Josephinum

Climb the staircase at Währinger Straße 25 and the stone announces itself first: hard, white Kaiserstein, quarried for what was meant to be Vienna's most serious school. The art historian Hans Tietze once called the building a miniature version of the Austrian National Library, and standing in the central wing, watching the stair rise in pale, even steps, the comparison holds. Stylistically, the Josephinum marks a hinge point — the turn from the Josephine baroque classicism of the 1780s toward a stricter, more disciplined Neoclassicism. It was built to look serious because what happened inside it was serious: training the surgeons who would serve with the Austrian army.

Joseph II founded the academy in 1784 as the Imperial-Royal Academy of Medicine and Surgery, an institution built specifically to train military doctors and surgeons. The initiative belonged to his personal surgeon, Giovanni Alessandro Brambilla, whom the emperor had placed in charge of the entire Austrian military medical system in 1779, with orders to reform it. Brambilla had already opened a smaller school of medicine and surgery at the Gumpendorf military hospital in 1781; the Josephinum was its full-scale successor. It opened on 7 November 1785, and Joseph marked the occasion by having a commemorative 40-ducat coin struck. On 3 February 1786, the academy was formally equated with every other medical faculty in the empire, gaining the right to confer doctorates and master's degrees in medicine and surgery.

The building itself went up between 1783 and 1785, in what was then the separate municipality of Alservorstadt — now Vienna's ninth district, Alsergrund — on Währinger Straße. Architect Isidor Marcellus Amandus Canevale designed it; an old shooting range and a manor house were bought up and demolished to clear the site. The location was no accident: it sat close to the newly built Military Garrison Headquarters Hospital, raised in 1783–84 on what is now Van-Swieten-Gasse, so students could move between lecture hall and ward. Inside, the academy held a library of 6,000 volumes, along with mineralogical, botanical, and zoological collections — a full Enlightenment cabinet of the natural sciences, not just a medical school.

But the building's real inheritance is older and stranger than its architecture: 1,192 anatomical wax models, still the most complete such collection outside Florence. The idea came to Joseph II in 1769, on a visit to Florence's La Specola, the natural history museum his younger brother Leopold — then Grand Duke of Tuscany, later Emperor Leopold II — had filled with wax anatomical specimens of plants and animals. Northern Italy was, by the late eighteenth century, the centre of the wax-modelling art, and its techniques were fast replacing the older terracotta and clay models used to teach anatomy and obstetrics: wax was cheaper, and easier to sculpt into convincing detail. Joseph commissioned a set for his new Vienna academy at a cost of 30,000 florins.

The models were made in Florence under the direction of Paolo Mascagni, an anatomist also known for his research into the lymphatic system, and Felice Fontana, working with a team of anatomists, physiologists, and historians of science who doubled as sculptors. The commission took six years; the first models were finished in 1784. In shaping the full-body figures, the modellers drew on the fashionable art of their day — some borrowed poses from Michelangelo's sketches, recalling ecstatic saints and martyrs, while the female bodies were rendered with a distinctly Baroque sensibility.

Getting the collection to Vienna was its own feat. The finished models were dismantled into their separate components, packed, and loaded onto a convoy of people and mules that left Florence and passed through Bologna and Verona, crossed the Brenner Pass, and followed the Danube before being shipped on from Linz to Vienna.

From 1786 the wax figures anchored the academy's teaching of young doctor-surgeons — but they weren't locked away from everyone else. In keeping with the Enlightenment conviction that ordinary people deserved a better education, Joseph opened the collection to the interested public as well. The display cases could be swung open for closer inspection; above each one hung a colour watercolour anatomical drawing, gridded and numbered to match the model beneath; and drawers underneath held explanations in Italian and Latin, with some translated into German.

The academy's fortunes turned after Joseph II died: government attention and funding thinned. It took the initiative of a later director, Johann Nepomuk Isfordink, to win it back some standing — on 27 October 1822, Emperor Francis II equated the academy with the other universities of the Austrian Empire. Teaching resumed on 6 November 1824 after a three-year gap, continued until Franz Joseph I ordered the academy's suppression in 1849, was revived in 1854 as a training institute for field doctors with the rank of a military academy, and finally closed in 1874.

The building had to wait almost a century and a half for its own restoration. Starting in February 2019, an eleven-million-euro renovation set out to recover the Josephinum's original eighteenth-century state — which meant, among other things, dismantling a nine-metre assembly hall that had been added later. The Josephinum reopened to the public on 29 September 2022 as the Museum of the History of Medicine, now home to the university's Institute for the History of Medicine and its collection, the wax models chief among them.

Outside, in the garden facing the building, stands a lead statue of Hygieia, goddess of medicine, cast by Johann Martin Fischer in 1787 — a quieter monument to the same Enlightenment ambitions that filled the rooms behind her. The only collection that rivals Vienna's is the one that inspired it: the roughly 1,200 wax specimens still held at La Specola in Florence, commissioned by Grand Duke Leopold and Felice Fontana with an identical goal, to teach anatomy in three dimensions without always needing a cadaver. Between them, the two collections are what's left of a brief, remarkable moment when wax stood in for flesh, and did it well enough to still hold a room's attention two centuries later.