Venue

The complex of buildings housing the Clinic of Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases was the final stage in the construction of the university’s clinical campus. Its creation represented the most significant investment in the medical sciences in Wrocław. Thirteen edifices, predominantly Neo-Gothic, were erected between 1887 and 1909. Eight of these also operated as hospitals: the Surgery Clinic, the Women’s Diseases Clinic, the Internal Medicine Clinic, the Skin and Venereal Diseases Clinic, the Eye Diseases Clinic, the Paediatric Diseases Clinic, the Ear, Nose and Throat Diseases Clinic, and the Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases Clinic. In this way, the university clinics, together with the natural science faculties (and, somewhat later, the technical university) established nearby, became a symbol of the strength of Prussian science and its importance to the state.

By the late 19th century, German science had gradually achieved a dominant position in the international scientific landscape, as had the German language. German professors – led above all by medical scientists – built an intellectual empire that extended across Europe. At that time, natural science institutes and university clinics were the principal centres of scientific research. Yet science and its findings were not regarded as their property: they belonged entirely to the state, which held a monopoly over the establishment of research institutions and exercised the only real influence on the scientific work carried out within them. By 1914, as much as 27 million marks had been allocated from state coffers to the development of the medical, natural and technical sciences. The effects of scientific research were subsequently used by the military and the industrial sector.

Opened in 1907, the complex of several buildings and gardens belonging to the Clinic of Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases occupies a large plot near the Oder and is among the largest facilities within the university’s medical campus. Its architecture and spatial layout may be read as a symbol of the changing attitudes towards mental illness that took place in the second half of the 19th century. Previously, people suffering from mental illness had typically been confined in prison-like conditions, often restrained, starved and subjected to various forms of violence, including physical abuse. As psychiatry became a separate branch of medicine, increasing numbers of scholars called for an end to these drastic conditions of forced hospitalisation. This was particularly urgent given the steadily rising proportion of people affected by mental illness. Built at a time of significant advances in the understanding of the human psyche and neurology, the Wrocław clinic met all contemporary standards and also functioned as a research institution.

The main building contained a clinic and wards for men and women, each further divided into three sub-wards: an open ward for patients under observation, for calm individuals, and a closed ward for those who were restless. In total, the clinic offered 84 beds. Compared with other clinics and municipal hospitals, this was a relatively small number, but it reflected the specific nature of the treatment, which relied heavily on patient observation. The gardens – an important therapeutic component – were likewise divided into separate areas for calm and restless patients. They included a playground, a lime-tree avenue, a vegetable garden and a rose garden for women.

From its inception, several renowned psychiatrists and neurologists worked at the clinic, foremost among them Alois Alzheimer, the celebrated researcher of memory degeneration. In 1912, he assumed the chair of the university’s Department of Psychiatry and the position of clinic director. Although his groundbreaking research on the “disease of forgetfulness” had already been published by the time he arrived in Wrocław, it initially had little impact on the scientific community. Alzheimer died in Wrocław in 1915, at the age of just 51.

Another prominent figure working at the clinic was the neurologist Otfrid Foerster, who fundamentally reshaped modern neurology. He was co-author of the pioneering Atlas of the Brain and a signatory of Magnus Hirschfeld’s appeal for the repeal of Paragraph 175, which criminalised homosexual men.

After the Second World War, the clinic was rebuilt from wartime ruins and repurposed as a children’s hospital specialising in oncological, haematological and infectious diseases. The complex further accommodated the Department of Clinical Pharmacology and Immunochemistry and the Department of Emergency and Disaster Medicine.

Initially, all clinics formed part of the University of Wrocław, but in 1950 they were incorporated into a separate institution – the Medical Academy (now Wrocław Medical University).

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