to the court in Brussels, where Maria Theresa's younger sister, Maria Anna, Governor of the Austrian Netherlands, was ailing following the birth of a stillborn child. While Maria Anna did not recover and died in early December, Van Swieten's swift response and confident actions had nevertheless endeared him further to Maria Theresa. By May 1745, the Van Swieten family had sold all their belongings in the Netherlands and traveled to Vienna. Career in Austria In his new position he implemented a transformation of the Austrian health service and medical university education. He was the proposer of the main sanitary reform in the Habsburg monarchy, "Generale Normativum in Re Sanitatis", implemented by Maria Theresa in 1770. He founded a botanical garden, a chemical laboratory and introduced clinical instruction. Since 1745 he was also librarian for Maria Theresa in what was then the Imperial Library. Beside his medical activities, Gerard van Swieten was also active as a reformer. Especially the censorship was organised in a different way under his direction. He drove out the Jesuits that were in charge of the censorship before and carried out a centralisation of the censorship that was only partly successful. He also tried to use scientific and rational aspects for the judgement of literature. Vampires Especially important is his part in the fight against superstition during the enlightenment, particularly in the case of the vampires, reported from villages in Serbia in the years between 1718 and 1732. Following the conclusion of the Austro-Turkish War in 1718, Northern Serbia and a part of Bosnia came under Habsburg control. Through the settlement of refugees granted Wehrbauer status in the new border regions, vampire stories spread to German-speaking areas for the first time. In 1755 Gerard van Swieten was sent by Empress Maria Theresa to Moravia to investigate the situation relating to vampires. He viewed the vampire myth as a "barbarism of ignorance" and his aim was to eradicate it. His report, Abhandlung des Daseyns der Gespenster (or Discourse on the Existence of Ghosts), offered an entirely natural explanation for the belief in vampires. He dismissed the claims of unusual circumstances around graves with possible causes such as the processes of fermentation and lack of oxygen being reasons for preventing decomposition. Characteristic for his opinion is this quotation from the preface to his essay of 1768 "that all the fuss doesn't come from anything other than vain fear, superstitious