Jens Bjørneboe , Semmelweis. Samlede Skuespill (Oslo: Pax, 1995). © 1968 by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag. English translation ©1998, 1984 by Joe Martin. Used by permission.
PROFESSOR DOKTOR KLEIN, PROFESSORS, SEMMELWEIS and KOLLETSCHKA. Pompous academic music. The scholars proceed into the meeting room.KLEIN: Distinguished commission: now that the hospital inspection is over, I welcome you to the conference on the causes of the high mortality rate as a result of child-bed fever.
The professors take their seats. SEMMELWEIS and KOLLETSCHKA sit last, a noticeable distance from the scholars.PROFESSOR 1: [rising] Herr Professor Klein. esteemed colleagues. On behalf of the commission I would like to express my satisfaction with the meticulous upkeep of the records. [Sits]
PROFESSOR 2: [rising] I would like to express my satisfaction with the clean and well-kept building. [Sits]
PROFESSOR 1: [rising] Esteemed Professor Klein, my admiration for the state of discipline in the hospital; the deferential conduct of the staff. [Sits]
PROFESSOR 2: [rising] Even if the mortality rate is, for the moment, the highest in Europe, this can not be regarded as any kind of fundamental flaw. [Down]
PROFESSOR 1: My admiration for Herr Professor Doktor Klein s elegant observation of the eternal principles of our science!
PROFESSOR 2: [rising most solemnly] Face to face with the death rate of thirty per cent which is before us, the commission has produced the following report: The high mortality rate among the pregnant women is brought about by the local cosmic-tellurgic forces, the hygrometric forces, the polar currents, as well as radiation from the constellations. And finally: the wrath of the spirit of the disease. Conclusion: Childbed fever is a specific, non-contagious female illness of an epidemic nature. Its treatment: frequent bleeding and daily enemas. [Sits]
KLEIN: Esteemed colleagues. I myself can propose, in addition, the fatal effect of miasma upon the crowded sickrooms. . . and above all, the very old buildings.
SEMMELWEIS: [angered. In a loud voice, and rather gruffly] May I have the floor!
KLEIN: [cheerfully] Good Herr Doktor Semmeiweis!
SEMMELWEIS: Distinguished commission, in regard to the geography of the hospital: Ward One and Ward Two are a stone s throw from one another, which means therefore, that the cosmic circumstances cannot be different. The cosmic forces must have the same effects in both wards: and therein lies a problem—the death rate in Ward Two comprises only eight per cent of the mothers, while in Ward One it comprises all together thirty per cent. I believe, therefore, that it would be erroneous to attribute influence to the cosmic forces upon the course of the disease.
The professors mumble and shake their heads.PROFESSOR 2: The line of thought is materialistic, but it cannot be denied a certain hypothetical worth.
KLEIN: I concur with my esteemed colleague. We take note of Dr. Semmelweis s criticism.
SEMMELWEIS: On account of the short distance between the two wards, the tellurgic forces must also have the same effects in both places, but in any case, esteemed professors, Ward One has a death rate four times as high as Ward Two.
KLEIN: [shaking his head in despair] Statistics!
PROFESSOR 1: Without emphasizing statistical figures, I would like to propose nevertheless that the commission disregard the cosmic-tellurgic influences. [Applause]
KLEIN: As the gentlemen wish. I presume that Herr Doktor Semmelweis has no more observations.
SEMMELWEIS: As for hygrometric forces, it must be noted that, given a distance of circa fifty meters, the atmospheric humidity would of necessity be the same in both wards.
KLEIN: In all seriousness, Herr Doktor, is this pettiness warranted?
SEMMELWEIS: Esteemed Herr Professor! We are dealing with human life and death!
PROFESSOR 1: If our friend is hoping to correct the opinions of his elder colleagues with the help of figures, then we will take this ad notam.
SEMMELWEIS: Each figure is a human life, Herr Professor.
PROFESSOR 2: We would appreciate your observing academic courtesy, Herr Doktor.
SEMMELWEIS: The next point concerns the sick rooms of both wards, most distinguished gentlemen, but Ward Two has an even more crowded census than our Ward One, because in Ward One they die so fast that the space situation is thereby improved. The thirty percent dead cannot, therefore, be blamed upon our overcrowded sick rooms.
PROFESSOR 1: The objection is recorded.
KLEIN: What is left then of the commission s report, Herr Doktor? What is the point of all this?
SEMMELWEIS: Point five. It was alleged that the old buildings were a reason for the high mortality rate on Ward One. Both wards are just as old. In Vienna there are hospitals with buildings far older than Vienna General Hospital. The age of the buildings, then, proves irrelevant as a cause of the illness.
KLEIN: [provoked] Your desire to criticize leads to medical nihilism!
SEMMELWEIS: Points six and seven. As a source of the illness, we have proposed the wrath of the spirit of the disease.
KLEIN: For you nothing is sacred, Doktor.
SEMMELWEIS: The same sinners are lying in both wards, honored colleagues.
PROFESSOR 1: There are more things in heaven and earth. . .
SEMMELWEIS: The constellations must have the same effect on both buildings. The stars are immensely distant from us, and the distance between the wards is only a few steps. The difference would be negligible.
PROFESSOR 1: I presume that this is the last remark Herr Doktor Semmelweis has to make?
SEMMELWEIS: Point eight. Herr Professor Klein cited the concept of "miasma" as a force which produces the illness on Ward One. I have never seen miasma outside of the textbooks. Though I could be mistaken.
KLEIN: [laughs aloud] The doctor doesn t know what miasma is!
Laughter.SEMMELWEIS: There is no such thing as miasma.
PROFESSOR 2: [laughing] He says there is no such thing as miasma!
All of the professors laugh heartily.ALL THE PROFESSORS: [amidst the cheerful, jovial laughter] He has repudiated miasma!
SEMMELWEIS: [shouting] A virus is not transmitted through the air!
He suddenly becomes completely cold and calm and turns to KOLLETSCHKA.KOLLETSCHKA: The illness is not contagious, Nasi!
SEMMELWEIS: Miasma is a word for things we don t understand.
Everything is drowned out by the laughter of the commission.KLEIN: [very cheerfully] Esteemed Dr. Semmelweis. I beg you not to take these gentlemen s high spirits too hard. All of our colleagues are acquainted with your exceptionally good heart.
SEMMELWEIS: [raging] I don t have a good heart, I have a good head!
KLEIN: I know, I know, Herr Doktor. That too. Everyone here knows in what high esteem the whole hospital holds your contribution. There was no ill will in the laughter.
PROFESSOR 2: We ve been deprived of the conclusions of our report. I don t see that a single point remains uncontested. Herr Doktor Semmelweis, may I venture to ask your opinion as to the cause of the illness?
SEMMELWEIS: Not a clue.
More laughter.PROFESSOR 2: Herr Doktor! Don t you have any opinion about the nature of the illness, its cause and treatment?
SEMMELWEIS: As is well known, the offspring of the mothers die of the same fever. Male offspring die too. If it was a disease specific to women the male children would not die.
KOLLETSCHKA: Are you going mad?
PROFESSOR 1: [momentarily speechless] You mean that child-bed fever is not a female disease?
SEMMELWEIS: Yes, of necessity.
PROFESSOR 1: That under certain circumstances a man could also die from child-bed fever?
KOLLETSCHKA: Nasi!
SEMMELWEIS: Yes, of necessity. [Everyone bursts out laughing.] Male infants aren't women!
KLEIN: [relaxed after the laughter] I fear that we shall continue to regard child-bed fever as a female ailment until we see the first family man dead in a maternity bed.
Laughter.PROFESSOR 2: Would the doctor respond to the question regarding the origin and treatment of the illness?
SEMMELWEIS: I don t know anything about it.
PROFESSOR 2. Should we, therefore, renounce all our scientific insight? And pose nothing in its place?
SEMMELWEIS: [reaches into his pocket, and produces papers] I have some figures here, they are statistics which are—
KLEIN: Objection dismissed.
SEMMELWEIS: I request permission to present the figures.
KLEIN: [quickly] These figures are Dr. Semmelweis's private hobby horse.
SEMMELWEIS: I. . .beg the commission to look at the figures. I can explain them in the twinkling of an eye.
KLEIN: This is a commission of medical experts! Not a random flock of arithmetic teachers.
PROFESSOR 2: Here I must concur with Herr Professor Doktor Klein. The commission ought not to be subjected to hobby horses.
SEMMELWEIS: Most distinguished commission, may I request . . .
PROFESSOR 1: Herr Doktor Semmelweis. Another time!
SEMMELWEIS: But I. . . .
KLEIN: I regret the word "hobby horse." The correct word is "mania."
PROFESSOR 1: The agony and fear of death from child-bed fever is most likely the price which God has set on the joy of motherhood.
PROFESSOR 2: A profound argument. [He nods thoughtfully] The price. . . of the joy of motherhood. . .A profound thought.
KLEIN: The heart of the matter! I myself have had the same thought: that it is the will of our Maker. But not formulated with the same scientific clarity.
PROFESSOR 1: [writing] The torment and anguish of the deathbed are God s price for the joy of motherhood. . .
SEMMELWEIS: [furious] Well-to-do ladies who give birth at home don t pay a price to God!
KLEIN: Herr Doktor Semmelweis!
PROFESSOR 2: The price is reduced for a good reason, Herr Doktor: at the public hospitals we deal with a clientele of far inferior virtue. We have to deal with women of low morals.
PROFESSOR 1: It is a fact that prostitutes, as well as women of the working classes, often feel passion during the act of fertilization. This feeling of passion must be assumed to be a mark of abnormally low morals.
PROFESSOR 2: Pathological.
KLEIN: Normal women don t develop feelings of passion during insemination.
PROFESSOR 2: All scientific authorities are in agreement that women do not feel pleasure during these activities, which are required for conception to take place.
KLEIN: The high mortality among our pregnant mothers is God s punishment for that passion which wanton women feel during the introduction of the penis into the vagina.
PROFESSOR 1: The Lord s just wrath upon sexual lust.
SEMMELWEIS: Don t Austrian ladies of the upper classes have feelings of desire? In Hungary it is more. . . .
KLEIN: No, no, no!
PROFESSOR 2: In Austria and Germany, feelings of lust never occur among well-situated women.
PROFESSOR 1: Almost the reverse: the women of the cultivated classes feel displeasure, shame, and probably also pain during insemination.
KLEIN: This is the case, undoubtedly, for the nobility, the business class and the academic class.
PROFESSOR 1: During fertilization, at any rate, many women can be heard groaning, almost weeping.
KLEIN: Many women can be heard whining during intercourse.
PROFESSOR 2: Sobbing!
PROFESSOR 1: Most likely, feelings of passion would occur in the classes involved in manual labor.
KLEIN: Now we are at the heart of the matter. We can presume that approximately thirty percent of our patients belong to that group of women who have conceived with a certain feeling of genital pleasure—and that the wrath of the Lord, naturally enough, strikes precisely this third part.
PROFESSOR 2: It s a fact that servant girls and prostitutes are capable of sensations of pleasure. The problem is how all of this applies to, for example, working wives. Do women in the working class feel passion in their genital encounters? I think: yes!
KLEIN: A clear "yes." While women from the educated classes feel pain and humiliation.
PROFESSOR 1: I can, in any case, assert that my wife never has felt pleasure during conjugal intercourse.
SEMMELWEIS: That I can understand.
PROFESSOR 2: Here—on Ward One—what we have is a licentious clientele, with the natural consequence that the patients we admit—prostitutes, working class wives, tramps and servant girls—will be doomed to God s punishment.
SEMMELWEIS: Ward Two deals with the same sector of the public. The patients are equally unchaste in both wards, but we have a death rate that s up to five times as high.
PROFESSOR 1: Herr Doktor, your logic really goes beyond all bounds.
KLEIN: I've thought so for some time.
PROFESSOR 2: Herr Doktor Semmelweis does not appear to attribute any role whatever to a word like "chastity"? Is "morality" also meaningless?
SEMMELWEIS: The two wards resemble each other in each and every way. The only difference between the two is that Ward Two is attended by midwives, and Ward One is attended by young men. They have midwives, we have young students. That s the whole difference. It is there we must look for the explanation of Ward One s high death rate: in the conditions that are particular to this ward.
KLEIN: [furious] I understand that Dr. Semmelweis would like to have it entered in the record that my practices are to blame for the many dead!!
SEMMELWEIS: There is no difference between the wards, other than the different sex of the staffs.
KLEIN: Slander!
PROFESSOR 1: Professor Klein, the matter may be explained by the fact that the pregnant women, due to being examined by males, feel that their modesty is violated.
PROFESSOR 2: A wounded sense of modesty among the mothers could be the pathogenic factor.
SEMMELWEIS: The women of the upper class always have doctors to assist with their births, without dying of shame due to the assistance of men. Do you think, for example, that the wives of professors have less of a sense of modesty than our whores and tramps?
KLEIN: Herr Doktor, I hope I can avoid requesting that you leave the meeting.
SEMMELWEIS: I beg your pardon.
PROFESSOR 2: I m also thinking that the students might be raw and brutal in examining the female organs of generation.
SEMMELWEIS: Does that mean that these washerwomen that are called midwives have finer and more delicate hands than the students who are trained in autopsies and who have constant contact with instruments like test tubes and microscopes? I have them myself every morning in the autopsy room, before we go to visit patients.
KLEIN: [Indignant] I know what it is: it s due to the foreign students. The foreigners have crude and brutal manners. They often behave in a way that would offend even a working girl.
PROFESSOR 1: Now we ve cleared up the matter. It s the foreigners!
PROFESSOR 2: Yes. Many of the foreign students also have anarchist ideas.
KLEIN: All foreigners out of the hospital!
SEMMELWEIS: I am a foreigner myself. I must protest on behalf of the foreign students.
PROFESSOR 1: Foreign students must go.
SEMMELWEIS: Do the distinguished gentlemen really believe that foreign students are more brutal than Germans and Austrians?
KLEIN: It is an indisputable fact that Germans and Austrians, as a result of their higher cultural level, are also more sensitive.
PROFESSOR 1: The humanity of Germans is the greatest in the world.
PROFESSOR 2: So let the conclusion be entered into the record. All foreign students must be dismissed from the Vienna General Hospital.
SEMMELWEIS: I am a foreigner.
Loud laughter from the commission.PROFESSOR 1: The decision is unanimous. Foreign students are denied access to the clinic.
KLEIN: The meeting is adjourned.
PROFESSOR 2: We thank the hospital.
KLEIN: I thank the distinguished, Royal and Imperial Commission.
He bows. The gentlemen disperse.
KLEIN walks past SEMMELWEIS without condescending to give him a glance.
Everyone out. Joyful and energetic Viennese waltz.