puerperal septicemia

Examines the work of Ignac Semmelweis, the doctor who discovered how childbed fever, an infection that killed one out of six pregnant mothers in the 1800s, was transmitted from doctor to patient but who wasn't taken seriously by the scientific community because of his abnormal personality and self-destructive habits.

Chronicles nineteenth-century Hungarian doctor Ign?c Semmelweis's discovery that physicians must wash their hands to prevent infection of patients, and his losing struggle with the ingrained medical establishment to make it change its practices.