The wax models
Over a thousand eighteenth-century figures, more precise than much modern medical illustration.
C.Stadler/Bwag — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Paul Korecky — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Paul Korecky — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Paul Korecky — CC BY-SA 2.0
That depends on you. The models are extremely realistic but they are wax, displayed calmly and scientifically. Anyone comfortable with medical textbook imagery will find them remarkable; anyone troubled by it should skip.
Medical students, anyone interested in the history of science, and returning visitors looking for something entirely unlike the palaces and art museums.
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Emperor Joseph II founded it in 1785 as an academy for training military surgeons, at a time when dissecting bodies was limited and difficult. He solved the problem in an extraordinary way: he commissioned a Florentine workshop to make life-size anatomical models in wax. The result is the collection on show today: more than a thousand wax models made between 1784 and 1788, kept in their original rosewood cabinets under Venetian glass. Their precision is astonishing — vessels, nerves and muscles in detail exceeding many modern illustrations — and the faces were deliberately sculpted as beautiful, to make the learning less brutal. The museum is not to every taste: some models are visually confronting in their realism. But it is among Vienna's strangest and most honest places, and explains a chapter of medical history no other museum in the city covers. It reopened after a long restoration with a modern, comfortable display.
Over a thousand eighteenth-century figures, more precise than much modern medical illustration.
Rosewood and Venetian glass from the foundation era — the display case is itself an artefact.
A section on the Vienna medical school, the world's most renowned in the nineteenth century.
Währinger Straße, Vienna