That Mothers Might Live

Long before as producer/director Fred Zinnemann won Oscars for A Man For All Seasons and From Here To Eternity as a young Viennese immigrant he toiled at the MGM studios doing short subjects. It was there he showed his promise directing this Best Short Subject for 1938 That Mothers Might Live.

Going to hospital was a dubious proposition as far as your health was concerned, especially for pregnant women to give birth. Infant mortality was high in those days for any number of reasons, one of them simply because hospitals were not kept sterile and newborns picked up all kinds of infections and died.

Ignaz Philipp Semelweiss working in a hospital in Budapest came to see that just washing hands cut down the death rate in maternity wards. He was on the right track but it would be left to better known scientists like Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister to fully develop the germ theory and the science of microbiology. It was left to Semelweiss to be ridiculed by his professional peers for most likely simply not taking the next steps that Pasteur and Lister did.

Sheppard Strudwick made his film debut in this short as the subject of same. It's a nice tribute to a forgotten and unappreciated man during his lifetime.

Until well into the 20th century it was common for children to be birthed at home: childbed fever. Until Semmelweiss began to develop the modern understanding of germs and how they can be transferred, there was no chance of stopping death in hospitals. True, microbes had been known for a couple of centuries, ever since the invention of the microscope, but no one made the connection. Even Semmelweiss didn't quite get it at first. He thought it was the smell that carried disease.

Of course, nowadays, we have antibiotics and medical facilities that don't recycle anything that can't be steamed to death, but every advance requires someone to make it. And that's what this overwrought episode of John Nesbitt's THE PASSING PARADE is about.

There isn't any dialogue in this short feature, just an increasingly frenzied narration as Sheppherd Strudwick portrays the visionary Austrian physician Ignaz Semmelweis. He was a man determined to establish just why so many perfectly healthy women died so swiftly after childbirth - but with no obvious cause. Gradually, he began to realise that it might be the doctors themselves who were carrying diseases about their hospitals and so instituted a culture of washing and sterilising. Though this had a profound effect on the mortality rates, his colleagues felt demeaned and embarrassed by his insistence they keep clean so he gets fired. Nobody will listen or read his book and the poor man ends up in a sanatorium. Luckily, others around the world including Pasteur and Lister eventually do read his theories and soon hygiene becomes a watchword for facilities around the globe. It's not really something particularly visual this, save that as he gets more frustrated Strudwick starts to resemble more of a werewolf than a doctor. It's essentially a monologue from a narrator that tells us of human belligerence and bloody-mindedness and though it's certainly a message worth listening to, as a film it's rather routine.

That Mothers Might Live (1938)

**** (out of 4)

Oscar winning short from director Fred Zinnemann (High Noon) tells the rather amazing story of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, a physician who came up with a cure for Childbed Fever, which was a disease that would kill mothers soon after they gave birth. What was his amazing cure? To make doctors wash their hands before treating a patient. Semmelweis drove himself to an asylum trying to get his message of clean hands across but he wouldn't be held high until years after his death. Even though Zinnemann was young into his career here he shows signs that would turn up in later films like From Here to Eternity.