Semmelweis

Vienna, 1846. At night, the good-hearted coachman Hammer finds a young woman in labour at one of the gates and takes her to doctor Semmelweis at the women's clinic, whom he knows well. The woman is crazy with fear; mothers die there. Doctor Semmelweis finds no peace because of the surprisingly high number of death-cases at the clinic. He is absorbed in books, makes statistics. Yet it is by accident that he understands that the pathogenic is carried over to mothers by dissecting doctors. Incident again helps him to realise that hand-washing in water sterilised with chlorine has a disinfecting effect. It is all that simple, yet trying to persuade his colleagues, the profession and the world equals attempting the impossible. His discovery is not favoured by the fact that he had supported the revolutionaries during the 1848 revolution. Towards the end of his life, Semmelweis, whose entire life is devoted to fighting child-bed fever, looses his sense with the struggle. The acknowledgement by Pasteur, his great contemporary, arrives too late. (official distributor synopsis)