That Mothers Might Live (1938)

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.