Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) is best known for his early novels
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)--which Charles Bukowski
described as the greatest novel of the past 2,000 years--and Death on
the Installment Plan (1936), but this delirious, fanatical "biography"
predates them both. The astounding yet true story of the life of Ignacz
Semmelweis provided Céline with a narrative whose appalling events and
bizarre twists would have lain beyond credibility in a work of pure
fiction. Semmelweis, now regarded as the father of antisepsis, was the
first to diagnose correctly the cause of the staggering mortality rates
in the lying-in hospital at Vienna. However, his colleagues rejected
both his reasoning and his methods, thereby causing thousands of
unnecessary deaths in maternity wards across Europe. This episode, one
of the most infamous in the history of medicine, and its disastrous
effects on Semmelweis himself, are the subject of Céline's
semi-fictional evocation, one in which his violent descriptive genius is
already apparent. The overriding theme of his later writing--a caustic
despair verging on disgust for humanity--finds its first expression
here, and yet he also reveals a more compassionate aspect to his
character. Semmelweis was not published until 1936, after the novels
that made Céline famous. "It is not every day we get a thesis such as
Céline wrote on Semmelweis!" wrote Henry Miller of this volume.
