Travel Journal

Places

Cities, landscapes, and the ideas they inspired.

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Europe  ·  Austria

Vienna

Summer 2023 5 days

The city of Freud, Klimt, and Mahler — where the fin-de-siècle still lingers in every coffee house. Walking the Ringstrasse, I was struck by how close the Kunsthistorisches and Natural History Museums stand to one another: art and science sharing the same baroque square.

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Highlights

  • Freud Museum, Berggasse 19 — his couch, his library, the whole preserved atmosphere
  • Kunsthistorisches Museum — Bruegel room was an unexpected obsession
  • Coffee house culture: Café Central, Café Landtmann
  • Josephinum — 18th-century wax anatomical models, including a complete wax brain

Reflections

Vienna made me think about the relationship between intellectual culture and physical space. The streets where Freud developed psychoanalysis, where Wittgenstein argued with the Vienna Circle, where Mahler conducted — they fostered a density of radical thinking that feels almost impossible to replicate today. What was in the coffee?

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Asia  ·  India

Mumbai

Winter 2023 10 days

The city that never idles. Mumbai's neurological parallel is the reticular activating system — perpetually stimulating, impossible to suppress. Gothic colonial architecture alongside some of Asia's busiest research hospitals; a city of extreme contrasts held together by extraordinary energy.

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Places Visited

  • Tata Memorial Hospital — the scale of oncology cases; neurology/oncology interface made vivid
  • Dharavi — the most misrepresented square kilometre on earth
  • Breach Candy Hospital neurology ward round (attended with permission)
  • Marine Drive at 5am — the quietest the city ever gets

Reflections

Visiting Tata Memorial gave me a sense of the primary brain tumour caseload that no paper had — the sheer volume, the resource constraints, the clinical acuity required. I left with profound respect for the physicians managing this. The ward round at Breach Candy was equally instructive: the case mix in Mumbai looks very different from what textbooks assume.

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Europe  ·  United Kingdom

London

Spring 2024 7 days

The Wellcome Collection made this trip worthwhile on its own — an entire museum dedicated to the intersection of medicine, art, and human life. I also spent time walking past University College Hospital on Euston Road, knowing that Gowers and Jackson once worked there.

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For Neuro Enthusiasts

  • Wellcome Collection (free) — Medicine Man galleries; historical ECT devices alongside TMS photographs
  • Gordon Museum of Pathology, King's College — by appointment
  • UCL Institute of Neurology, Queen Square — attended an open lecture
  • British Library Reading Room — where Darwin wrote

Reflections

The Wellcome Collection's ECT machine from the 1940s, exhibited alongside contemporary transcranial magnetic stimulation equipment, was the most striking juxtaposition I encountered on this trip — a vivid illustration of how far, and how recently, psychiatry has changed.

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