From now on I’ll find it hard to wash my hands without thinking of Mark Rylance. In Dr Semmelweis he incarnates the Hungarian doctor who was a pioneer of antisepsis but is now largely forgotten. Perplexed, furious and zealous, Rylance is the burning centre of the play he wrote with Stephen Brown before the pandemic, and which is now brought to reverberating life under the direction of Tom Morris.
Working in the obstetric clinic of the Vienna general hospital in the mid-19th century, Ignaz Semmelweis was appalled by the number of women who were dying soon after giving birth. Conventional medicine considered the deaths inevitable, accounting for them by miasma, poor ventilation or emotional disturbance. Semmelweis’s investigations, conducted before the concept of bacteria, revealed that patients were being unintentionally harmed by the men who were trying to heal them: physicians, who moved straight from conducting autopsies to delivering babies, were contaminating the mothers. When they washed their hands with a chlorinated solution, the deaths ceased. The effect was indisputable but resisted by the medical profession for years; Semmelweis died, his work unacknowledged, in an asylum.
