Characters:

Semmelweis (bass)

Kolletschka (tenor)

Woman (soprano)

Maria Semmelweis (soprano)

Kolletschka, dead, wandering in autopsy room of Allgemeine Krankenhaus

Semmelweis enters, distraught, and sees him, rushes toward him.

Semmelweis:

I was in Venice when I heard the news.

I came back at once, 

The canals suddenly hideous,

everything to me seemed arteries and disease.

I couldn’t believe it was true,

prayed there was some other Jakob Kolletschka,

but sadly there is not, and coming here I saw you…

S approaches, K waves him back.

Kolletschka:

Don’t come nearer, Semmelweis. 

Unless you’re here to cut me open.

And you’re late for that, thought you’d know by now

my cheerful autopsy by heart.  

you more than any should understand,

I carry death with me.  What would they say,

Klein and his minions: Semmelweis dead

of the same female disease

that brought down his good friend Kolletschka?

Semmelweis:

They make no connections, Klein and them.

They will blame it on the air.  And the women

are poisoned by the milk from their breast

And what do I care?  The opinions

of Director Klein and those inferior minds--

Kolletschka :

You care too much, Ignac.  I worry for you.

All night out, pacing the streets late, drunken energy

when nothing puts you down, and then so low

the next day you barely will your heart to keep beating.

Semmelweis:

What do mean?  You don’t describe me—

Kolletschka:

I see things now as in time they will be.

But if it helps to make your case,

there’s a lesson here for the blood inside you

I was stuck with an autopsy knife

in our friend’s shaky hand…

Semmelweis:

That no good lush.  Why did they ever let--

Kolletschka:

And in days my insides had etched the same picture

we’d seen in the woman whose childbed death

was opened up for us to see.

Maria Semmelweis and pregnant Woman, the latter catching a coin and checking heads or tails.

Woman:

Heads they send me to the Doctor’s Ward,

tails to the Midwives.

How I wish that I had a few more pennies,

and a midwife deliver my child at home.

Maria Semmelweis:

Not all the doctors are bad, you know.

Woman:

One stray dog is not so bad either.

But a pack of them can tear you apart.

If only the police would let me be

I would give birth in the street.

Maria Semmelweis:

If there were no hospital

you would wish for one such as this. 

Woman:

That snuffs out your candle

once your child’s is lit.

She looks at Maria’s belly.

You’re quite early.  Or are you late?

Maria Semmelweis:

My husband forgot his glasses this morning.

He can’t do his research without them.

Woman:

He is Doctor….

Maria Semmelweis

Semmelweis.

Woman:

I know this Doctor Semmelweis.

He is your husband?

But you are no older than me,

and he-- 

Maria Semmelweis looks at her critically.

Woman:

…If he’d made a child

the first time in his life he tried,

you would be the same age as that child.

Maria Semmelweis:

Such a subtle word, to “try”.

How is it that you know

he didn’t save himself for me?

Woman:

Because they always try. 

Woman:

It’s never a choice

you see who you see

and soon you belong

to the one who trains himself on you.

You heard about it your whole life,

that moment, but

what is it really?  You feel his

clumsy hands, wrong and hard,

see the eager look in his eyes.

This is no one

who knows me at all, you think,

then it hurts, then it

doesn’t, maybe afterward

you glow but inside

you are changed,

something planted in your body where it grows

and pain goes everywhere it goes     

Kolletschka enters.

Kolletschka:

It’s a shame we never met.

You’d be singing a different tune.

No ex-lover of mine

ever sang a dirge like that.

Woman:

Don’t you ever stop?

Kolletschka:

Evidently, no.

Woman:

I wasn’t singing of sex, you know. 

It was a song of my giving birth.

Kolletschka:

An underappreciated genre, that.

Woman:

We’ve met.  Do you remember?

Kolletschka:

Was I your…doctor?

Woman:

No, but I died from fever and after that

I was examined and you were there.

You were stuck in the hand with the knife

and the disease poured in.

as if your body were a cathedral

lit by candlelight touched

from a dead body to a doctor to my body to you.

Kolletschka:

There’s a lesson here for the blood inside you.

Semmelweis:

Our doctors’ hands are also knives.

If we washed them with chloride of lime

we would kill the seed of disease we plant

from the dead into the living.

Kolletschka:

Bravo, my friend.  They should

name a school after you.

Too late for me, but you

were ahead of your time.

Semmelweis:

How many dead before…

Kolletschka:

Before they change? 

Semmelweis:

All the ones before this.   And after this, how many more.

Kolletschka goes to shake hands.

Kolletschka:

What an honor

to shake the hand of the great Ignac Semmelweis!

Semmelweis:

It’s not funny, Jakob. 

Kolletschka:

I know.

Maria:

In the market squares in Buda and Pest,

old women cut snips from folded paper

and the shape of a mother would unfold

and trailing from her were children you had not seen,

invisibly built by that quiet machine,

and one wrong cut would cut through everyone,

and it seemed like nothing they had ever learned

but knew in their hands

how to make and make and make.

And I never asked the price, just watched them

weave with their scissors

something too delicate to take.

Semmelweis:

Shall I commission also an experiment

to show that every day the sun comes up? 

Kolletschka:

The same light does not shine on everyone, Ignac.

Even Galileo had to prove what he knew.

Semmelweis:

I do not orbit around Klein and the old guard.

Kolletschka:

But you exhibit such eccentricity.

Semmelweis:

I know what kills humans,

yet I should waste my time with rabbits and mice? 

Kolletschka:

One experiment and use the results

to show the world what you know in your head.

Semmelweis:

And they will accept that they are murderers?

Let the dead bury their dead.

Maria:

I am the experiment—child after child,

born into the clean hands of their father,

and the mother still alive.

How desperately he tries

to prove himself, to start again in my body

another child

and sling another arrow

through the apple on my head,

and walk me around, not dead,

through the streets Klein

walks when he goes to the theater.

Semmelweis:

And they will all accept that they are murderers?

Jakob, I shall let the dead bury their dead.

Kolletschka:

Ah, the intellectually dead,

carting the bodies from their morgue—

an interesting turn.

You are fond of quoting Jesus, for a Jew.

Semmelweis:

I am Catholic, like you.

Kolletschka:

I know. 

But they say that of you, I’m sure you’ve heard.

You’re a foreigner in your hometown,

so strange to the ear,

and here in Vienna no one knows who you are.

Semmelweis:

And what do I care?  The opinions of--

Kolletschka:

You care too much, Ignac.  I worry for you.

All night out, pacing the streets late, drunken energy

when nothing puts you down, and then so low

the next day you barely will your heart to keep beating.

Semmelweis:

What do you mean?  I—

Kolletschka:

I see things now as in time they will be.

Semmelweis:

A child of nine, they lost me sometimes.

Days I would wander down

between Buda and Pest

and watch the boats work against the current.

A very hurt dog crawled up out of the river,

dying in misery and I couldn’t help it.

I held my weight against the shaking dog,

built my fist around a cobblestone

but could not bring it down against the skull.

Was then I knew what I should do.

My doctors’ hands were pure.

Kolletschka:

How are things down at the whorehouse, Ignac?

Semmelweis:

You ask me? 

I should ask you that question.

Kolletschka:

But I wouldn’t have an answer.  Everyone knows—

Semmelweis:

For research. 

It’s very important, for my work…

Kolletschka:

Nice work if you can get it.

Semmelweis:

Here’s what I get, Jakob: Allgemeine Krankenhaus

has never seen an infection rate as low

as the rate in those low houses.

And the fight they put up—

Kolletschka:

Ignac!  I don’t need details…

Semmelweis:

At the Krankenhaus, Jakob,

when I put out the wash buckets

of chloride of lime,

Klein and his minions put up such a fight.

Kolletschka:

You might catch more flies with honey

than chloride of lime.

Semmelweis:

I do not suffer doctors gladly

who haven’t learned what a common

street girl could teach them.

Kolletschka:

Who knew learning

could be such fun?

I worry for you…

Kolletschka exits.

Semmelweis:

But it’s research.

And only that!

Maria Semmelweis:

Tell me what you learn down there, Ignac,

while I’m home taking care of your children. 

Semmelweis:

Do you know what my life is like?

Maria Semmelweis:

I know only the barest fraction.

Semmelweis:

Hour after hour at the Krankenhaus—

if not for what I have painstakingly learned—

this family we have—

Maria Semmelweis:

I know, Ignac.  It’s true.

All of us are alive because of you.

But now I know that, for you,

just any wife would do.

You have nothing but access,

and when you get home

I’m nothing,

a body you already know.

Semmelweis:

Oh, I am a lucky man.

Maria Semmelweis:

What’s the difference:

the whorehouse and the Krankenhaus?

Semmelweis:

You know what I do all day, Maria?

I open up the bodies of dead women,

and in that putrefaction see

what happens

when no one at that hospital

pays any goddamn attention to me.

The difference?  You really want to know ?

At the whorehouse there are no dead bodies.

And they pay attention to me.

Maria Semmelweis exits. 

There are no dead bodies.  That’s the difference.

To Kolletschka, who  enters.

What more proof could they need? 

It’s not bad air that transports disease.

It’s us.  Doctors.  Our hands.

You know I’m right, Kolletschka,

will you say something?

Kolletschka:

I’m not here Ignac.

Semmelweis:

Kolletschka!  It’s all gone to shit.

I’m a little drunk. 

A hospital?  You’re taking me to a hospital?

That building was made by netmakers,

who stitched these bricks together

and in this net they catch women and

dump them out on the floor, where the living

children are thrown back into the sea of the living. 

Maria Semmelweis:

Ignac, what else can we do?

Semmelweis:

Now I am the experiment. 

What hospital is this,

that beats a man for saying who he is?

I am not some hurt dog

dragged up from the river

for you to kill with mercy and a cobblestone

I am Ignac Semmelweis, I am—

Kolletschka:

Crude as our methods

on the Doctor’s Ward, lucky those women were

not to have disease of the mind.

Maria Semmelweis:

Not all the doctors are bad, you know.

Woman:

But a pack of them can tear you apart.

You say he is your husband?

Semmelweis:

My hands are also knives. 

Woman:

It’s  never a choice.  You see who you see.

Semmelweis:

And they will believe they are murderers?

This is a hospital?

If the police would let me be

I would rather bleed out on the street

than in this dingy room,

everything here

arteries and disease.

A child of nine.  They lost me sometimes.

Where did I learn it, you ask.  Where?

Was it in the seminary, when we all went to see

my brother take his orders?  I watched how

one hand was dipped in the holy water

and it was touched, hand to hand, to everyone.

I am nothing if not the one who redeems

the living and the dead.

I am nothing.  But I see things now

as in time they will be.

I see things now

as in time they will be.

© Matthew Doherty, 2009

The Doctors' Ward

Libretto by Matthew Doherty

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