In the mid-19th century, mortality rates among women in labour were extremely high in all European hospitals: the characteristic symptom was a fever so high that it gave its name to the condition known as “childbed fever”.

The young Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis worked in the maternity ward of Vienna General Hospital, and his story is an incredible one. Although he had intuited the real causes (the doctors themselves, with their infected hands, transmitted the fever from woman to woman) and the methods of prevention (hand washing), his colleagues refused to accept the irrefutable proof of their guilt and rejected Semmelweis' theories. Discouraged, he went mad...

With Sara Oderda (University of Turin), read by Marco Panzanaro.