When Joseph II. (1741 - 1790) realised that the Home for the Poor and Invalid was being used as living quarters for poor civilians and unfit soldiers and not as a hospital, which was the original intention, he decided to close it. In its place should come a modern hospital, based on the example set by Paris’s main hospital, Hôtel-Dieu. When planning it, the focus was to be on cost efficiency, hygiene and medical provisions in line with the latest scientific advances. It was largely financed out of the emperor’s private fortune. Moreover, Joseph II insisted on each patient being given their own bed instead of as many as four people having to share a bed, which was the case in the Parisian hospital.
Joseph II commissioned his personal doctor, Joseph Quarin (1733 - 1814), with the redesigning and expansion of the Home for the Poor and Invalid in 1783. The result, after just 17 months of construction work, was a unique hospital complex which also included a maternity unit and an asylum in addition to it being a general hospital. A foundling hospital and sick houses (hospices) were located adjacent to the hospital. Around 2000 patients could be cared for in 111 sickrooms, in which men and women were separated. As it was presumed that the air in the hospital carried germs that caused illness, care was taken to ensure that sickrooms were properly ventilated by opening facing windows. There were four categories of sickrooms at that time. First-class rooms were single-bed rooms with individual care and multi-course meals, while the fourth-class rooms were for sick poor people and were free of charge.
Any woman, whether she came from an upper or lower class background, could give birth to their child anonymously in the maternity unit. If the woman did not want to keep the child, it was then taken into the adjacent foundling house.
A three-storey building was in the first courtyard, known as Stöckl, which house the “practical medicine school”. It enabled classes to be held at sick beds, something which was introduced by Maria Theresia’s personal physician Gerard van Swieten (1700 – 1772).
In 1988, the City of Vienna handed the building complex over to the University of Vienna. Today it is home to the University of Vienna campus for the 15 departments of the Faculties of Historical and Cultural Studies and of Philological and Cultural Studies.