FIERCE INDIGNATION

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22367, 2 April 1938, Page 18

FIERCE INDIGNATION

Mea Culpa and The Life and Work of Semmelweis. By * Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Allen and Unwin. 174 pp. <5/- net.)

“Mea Culpa” is M. Celine’s lament for his,unreasonable enthusiasm for Russian Communism. An anarchist still, made so by his profound pity for those who suffer pain and want unnecessarily, M. Celine confesses in violent, frenzied language his hatred for the system that once appeared to him to be tl e salvation of mankind. He found in Russia men still enchained b’ 7 men, abuses still crushing goodness and kindness, and these the woi'se as they are represented to be the remedies for human misery. Such a passionate Jeremiah is not tv. Lj trusted, especially as his fury expresses itself in wide charges and mysterious exclamations. The same indignation, but not the same obscurity, fills his life of Philip Semmelweis, 1818-1865, a native of Budapest. In 1846 he discovered the efficacy of antisepsis in preventing puerperal fever. His first antagonist was his superior, Klein, who was rendered obdurate by Semmelweis’s impatience, lack of tact, and impetuosity. Semmelweis tried to batter down opposition; he exhausted himself and was made impotent. He fought on with a few followers, but .disappointment and opposition crushed him. His senses failed him and in an attack of mania he infected himself, in ghastly circumstances, with the disease that he had striven to destroy. He died after three weeks of agony: “He was a great soul, a great genius in medicine. He remains, beyond the possibility of doubt, the clinical precursor of antisepsis.” No more suitable biographer of a man ruined by human stupidity and ignorance could be found than M. Celine. His passion for human welfare is his strongest motive in living and writing.