Vienna's Allgemeine Krankenhaus (General Hospital, usually known as AKH) is one of the two or three largest in the world. King's County Hospital in Brooklyn, where I did my residency, was 1000 beds, and this dwarfs it. It's like a city. In fact, at any given moment, it might actually contain more people than Omaha. The hopital has two giant buildings, Gruenes Bettenhaus (Green Bed-House), which houses surgery, and Rotes Bettenhaus (Red Bed-House), which houses medicine. They are connected by a giant 9 story plaza. The whole thing is just really impressive.
Today I observed an unusual and difficult pediatric reconstructive leg surgery, but then we left the hospital early, with our host, Dr. Catharina Chiari. We had an exciting afternoon planned: lunch at a typical Viennese Kaffeehaus (coffee house), where I finally had my sausages with rolls, mustard, and horseradish. Not to mention apricot cake for dessert. After lunch, we went on a sight-seeing bus tour of Vienna, which gave us the lay of the land, and pointed out important buildings and sights that we might want to return to later.
The tour was given through earphones, which you could tune to different languages. The English translation was a little odd: at one point, it described a sculpture as being nicknamed "little golden herbal snack" by the Viennese. That sounded unlikely, so I asked Catharina what the German name actually is. Turns out it's goldene Krauthaepl, or "golden cabbage head".
The highlight of the tour was a stop at the Hundertwasser Haus, an apartment building (now public housing) named for it's architect.
By the way, Catharina is orthopaedic royalty: her grandfather was a well-known orthopaedic surgeon who invented the Chiari pelvic osteotomy, and her uncle is our Salzburg host, Dr. Dorn.
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