Semmelweis - Retter der Mütter (1950)

In 1846, more than a third of the women admitted to Vienna’s maternity clinic die of puerperal fever. Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, the Viennese doctor who has taken over the clinic, refuses to accept this. The officials he confronts with the high death rate merely shrug. In his efforts to find its cause, Semmelweis discovers something astonishing: doctors’ inadequately washed hands after performing anatomical dissections transmit cadaveric poison to the women who have just given birth. This proves that puerperal fever is a form of ordinary blood poisoning. As a countermeasure, Semmelweis introduces washing with chlorinated lime for everyone who comes into contact with any of the women on the ward. The death rate from puerperal fever then drops considerably. Semmelweis faces a hard struggle against the ignorance of his fellow doctors, who regard it as a loss of prestige to admit that the doctors’ own negligence has caused their patients’ deaths. His many opponents gain the upper hand when they see a chance to get rid of the inconvenient voice of warning. Citing the fact that Semmelweis sided with the revolutionaries during the revolutionary year of 1848, they remove him from his post, thereby also depriving him of the opportunity to continue spreading his findings and to put pressure on his opponents by mobilizing the public. Semmelweis now sees no other option but to go to Budapest and set up a maternity clinic there according to his own ideas. However, it weighs on him that he cannot help so many other women because he is not allowed to publish his findings and make them accessible to everyone. Although he has contracted an infection during an operation he performed and is now gravely ill, Semmelweis nevertheless goes to the medical congress in Vienna, intending to give a presentation. His friends in Vienna had fought for this right for a long time. Before he can finish his talk, he collapses at the lectern and is taken to hospital. Two days later, he dies of the disease he had fought throughout his life. After his death, his medical doctrine gains acceptance, supported by the bacteriological findings of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch.