Madness, modernity and those 'nervous times': Vienna in 1900

Madness, modernity and those 'nervous times': Vienna in 1900

What drives someone to seek a life less "nervous" in a city that seems wired to the hilt? This episode heads to Vienna around 1900, a place described as a "city of the psyche" and gripped by anxieties about modern urban life, caffeine, alcohol, cigarettes and the sheer speed of change.

Art historian Dr Gemma Blackshaw guides Natasha Mitchell through the Wellcome Trust exhibition *Madness and Modernity*, unpacking how architects, artists and psychiatrists all fixated on the mind and the nerves. You’ll hear how mental illness was framed as a distinctly modern condition, with "modern times" said to stress the "modern nervous system". One critic even claimed, "when modernism says man, it means the nerves".

Instead of focusing only on Freud, the conversation contrasts his private consulting room and couch with mainstream psychiatry’s obsession with bodies, light, air and exercise. There’s the grim 18th-century "tower of fools" beside Otto Wagner’s utopian Steinhof psychiatric hospital, marketed to fee-paying "nervous" clients with indoor swimming pools, electrotherapy, hydrotherapy and mechanotherapy for bodies "too tired out from alcohol and caffeine".

Gemma and Natasha walk through unsettling medical images, electrotherapeutic cages and green-velvet exercise machines, then move into the artistic response: Egon Schiele’s contorted self-portraits, Oskar Kokoschka’s harsh psychological portraits and the idea that nervous disorders could be a creative spark. They also tackle the ethical tension between psychiatrists’ urge to categorise and artists’ tendency to romanticise distress.

The episode closes with the moving work of patient-artist Josef Karl Raedler, who spent decades in an institution painting meticulous portraits of fellow residents and writing cheeky inscriptions like "Are these men mentally ill? Do you maintain every person's dignity?" His watercolours, once discarded, now ask hard questions about who gets seen and valued.

If you’ve ever wondered how ideas about nerves, madness and modernity shaped our attitudes to mental illness and addiction, this trip to Vienna might leave you thinking about your own "nervous times" in a new way.