Giving birth at General Hospital
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Giving birth at the General Hospital

Protection and anonymity

When the General Hospital was founded, a maternity ward was built in the former eastern wing (court 7 today). Known as the Wiener Gebärhaus (Vienna Delivery House), it enjoyed a colourful history, sometimes wholly independent of the hospital.

Back then, births mainly took place at home in the presence of a midwife. As disclosed in a Message to the Masses in 1784, the delivery house offered unmarried expectant mothers in particular a safe haven, sparing them “shame and distress”. Here they would have a discreet birth and postnatal care.

Despite the assured anonymity which was supposed to protect women from the ‘shame’ of unmarried motherhood, admittance meant women relinquishing their bodies to science and research in what were, in part, public births in front of male doctors and students; ‘free’ births took place at the University Clinic and it was here that most women were admitted. They were expected to offer a service in exchange for the care of their infants, serving as wet nurses and carrying out odd jobs at the institution. Only those women who were able to pay the fee avoided this.

Divided into three classes, the women who could afford it were able to pass through the gate ‘disguised and as unrecognisable as they wished’, even with their own servants.

Nearly 700,000 women took advantage of the protection the delivery house offered. The babies could be taken home or handed over to the orphanage, i.e. to foster parents.

In the mid-19th century the illegitimacy rate was at almost fifty percent and over thirty percent of newborns became orphans. The parish birth lists in Alser Straße are the longest in all of Austria.

Source: Vienna University Archive, 106.I.1841
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