It was an “angry little book” telling the story of one of the great misunderstood pioneers of medicine that grabbed the attention of Mark Rylance, the Oscar-winning English actor. “I hadn’t known about Semmelweis, his work, or the tragic way he was oppressed by the medical authorities,” he said this weekend. “But then I picked up a copy of an old French biography, reprinted in translation by a friend of mine at Atlas Press, and found it very moving.”
Now Ignaz Semmelweis, the groundbreaking 19th-century Hungarian doctor who discovered that invisible germs can convey deadly disease, will be the acclaimed actor’s next stage role and could also be central to a unique and timely theatrical experiment this summer.
The book Rylance chanced upon, Semmelweis: A Fictional Biography by the controversial Louis- Ferdinand Céline and published in 1936, gave a fiery and impassioned version of the life of Semmelweis, charting how he was ignored or derided throughout his career.
“Working in Vienna, this brilliant immigrant doctor, who was nervous of speaking in public because of his strong Hungarian accent, realised that it was bacteria, which he called ‘cadaveric particles’, that were infecting patients in their hundreds. He had no microscope, but used reason, observation, deduction and even his sense of smell,” said Rylance, who last year took the idea for a play about Semmelweis to Tom Morris, artistic director of The Bristol Old Vic and one of the devisers of the international stage hit War Horse. Together they created an ambitious production, calling in the writer Stephen Brown to work on a script.
“The play is not just about the fact Semmelweis was a genius who came to these conclusions 20 years before Joseph Lister or Louis Pasteur. It is about the way a renegade like that needs other people around them to help communicate. He would get angry when he wasn’t believed, but then the reluctance of these leading doctors at the Vienna General Hospital was understandable because he told them they were killing people,” said Rylance, 60. “A pioneer like Semmelweis is like the sharpest knife in the cutlery drawer. It can cut through, but it is not the best thing for putting meat into your mouth. He could not get them to understand the rigour required with hand washing and he was constantly haunted by the ghosts of those he had seen die in the wards and who, in some cases, he himself had unwittingly killed.”
Just as rehearsals for Doctor Semmelweis were to start this spring, world-altering events took over and the significance of hand washing was suddenly in the news. Semmelweis’s name gained currency again.
“We were ready to go before lockdown, with our diverse cast of 12 mostly in place. And we had unusual ideas, like using a corps de ballet of dancers to represent all the mothers who needlessly died,” said the actor, recently seen on cinema screens in Dunkirk and Bridge of Spies.
Many shows are waiting in the wings for the current pandemic to recede, and Doctor Semmelweis is now lined up to go on stage in Bristol next year. In the meantime, however, Rylance and Morris both feel the story deserves be shared now. So they are working on a radical proposal to let the public in on the act.
“Although the play is a universal story, it is so topical now that we have been exploring the idea of rehearsing the cast together in quarantine and perhaps being filmed, almost like Big Brother. We could do it inside the theatre itself, which has a canteen and showers, or stay nearby. I like camping, so I am drawn to the idea,” said Rylance.
The play will take audiences back to 1847 when Semmelweis reduced the death rate in maternity wards in just a few weeks by making student doctors wash their hands with a chlorinated fluid.
“He still could not convince the authorities of his discovery, partly because autopsy was at the vanguard of medicine at the time and this was a leading hospital. Tens of thousands of autopsies being conducted, making the connection between external symptoms and internal causes. So it was very difficult for Semmelweis to challenge,” said the actor who won many fans playing Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall in the BBC1 dramatisation of the book.
The first indication of the cause of the infections came from observing pregnant women when they were shown into one of two parallel maternity wards set up for the poor. One was served by nurses who had learned midwifery on mannequin models and the other by trainee doctors who had practised on cadavers in autopsy. “Semmelweis wanted to work with the famous doctors, but instead they put him on the desk at the doors of these two wards and he soon noticed that women did not want to go into the ward where the doctors were working,” said Rylance. “On the street it was widely known the death rate was much higher.”
While Céline’s biography veers towards the mythological, it does trace the farsighted doctor’s real path to insanity.
“The truth seems to be that Semmelweis was sectioned and put into a mental asylum in Vienna, where he was beaten before dying there of sepsis in 1865,” Rylance said, adding that the value of the emotional aspect of Semmelweis’s thinking is the key to the story for him.
“One thing that Céline did get right is that he was obsessive about his work. It was emotion that drove him. We praise rational behaviour so much, but it was heat or a fire that forged his brilliant mind.
“The lesson for me is that we should be allowed to be emotional. If we exclude people because they are emotional we may well be missing things in our institutions. That is important, I think.”
