Semmelweis
From the Publisher
Translator's Introduction by Joe Martin
Excerpt
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The great play Semmelweis had its world premiere at the National Theatre in Oslo in 1969. Recounting the tragic history of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, the founder of modern antiseptic techniques, this dynamic play captures the appalling absurdity of historical events—for his belief that the unclean hands of the doctors themselves helped to cause the so-called "childbed fever," which took the lives of thousands of women in Europe in the second half of the 19th century, Semmelweis was ridiculed by his colleagues, hounded by the police, fired from his position at the Vienna General Hospital, had his works banned, and finally was driven into exile and madness. For the Norwegian playwright Bjørneboe, always the iconoclast and himself tried for obscenity, Semmelweis's plight represents the author's continual fear of obtuse authority.
The story of the Hungarian-Austrian physician, Ignaz Semmelweis, is one of the most tragic and revealing episodes from the annals of modern science and medicine. Bjørneboe's Semmelweis— much like Brecht's Galileo—is a story that shows the pitfalls and even horrors that await the man or woman of science who is naively in search of truth and improvement of the human condition, in a society that reveres prestige and power and its own received belief systems to the exclusion of any new "truths."
The story has recently taken on a new relevance due to its somewhat chilling parallels with the various scandals surrounding the initial research into AIDS: an epidemic of similar proportions to that of the so-called "childbed fever," which took the lives of many tens of thousands of women in Europe in the second half of the 19th century. In the reckless actions of the political and medical authorities in the play, one discerns the same mentality as that of some present-day medical authorities who refused to mandate testing of the blood supply in the United States even though they knew some portion of that supply was contaminated with the virus. Anyone who thinks that ours is a "new and unusually complex" medical issue, without precedent, and that such political maneuvering can legitimately be excused, need only acquaint themselves with the career of this "hero in retrospect," Ignaz Semmelweis. . . .
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