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Semmelweis (Sun & Moon Classics)

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This chilling tale is classic Bjørneboe material. Based on the true story of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, the play shows the intelligent well-meaning individual pitted against the ignorant and inhumane forces of the faceless institution and small-minded peers. Semmelweis, an Austro-Hungarian physician, is today lauded as the father of modern antiseptic theory. During his lifetime, however, he was ridiculed, maligned, fired from his position, and driven to madness. The first to make the connection between the plague of childbed fever, which killed countless women, and medical students' trips between the morgue and the maternity hospital, Semmelweis found himself to be a voice crying in the wilderness. Doctors and medical students did not want to believe that they themselves could be the carriers of disease. They therefore branded Semmelweis a heretic and created a martyr to truth. In his preface to the work, Martin states: "As often is the case in Bjørneboe's work, disease is also a metaphor for the prevailing consciousness of an age. The 'doctors are the disease' here -- and so is the hierarchical form of society upon which they sit near the top rungs. Meanwhile anyone who pursues an inconvenient truth in such a society is paradoxically seen as 'sick.' That is, he is not normal because he is not part of the prevailing disease."

Class and gender politics are evident, as doctors seem unmoved by the deaths of the poor women who come to the lying-in hospitals. The disinfectants found in the janitor's closet are deemed inappropriate tools for the gentleman professional. Our tragic hero Semmelweis and the unfortunate patients are undone by the physicians' refusal to simply wash their hands - or even to engage in the scientific experiment of determining if such an act could make a difference in hospital mortality rates.

Martin's lively translation conveys the excitement and despair of this story of misunderstood genius. Bjørneboe himself deserves high praise for bringing this tale to life for modern readers, and for casting more light on our own human condition.

Jens Bjorneboe, like the Russian dissident Yevgeny Zamyatin, believed in heresy. The autobiographical alcoholic hero of his novel MOMENT OF FREEDOM (1966) remarks: "What on earth would our beloved, stinking, beautiful Europe have become without our dope fiends, drunkards, homosexuals, consumptives, madmen, syphilitics, bed-wetters, criminals and epileptics? Our whole culture was created by invalids, lunatics and felons. There isn't one normal person who has done a useful or lasting thing: it was the normal ones who built the slave labor camps in both Germany and Russia." This wild thought echoes Zamyatin's famous literary declaration of 1921: "The point is that there can be a true literature only where it is made not by efficient and trustworthy clerks, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, skeptics." Both writers identified with the loner, the original thinker, the individual with the courage to question routine, dogma and well-established rules. Such an individual may challenge society, but also prove its salvation. Zamyatin characterized him as "a sailor sent up the mast, from which he can see shipwrecks, icebergs and maelstroms still undetectable from the deck."

As a Norwegian, Bjorneboe did not make his protest against a totalitarian government or even totalitarianism in general, but rather against the common urge to think alike, the herd mentality, the mass mind. His demon was what he called "the guardian type" (the term formynder-mennesket" entered everyday speech in Norway). This is the moral, political or social administrator, functionary or busybody who needs the system, the institution and the boss above him, who faithfully enforces the rules on people below him and ferociously punishes transgressors, mavericks and misfits. It's the little man who can be a big bully, a soul-killer or even, given the right circumstances, a body-killer, whether in an office, a university, or a scientific institution. In Russia they called such men "little Stalins." In America such men (and women) ticket your car, make sure you mow your lawn regularly and--but you know the type.

In the historical figure of Ignaz Semmelweis, nineteenth-century founder of antiseptic medicine, Bjorneboe found the perfect foil for his argument. Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician in Vienna, questioned the medically established definition of "child-bed fever" (a supposedly "non-contagious female disease common to the lower classes") and discovered the true source of the malady--infection from the dirty hands of the high-class physicians. From the moment of that discovery in 1846 to the end of his life in 1867 he was at war with the authorities, the recognized experts, the upholders of convention, who refused to accept his scientific data, to follow his hygienic methods, which eliminated the "fever" in his ward, or even to try washing their hands with the proper disinfectant, and therefore condemned 25% of pregnant women in Europe--hundreds of thousands--to death. The heretic-savior is denounced, fired and driven half-mad, while the respectable guardians of medicine murder their patients. Later Louis Pasteur confirmed Semmelweis' discovery, and procedures were finally changed.

Given this theme, the play SEMMELWEIS (1968) is unusually forceful, like all of Bjorneboe's works, though in the manner of a Greek tragedy the opposition to the hero is mostly offstage. Joe Martin's translation is crisp and efficient, but has irritating lapses of punctuation ("I know, I know Herr Doktor." "Then you should know something about women, shouldn't you Nasi?")Bjorneboe framed the period piece with a prologue and epilogue: contemporary students seize the stage (prologue), present an unscheduled play (the play about Semmelweis) and afterwards encourage the audience to discuss it (epilogue). Since the frame can change with the times, the historical material can be renewed in each country and period, and with it the basic argument. But here the translation drops the prologue, preferring to explain it at length in an introduction, which is strange. Otherwise it's a good job, and the Sun and Moon printing is beautiful. Martin is also the author of an important study of Bjorneboe, KEEPER OF THE PROTOCOLS (1996). The play should be made into a movie.