The Narrenturm
Semolina Pilchard
most lifelike, in the anatomical collections of hospitals and
universities. One such collection is housed in the Narrenturm, or
Tower of Fools, in Vienna, which used to be a lunatic asylum before
being turned into a museum, a curiously forbidding building in the
grounds of Vienna's eighteenth-century general hospital, today the
university campus. Half hidden by trees the Narrenturm looms in the
furthest corner of the grounds. The plaster is falling off in large
lumps from its rusticated facade, especially around the window frames,
where the brick is revealed, making it look as though the building is
suffering from some terrible skin condition. It has something of a
fairy-tale tower or castle air about it, hermetically sealed against
the outside world - cruelly appropriate for those of its former
inhabitants who, as Dr Gall's collection shows, believed themselves
princes and emperors. Its unfortunate inmates have made place for
another panopticum of wretchedness: the Federal Museum of Pathology.
This collection, the largest of its kind, was begun in 1796 as a
teaching aid for the new hospital. Like the building in which it was
to be housed later, it was an expression of a new way of seeing
humanity and human illness. Medicine was freeing itself from doctrines
laid down by Galen 1,^00 years earlier. Surgery was slowly being
recognized as a discipline that should not be left to quacks, barbers,
horse castrators, butchers and hangmen. The modern hospital embraced
these ideas, and work in the mortuary was accepted as an important
part of medical science. Johann Peter Frank, who became director of
the hospital in 1795, was determined to give a systematic foundation
to this new science and to create a repository of specimens that could
be used to compare and to instruct. Thirty years later, the collection
already encompassed more than 4,000 specimens, either in spiritus or
as skeletons separated from the flesh with acid. In 1971 it was
transferred to the Narrenturm.
Today the tower is part museum part anatomical collection, and
visitors enter the building through incongruously modern wrought-iron
doors - the tower served as a home for nurses for a while. It is
impossible to escape the claustrophobic feeling of the curving
corridors and cells and the concentrated misery of the "preparations',
among them Vienna's last remaining stuffed human being: the body of a
little girl, standing up, one foot set in front of the other,
supported by a staff running through her body, and pur unceremoniously
among jars of deformities. At the time of her death she had been
between four and five, and her entire body is covered by black,
fishlike scales. Her face looks like that of a life-sized doll. She is
bald and her hands and feet are mummified on their original bones, as
the guides relate with solicitous informanveness. She was prepared in
1780 and was later exhibited in the same collection as Angelo Solinan.
Nothing is known about her cause of death, or about her identity. The
body underneath her skin is cast in wax.
The golden time of the collection, the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, provided fertile ground for such displays, when there were
as yet few effective treatments for many terrifying illnesses. The
devastations of syphilis and leprosy, grotesque tumours and skin
conditions are all here, re-created painstakingly in wax and painted
after the original. They still look absolutely lifelike. The
preparer's skills are also evident from objects such as the head of
Georg Prohaska, a groom who survived for a full ten years without a
lower jaw after it had been shattered by the kick of a horse. A wax
replica of his head, complete with neckerchief, long hair and
aimlessly lolling tongue dribbling saliva on to a decorous pedestal,
can be compared to the head itself, colourless and suspended in a jar
of spiritus with a fine glass lid. There are about 50,000 objects,
most of them in glass jars or, after the recent acquisition of some
smaller collections, in large white plastic buckets.
This museum is no place for women expecting children. Much of the
collection consists of deformed newborns who were born dead or died
soon after birth. In the crammed former cells and corridors of the
asylum, assembled in the form of tiny, floating bodies, is the entire
demon world of Greek mythology: cyclops, creatures with bulging eyes
and no brains, Siamese twins joined in every conceivable place, bodies
with too many extremities, hands with too many fingers, feet with too
many toes, claws instead of hands, and the swollen brains of
hydrocephali. A special section is occupied by the collection of dry
preparations': skeletons, largely of people who lived into adulthood.
The English Sickness, rickets, has wrought most havoc here, with arms
and legs transformed into spiralling growths, powerless appendages to
useless bodies. Other specimens illustrate the effects of
tuberculosis., tumours, syphilis and spina bifida. A silent assembly
of skeletonized Siamese twins seems to be engaged in a grotesquely
intimate waltz.
In contrast to the work of Frederik Ruysch and to the graceful
anatomical wax models produced in the eighteenth century (some of
which are kept a stone's throw from the Narrenturm), this collection
speaks of a different attitude to human life, to mortality and to
dignity. Human bodies had been deserted by the divine spark and the
ideal of beauty once thought inherent in them and in every
representation of anatomy. Ruysch's conflation of beauty and mortality
and the gracefully instructional vanitas tableaux of the eighteenth
century had no space here. They had been replaced by a mode of
research and teaching that treated bodies quite dispassionately as
objects, much like rock samples or beetles. This ideological gap was
to widen during the twentieth century and was to reach its nadir in
the anatomical collections of Nazi Germany, which would routinely use
concentration camp inmates to widen the scope of the specimens. Rumour
has it that some of the heads collected by the pathologists of the
Third Reich are still held in deep cellars while an embarrassed
administration is unsure what to do with them.
Whatever collections try to master it cannot be closer to the bone
than collecting the bones themselves. Nature and culture, the past and
the present can all be the subjects of collections, of building small
ordered worlds amid the chaos all around. If a collection really can
promise eternal life then these assemblies of the dead carry this
promise by daring us to face them down and learn from the deaths
already passed. As graveyards traditionally combine the reality of
death with the promise of transcendence and of an afterlife, those
collections that had the human body as their object throw down the
challenge of the Delphic Oracle: Know Thyself.
(Shamelessy stolen from Blom, Phillip: _To Have and to Hold, An
Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting_ London 2002)
This seems to be one of the better stomach-churning collections. It
still exists: http://www.pathomus.or.at/englisch/nturm-e.htm
but unfortunately the exhibits aren't illustrated.
Any a.ter who happens to be a resident of the Neofascist State of
Austria or who happens to be travelling in the area, take your digicam
and bring a few wankpix back for us.
--
Sem
reflex
Semolina Pilchard <us...@ukonline.co.uk> wrote:
> (Shamelessy stolen from Blom, Phillip: _To Have and to Hold, An
> Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting_ London 2002)
Aw, jeez, Sem. And here I was all the way through admiring your
eloquent prose. All the time admiring how you used words like
"spiritus" and "rusticated." And then I come upon this paragraph.
Kind of a disappointment. Maybe start out with some quotation
marks next time, whaddya say?
Semolina Pilchard
wrote:
Fuck. All the people who didn't get to the bottom of that
particularly long piece of unashamed plagiarism were probably *still*
thinking I wrote that until you blew my fucking cover, reflex.
--
Sem
Dry
Semolina Pilchard
>Lurker and disappointed, must move on to Alt.dummies
Don't let the door hit you in the arse, you top-posting, 120-line
quoting, brain-damaged one-line wonder.
--
Sem
Mike M. Skala
<us...@ukonline.co.uk> wrote:
>There are many monuments to our mortality, all preserving death at its
>most lifelike, in the anatomical collections of hospitals and
>universities. One such collection is housed in the Narrenturm, or
>Tower of Fools, in Vienna,
You can get more infos here: www.narrenturm.info
I'm actually thinking about renting the place for my 40th birthday.
More interesting are the copies from some of the moulages:
http://www.mueller-restaurator.at/SiteFiles/BereichSeiten/MedizinKunst/KeroMedZentralFrame3D.htm
I really like the syphilitic one.
mike