The Return to Vienna

It was nighttime when Dr. John Appleby, 61, a veteran surgeon of Bellevue, Ohio, stepped off the Orient Express in Vienna. There was no one to meet him because nobody expected him; he was simply another American doctor beating a path to Vienna to learn something of what can again be learned in the onetime capital of European medical science. Dr. Appleby took a cab to the newly opened clubrooms of the American Medical Society of Vienna. Next morning, after a minimum of red tape, he stood at the side of one of Vienna's leading surgeons during a difficult heart operation.

Surgeon Appleby was one of a score or more U.S. doctors who have dropped in to Vienna in the past month to widen their skills. Like Appleby, all of them have had reason to be glad that the American Medical Society is again operating with prewar precision. From 1904 to 1940 it was host to more than 20,000 English-speaking physicians. Postwar reconstruction was slow, but Boston's Dr. M. Arthur Kline, a nutrition expert and biochemist, was fired with a resolve to revive the society when he went to Vienna two years ago to revisit the scenes of his student days. Now he is the society's energetic executive secretary.

Practical Surgery. Paradoxically, although to most U.S. laymen medicine in Vienna means Freud and psychoanalysis, few foreign psychiatrists go there. For one thing, Prophet Freud is less honored at home than abroad. Also, Viennese psychiatrists admit that their U.S. colleagues have outfreuded them. Vienna's attraction to U.S. doctors is in its readily available facilities for studying the practical side of surgery and pathology.

For such as Dr. Appleby, the society can arrange 534 specialized courses with the University of Vienna's medical faculty. Study is cheap: most courses cost $6 and are limited to five graduate students. In Vienna there are fewer lectures and more physical demonstrations than in most U.S. teaching hospitals, and the student is not limited to a single institution. He can go to any of 52 major hospitals, with a total of 35,000 beds, and work in all the wards alongside his professors. And living is cheap.

Knowledge from the Dead. Another advantage of graduate work in Vienna is the unparalleled opportunity for study of the dead. Thanks to a 200-year-old law, virtually all who die in the city's hospitals receive postmortems. In one hospital, there may be as many as 20 in a single day. Comments Ohio's Dr. Appleby: "You can see the operation in the afternoon, and if it fails, you can do the postmortem in the pathology room of the same hospital that night."

After many lean years, medicine in Vienna is reviving, and the city is again becoming a good place for foreign doctors to study.

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