Billrothhaus Festsaal
2019
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Billrothhaus Festsaal documents a transplantation of material surface in progress. This video shows a moment in the middle of an action taking place in the grand auditorium of the Billroth Haus - Vienna’s Society of Doctors. Holding almost 300 seats, the Festsaal used to host protagonists of the history of medicine in the 19th century, when Vienna was at the forefront of scientific progress. Sigmund Freud is the society’s most famous member, though his theories were contested and derided by many contemporaries. The biographies linked to this auditorium are many and varied and span the entire globe. In the 1920s, 2000 American doctors were trained here and exported Viennese teaching to other continents. The Doctors’ Society was dissolved during WWII and its historical venue used for storage. Miraculously, it remained almost entirely intact and so, today, one can still see and trace the bass-relief on every wooden Thonet chair in its auditorium since the building’s inauguration in 1837.
With the generous support of Gesellschaft der Ärzte, Vienna https://www.billrothhaus.at