A scientific and moral tragedy

On Sale March 31st

Mark Rylance returns to the West End this summer in this fascinating transfer from the Bristol Old Vic. Based on an original idea from Rylance, Dr Semmelweis tells the story of the titular Hungarian physician who recognised bacterial impact some forty years before Louis Pasteur proved it. In this moving production, Rylance is joined on stage by a chorus of ballet dancers and a quartet of women representing the myriad lives lost due to his peers' dismissal of his pioneering findings. 

"Here is a person who makes one of the most important discoveries in modern medicine - what we now call Bacteria' - and yet he is pretty much unknown because for forty years, until Louis Pasteur and Dr Lister make the same discovery, no one will listen to him. Why?" - Mark Rylance.

A doctor and scientist practicing in the mid-19th century, Dr Ignaz Semmelwei theorised that simple hygiene could diminish the proliferation of fatalities of women suffering from Puerperal fever, a common disease affecting women during and after childbirth. Offering a simple solution - asking the attending doctors to wash their hands between patients - the deaths fell to 1%. However, the scientific community rejected his findings despite the evidence and later condemned him to an asylum. It wasn't until years after his death that his groundbreaking work was accepted as part of Germ Theory.