However, since money was lacking for the establishment of the buildings, the disabled veterans were quartered, including families, in the Kontumazhof (epidemic hospital), already in existence.

Extension of the complex was made possible by the will of Ferdinand Baron von Thavonat, who left his estate to disabled soldiers in 1726.

The inhabitants had to wear their own uniforms and received individual copper coins, which could be redeemed with the bakers in the complex, butchers, etc.

He stated the fact that the enormous plant served more as an accommodation for people who gained entry by virtue of their connections.

There Ignaz Semmelweis made his observations of hygiene, and Karl Landsteiner discovered the groups of blood types.

The synagogue in the old AKH Vienna was established in 1903 by architect Max Fleischer as the "praying pavilion" for patients of Jewish faith.

[2] In the old AKH stands the first building worldwide for the accommodation of mental patients, established in 1784 under Emperor Joseph II by Isidore Canevale.

Ten years later, the tower was already completely outdated due to innovations in the therapy for mental patients.

The notion that the Fool's Tower is a conversion of the idea of the Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham does not apply, since the cells are not controllable from a central observation post.

The apparatus, devised by the Czech priest and inventor Prokop Diviš and installed in 1754, was probably not intended as lightning protection.

Josef II knew well the attempts of Diviš, which specifically concerned an assumed health benefit from currents.

In 1939, a year after Austria's Anschluss with Hitler's Third Reich, the General Hospital was transferred to municipal administration.

[3] Reporting on March 28, 1938, shortly after Austria's Anschluss with Nazi Germany, Time wrote of the devastating impact of the persecution of the many Jewish doctors in Vienna, listing the suicides, both Jewish and non-Jewish, including "Professor Arnold Baumgarten, 58, part-Jewish director of Vienna's largest city hospital (1,000 beds), onetime head of the Austrian State health department" and "Professor Wolfgang Denk, 55, University & General Hospital chief surgeon, author of the textbook on surgery most widely used in Austria, no Jew.