Herwig Czech takes over professorship in the history of medicine at MedUni Vienna

The main focus of Herwig Czech’s research activities is on the contemporary history of medicine—especially the history of medicine under National Socialism, its preconditions and consequences. Since 2017, he is co-project leader of the Max Planck Society-funded research project “Brain Research at Institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in the Context of National Socialist Injustices”, conducted in cooperation with the Technical University of Munich, the Berlin Charité, the Leopoldina and Oxford Brookes University. Since September 2021, he is also co-chair of the Lancet Commission on Medicine, Nazism, and the Holocaust.

Another focus of Czech’s work is Viennese medicine since the Enlightenment, especially with regard to social, political, cultural and history of science aspects as well as the history of public health.

The professorship is assigned to the organizational unit Ethics, Collections and History of Medicine at the Josephinum. Herwig Czech: “The Josephinum with its unique collections and the Medical History Museum Vienna, newly opened in September 2022, is well on its way to becoming one of the world’s most important centres of medical history. I am very grateful to be able to contribute to this."

Short bio
Herwig Czech studied history at the universities of Graz, Vienna, Paris VII and Duke (North Carolina). For many years he was a researcher at the Documentation Centre of the Austrian Resistance. In 2007, as a DOC fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), he completed his doctorate with a thesis on the Viennese health care system under National Socialism. From 2011 to 2014 he was an APART fellow at the ÖAW, and from 2017 a postdoc researcher in medical history at MedUni Vienna. He completed research and teaching stays at the Universities of Wroclaw and Newcastle, at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) and most recently, in 2019, at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine at the Charité in Berlin. In 2020, Czech took up a professorship (§99/1) at MedUni Vienna in the history of medicine with particular consideration of contemporary history of medicine.

Herwig Czech - professorship in the history of medicine at MedUni Vienna

in German (English subtitles available)