Narrenturm

The Narrenturm in Vienna's Alsergrund district is Europe's oldest purpose-built psychiatric institution, raised between 1783 and 1784 under Emperor Joseph II as a five-storey ring with 28 tiny cells on each floor. Locals soon nicknamed the massive brick cylinder the Guglhupf, after the Austrian bundt cake. The architecture followed the period's modern idea of separating the patients absolutely from the outside world. Abandoned as an asylum in 1869, the building has housed the Pathological-Anatomical Collection since 1971, one of the largest specimen collections in the world. Today visitors see dry preparations of malformations, wax moulages of syphilitic disease and the skeleton of the giant Cornelius Magrath in the dimly lit gallery around the central courtyard. The tour is not for the squeamish; the building now belongs to the Natural History Museum.