German-speaking world and in the years 1849/50, 1856/57, 1859/60, and 1862/63 served as Dean of the Medical Faculty. In 1852/53 academic year he was the first freely-elected rector of the University of Vienna. Pathologist New Viennese School: The 1830s saw the emergence of the New Viennese School that was based on the new scientific methods established by Carl Rokitansky. In the 20th century this became known as the Second Viennese School of Medicine. Other well-known proponents besides Rokitansky were the clinician Josef Škoda and the dermatologist Ferdinand Ritter von Hebra. However, contemporary students such as Sigmund Freud described themselves until well into the 20th century as students of the New Viennese School and regarded Rokitansky as a father figure, calling him "Vater Roki". The New Viennese School sought to introduce a new system of science-based medicine. Until then, pathology had been a purely descriptive science and while contemporary pathologists such as Gabriel Andral and Jean Frédéric Lobstein compiled autopsy reports containing descriptions of illnesses they did not make any diagnoses. They believed that the origins of an illness were to be found in the "dynamic moment", an imbalance of the four humours as postulated by Hippocrates. For Rokitansky, however, such an approach no longer sufficed; he wanted to find explanations, to reach science-based diagnoses. One of his first autopsies that he performed as a young man together with his superior Johann Wagner (1799–1832) was that of Ludwig van Beethoven. In this autopsy the question of the composer's deafness was of particular interest and the pathologists did far more than produce the customary description as they sought to find an explanation for Beethoven's deafness in anatomical changes. This was to have a lasting impression on Rokitansky's approach to research, which was driven by a desire to explain the origins of illness with the help of anatomy, an intellectual approach that had first been initiated by the Italian pathologist Giovanni Battista Morgagni in the 18th century. Rokitansky's approach differed from that of his contemporaries as he no longer looked for the "dynamic moment", but for the "anatomical seat" of the illness. The inscription on the Pathological-Anatomical Institute subsequently erected in Spitalgasse in the ninth district of Vienna therefore reads: "Indagandis sedibus et causis morborum" (Der Erforschung des Sitzes und der Ursachen der Erkrankungen). Diagnostics: Rokitansky developed pathology from a descriptive discipline into an explanatory science. Over the course of his life he