Unclean Hands

In the mid-19th century, the University of Vienna's prestigious medical school is the "mecca" of medicine in the world. Yet it is dominated by royal court-appointed, aristocratic and reactionary physicians working in a cauldron of politics and intrigue that resists progress. A young obstetrician insists on figuring out the cause of the carnage of women in labor and in most cases their babies that he sees daily. He is ordered and threatened by his chief of obstetrics to keep his nose out of these a airs. Defying his superiors, he finds that the cause is an overwhelming infection introduced by the dirty hands of doctors and students who have been doing examinations and deliveries after performing autopsies in the morgue. Well before the discovery of germs, the young doctor introduces hand scrubbing in a disinfectant for anyone who enters the ward, promptly leading to a virtual elimination of the deaths. But he is fired for his insubordination, shunned by an arrogant anti-science medical community that obstinately refuses to look at facts. Humiliated, he is driven out of Austria. Then descending into insanity for unknown reasons, he dies mysteriously shortly after commitment to an asylum. His tragic ending ultimately becomes one of the great triumphs in the history of scientific medicine, and Ignac Semmelweis is known today as the savior of mothers.