Nevertheless, walking down the apparently endless Währingerstrasse on a grey winter’s day, past the neo-Gothic Votivkirche, a massive Coca-Cola advertisement not so much not so much emblazoned on the porch as offering some sort of annunciation- past the dusty academic bookshops selling surgical texts and plastic skeletons, to (eventually) the Josephinum, was something of an act of courage.


...Not all their explorations were profound in concept but all made an impact: in Vienna poor Semmelweiss, later to die in an asylum, ironically of infection, introduced the simple idea of hand-washing in obstetric wards and cut death rates at a stroke.


...I was riveted by a picture of the first ever gastrectomy, with a full audience: surgery as theatre, accompanied by the entire, immaculately stitched stomach, retrieved by the surgeon and preserved in formalin when his patient died three months later.

...Created over two hundred years ago, here are the life size écorchés - wax models - flayed or neatly eviscerated to reveal what were then the unfamiliar wonders of the human body to the public as well as medical students.

...This is where my imagination wanted to linger-not in the monologues of the patients as they lay on Freud’s couch, but of what they thought when they waited.

...Just as the surgeons magnified, stretched and pierced the human body so that we might live infinitely safer lives today, so Freud, at his simplest, entered the human mind and left us with the idea that the motive for our thoughts and actions might be more complicated than we had believed and not always under our conscious control.