Die Wiener Medizinische Schule Im 19 Jahrhundert. (The Vienna Medical School in the 19th Century.): By Erna Lesky. Graz-Köln: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1965. 660 pp.

This volume is published in the six-hundredth anniversary year of the University of Vienna, the oldest university in the German-speaking community. Professor Erna Lesky, who holds the chair of History of Medicine at the University, has produced a historical treatise which continues the standards set by her famous predecessor, Max Neuburger (1868-1955).

The book is, for several reasons, of particular interest to the psychoanalyst. It unfolds the history of that period when the foundations of modern medicine were being laid. The reader becomes familiar with a whole array of historical facts concerning the course of development of medicine in the nineteenth century in Vienna. Rarely can any science boast of such vast progress as occurred between 1800 and 1900 at the Vienna Medical School, and it is always fascinating to watch such scientific spurts and to ponder the historical factors that produced them in a particular locale. Furthermore, we are introduced into complex interrelationships in the medical department of the university at which Freud received his initial scientific training. Thus one can gain from perusal of this book a knowledge of one part of the cultural background that was decisive for Freud's development.

The author starts with the medical situation at the beginning of the century. The analyst will read with particular interest of the great role that Brunonism played at that time in Vienna. According to this theory, life is nothing but a state enforced and maintained by stimuli, 'in which stimuli … take their effect from without and within upon a force of the animated body'. John Brown (1735-1788), the famous Scottish author of Elementa Medicinae, called this force 'excitability'. Excitation was defined as the product of excitability and stimulus, and health was considered to be the median degree of excitability. Here there seems to be an important historical root of Freud's early theories not yet investigated.

In the second chapter, an interv