Narrenturm (Fool's Tower)

Museum · Alsergrund (9th)Vienna,Austria

The first building in Europe raised to hold the mentally ill, a five-storey ring of identical cells in Vienna now full of specimen jars.

The Narrenturm is a round five-storey block of identical cells, twenty-eight to a floor, and the first building in Europe put up specifically to hold the mentally ill. The plan carries the whole idea: each floor is one ring corridor, the cells are all the same size, and each had its own drain. The reform stopped at the cell door. Chains stayed in use for decades, and by the 1820s the building was already called unfit. It opened in 1784, paid for by Joseph II out of his own fortune and set beside his new General Hospital, because he wanted the state rather than the monasteries to look after the sick poor. Patients left in the 1860s, and since 1971 the tower has held a medical collection of diseased organs and tissue, close to fifty thousand objects. The ground-floor cells are the exhibition rooms, so you walk the same ring, and each old cell holds one subject: inflammation, tuberculosis, tumours, then one organ system at a time. Most of what is in the glass cylinders is human.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Check the days before you cross town — It is shut more of the week than open, and the upper floors, where the cells still look like cells, need a guided tour.
Do not bring young children — The rooms hold preserved human remains, including malformed foetuses and late-stage disease, and the museum itself puts fourteen as the lower age it recommends.
Take your pictures outside — Cameras are not allowed among the specimens, so the only shot you get is the building, and the courtyard gives you room to fit the whole circle in.
Look for it inside the courtyards of the old hospital, not on the street — The tower stands in its own yard behind the campus cafés, and those yards stay open even when the museum is closed.
Read the labels, not just the jars — Many specimens still carry their handwritten numbers and original notes, which is why a two-hundred-year-old collection is still used in research today.

Things to do

1
Follow the ring corridor all the way round
Start at the entrance and keep the outer wall on your shoulder. The corridor curves so gently that you never see more than a few doors ahead, and you come back to where you began without turning once. Every doorway you pass was one person's cell. You will feel the scale of the place before you read a single label.
2
Stand inside one cell and take its measure
Pick any of the ground-floor rooms and stop in the middle of it. About eleven square metres, one window, a vaulted ceiling. This was one person's entire world, sometimes for years. Now the same room holds a single medical subject in glass cases, and you can cross it in four steps.
3
Walk right round the tower from outside
Do the full circle of the exterior before or after going in. Viennese called it Kaiser Joseph's Gugelhupf, after the ring-shaped cake, and from out here you can see why. Look at the two lowest storeys, where the facade was reworked in the 1790s so that nobody could climb up to the windows.