Born On This Day: Sidney Lanier, 1842-1881

Feb3

Sidney Lanier, born February 3rd, poet of the American South, was also a storyteller, a flautist, and a professor of literature. He fought for the South during the Civil War, was taken prisoner, contracted tuberculosis during his imprisonment, and suffered from the disease for the rest of his life. After the war, Lanier taught school, moved around, taught himself to play the flute and to read the music, and became, in a minor way, famous as a flautist.

In order to support himself and his family Lanier began to write poetry. It doesn’t sound any more lucrative than the musician gig, but he managed to make a living. Poetry was more popular back in the day. One of Lanier’s most well-known poems, The Marshes of Glynn, describes the salt marshes of Glynn County on the coast of Georgia. An excerpt that I like very much goes like this:

As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God:
I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies
In the freedom that fills all the space ’twixt the marsh and the skies:
By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod
I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God:
Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness within
The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.

Behold, I will build me a nest on the greatness of God. I really like that.

Sidney Lanier also wrote four books of stories for boys:

The Boy’s Froissart (1878), a retelling of Jean Froissart’s Froissart’s Chronicles, which tell of adventure, battle and customs in medieval England, France and Spain;
The Boy’s King Arthur (1880), based on Sir Thomas Malory’s compilation of the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table;
The Boy’s Mabinogion (1881), based on the early Welsh legends of King Arthur, as retold in the Red Book of Hergest; and
The Boy’s Percy (published posthumously in 1882), consisting of old ballads of war, adventure and love based on Bishop Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.

The Boy’s King Arthur is fairly easy to find, new or used and at a reasonable price, with illustrations by N.C. Wyeth. I found a an old copy of The Boy’s Percy on Amazon for $18.00; it looks good in the picture, but I would be afraid to purchase it without really knowing anything about the content or condition of the book. The Boy’s Mabinogion is rather expensive for a hardcover used book. The Boy’s Froissart is available for around $15.00. Of course all of these are available in reprint editions and online, since they were published in the late nineteenth century and are now in the public domain.

I do think it would be lovely to have a set of these four books, but the only one I do have is The Boy’s Arthur. A book of Lanier’s poetry, edited and arranged for children as in the Poetry for Young People series, would be a lovely thing to have, too. But I don’t think such a thing is available.

Another poem by Mr. Lanier:

Into the woods my Master went,
Clean forspent, forspent.
Into the woods my Master came,
Forspent with love and shame.
But the olives they were not blind to Him,
The little gray leaves were kind to Him:
The thorn-tree had a mind to Him
When into the woods He came.

Out of the woods my Master went,
And He was well content.
Out of the woods my Master came,
Content with death and shame.
When Death and Shame would woo Him last,
From under the trees they drew Him last:
’Twas on a tree they slew Him—last
When out of the woods He came.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Feb1

This adult novel is about mothers and their children and their bond to their children. It’s quite compelling and the issues that are raised are thought-provoking and worthy of examination. However, I have a couple of issues myself with the novel and its believability and the lack of believable motivation and awareness on the part of some of the characters. To talk about these problems, I will have to give some spoilers for the plot of the novel, so here is your warning. Here there be spoilers.

Mia Warren is an artist (photographer) and a single mom. She and her teen daughter, Pearl, rent an apartment in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a Midwestern suburb that is, we are told repeatedly, the epitome of upper middle class respectability, predictability, and dullness. (Under the surface, however, there’s a lot of not respectable, unpredictable, and crazy stuff going on in good old Shaker Heights.) Mia’s and Pearl’s landlords are the Richardsons, particularly Elena Richardson, who lives in a luxurious two-story home in Shaker Heights with her four teenage children and her colorless and barely described husband. (You can forget the husband. He doesn’t really do much of anything in the story.) An old friend of Elena Richardson, Linda McCullough, attempts to adopt an abandoned baby. The baby, abandoned at a firehouse, is ethnically Chinese. In the meantime, Pearl develops a close friendship with the younger of the two Richardson sons, Moody, while Moody proceeds to fall hard for Pearl. Pearl, however, has a crush on the older Richardson, Trip, and eventually they get together. The oldest Richardson child, Lexie, eighteen, has a boyfriend who is black, and the two of them manage to get Linda pregnant. Mia, the avant-garde photographer, not only has a secret in her past that involves Pearl’s conception and birth, but she also befriends the Chinese baby’s real mother and tells her where her baby is, in the home of Elena Richardson’s friend, about to be adopted.

Despite all of these intertwining relationships and problematic characters, the title and the narrative indicate that the book is really not about any of these people as much as it is about the Richardsons’ fourth child, Izzy. Izzy is fifteen years old, and she has a fraught relationship with her mother because of her traumatic birth and the way her mother has treated her ever since—and Izzy’s reaction to that ill treatment. Izzy is a social justice warrior, and she just doesn’t fit into the staid, racially indifferent world of Shaker Heights. She especially doesn’t live up to her mother’s rule-following expectations. She gets along with Mia Warren much better than she does with her own family and her parents. So far, so good. We have a lot of interesting characters and situations to explore.

The first false note sounds when Lexie finds out that she is pregnant. She begins to dream of keeping the baby, of her and her boyfriend, Brian, going off to Princeton or Yale together and living in family bliss while raising their own child. However, she soon realizes that this dream is not likely to become a reality. Brian recoils at the mere suggestion of a possible unexpected pregnancy. Lexie can’t think of anyone she can tell about the baby, and so she schedules an abortion. Meanwhile, Lexie is feeling her own maternal instincts which display as an inordinate interest in the little Chinese baby, Mirabelle/May Ling, and a sympathy for the adoptive parents who are fighting to keep Mirabelle as the birth mother tries to regain custody of the baby she abandoned. Never once does Lexie even begin to think of her own baby and its own right to grow up in a loving home even as she is almost obsessed with the child that is at the center of the custody battle and that girl’s right to grow up in a loving home. Not once does Lexie say to herself, “Wait, maybe someone would like to adopt my child. Maybe my child has a right to life and a home and parents who love her and can care for her.” It’s a huge blind spot, and no one in the novel even brings up the obvious and painful parallel.

Then, there’s the ending of the novel. Basically, Izzy burns the Richardsons’ house down—on purpose. We’ve been told over and over throughout the novel that Izzy isn’t crazy, just misunderstood. Then, she takes Mia’s words about “how sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over” literally, and she sets a bunch of little fires in all the beds in the house and burns it to the ground. Izzy then runs away from home to try to join Mia and Pearl who have left town for their own reasons, and Izzy’s mother vows to “spend months, years, the rest of her life looking for her daughter.” So, if Mother Richardson ever does find her wayward daughter, Izzy obviously needs some serious psychiatric help. People who are simply artistic and misunderstood don’t burn the house down for no reason other than a need to start over. Maybe the last paragraph of the novel is meant to tell us that Linda, too, is in need of some psychiatric help and lives in a fantasy world. She tells herself that Izzy, when they find her, will “be able to make amends.” I wanted to shake Linda Richardson and tell her that Izzy is delusional. Izzy won’t make amends because Izzy doesn’t even see that she’s done anything to make amends for. I can’t make a definitive diagnosis, but Izzy is ill and needs help. And maybe Linda does, too.

So, it’s an interesting novel with compelling characters, but none of the characters were people I could sympathize with or understand very well. Sex-driven teens whose parents preferred not to know what they were doing. Rule-keeping parents who can’t think outside their own little boxes. A rule-breaking parent who suggests vandalism to impressionable teens and then disclaims responsibility. A parent who discards her baby and then wants her back. Another parent who is too dumb to see her own blind spots in regard to societal expectations. And crazy arsonist Izzy. I just couldn’t find anyone very likable, but if these were real people, I would feel sorry for them. And this is me, being smug and patronizing, probably.

The Season of Styx Malone by Kekla Magoon

Jan31

Ten year old Caleb Franklin and his older brother, Bobby Gene, are different from each other. Caleb longs to become someone distinguished and special and he can’t wait to leave the small town of Sutton, Indiana and go somewhere exciting. Bobby Gene is more like the boys’ dad—content to be ordinary, even extra-ordinary, which Caleb understands to mean extra-boring and extra-plain and extra-normal.

So, when Caleb and Bobby Gene meet Styx Malone, a new boy in town, sixteen years old and extra-cool, it’s Caleb who becomes Styx’s acolyte and hero-worshipper. Bobby Gene goes along with the plan to pull off a Great Escalator Trade and trade up to a motorbike that will take Caleb and the other two boys everywhere they want to go. But Caleb does more than just go along; Styx Malone makes promises that Caleb just can’t resist until the dreams and the price of those dreams get a little too high and a lot too dangerous.

What a great story! As Caleb follows the ultra-cool Styx Malone, we as readers get to see just how easy it is to be sucked into doing things and saying things we know are wrong. And there really are no villains in the story. Caleb’s parents are old-fashioned and ordinary, and they don’t really understand Caleb’s longing for the special and exciting. But the parents are good, involved parents, not villains. Bobby Gene tries to put the brakes on the boys’ adventures with Styx Malone, but Caleb is too blinded by his hero-worship to see the wisdom in Bobby Gene’s caution. Even Styx himself, who turns out to be a foster child who has been moved from home to home too many times, isn’t mean or bad kid. He doesn’t tell the boys all of the truth, and he gets them into situations that are at the very least borderline unethical. However, Styx just wants to provide the adventure that Caleb so desires. Styx Malone is the catalyst, but all three of the boys bear some responsibility for what happens.

It has been noted before that good stories provide an opportunity for us to try out different personas and courses of action and see how those decisions might play out in real life—without the danger of actually trying out risky behavior. The Season of Styx Malone provides just such an opportunity for readers to see how heroes can fail us and how our own desires can blind us to the truth. Caleb is a somewhat unreliable narrator because of this blindness, but he’s unfailingly honest. And eventually he and Bobby Gene see what the reader sees much sooner: A Cool Guy is just a regular guys with some extra confidence or bluster, and we all have to rely on our own conscience to make moral and ethical judgments. Or in other words, be careful whom you follow.

And we get all of this wisdom without its ever being stated, without a moral being given. Story really is the best way to internalize wisdom. I’m going to remember Caleb and Bobby Gene and Styx for a long time, and I’ll bet the children who read this book will remember them, too.

Born on This Day: Vera B. Williams, 1927-2015

Jan28

Vera B. Williams was an American illustrator and author who wrote several popular picture books for children. The two that I’m most familiar with are A Chair for My Mother, which won a Newbery Honor, and Three Days on a River in a Red Canoe, the story journal of a mother-daughter-aunt canoe trip. A Chair fro My Mother is a beautiful homely story about a girl whose family experiences a fire in their apartment. No one is hurt, but all of their possessions are destroyed in the fire. Their community and family come together to give them things to help them start again, but the one things they don’t have is a soft, comfortable chair for the girl’s mother to relax in after a hard day of work at the diner. SO the family begins to save up their money in a big jar to buy a chair for mother (and grandmother who lives with them). It’s such a good book about a working class family and about how families work together to manage their money and save for something important. I feel as if the book teaches gratitude and delayed gratification and teamwork and so much more, but in a story, not a sermon.

Ms. Williams’ bio sounds as if she led a colorful life: she helped start a “community” (sounds like a commune) in the hills of North Carolina and a school based on the Summerhill model. Then she moved to Canada and lived on a houseboat for a while, where she illustrated her first book. Oh, and she spent a month in the federal penitentiary in West Virginia after a “peaceful blockade of the Pentagon.”

“I don’t make a point of ending up in jail. But if you try to put your hopes and beliefs for a better life into effect, arrest is sometimes a hazard. As a person who works for children, who raised three children … I have to be able to say I did something to try to save our planet from destruction.”

It sounds as if our politics may differ, but I do appreciate Ms. Williams’ books.

The Little Giant: Stephen A. Douglas by Jeanette Covert Nolan

Jan25

Stephen Douglas is known now mostly for the debates he had with another famous fellow, Abraham Lincoln. I took a break from my reading of Doris Kearn Goodwin’s massive tome, Team of Rivals, to read a few other books, including this much more brief biography of Stephen Douglas, who was Abraham Lincoln’s rival indeed, but not a member of what Goodwin calls Lincoln’s “team of rivals”.

Douglas was unlike Lincoln in many ways: middle class background, a compromiser, supporter of popular sovereignty, indifferent to the evils of slavery, a judge and a lawyer, and a promoter of the growth and expansion of the United States at all costs. Douglas was short and stocky and sensitive about his height. Lincoln came from poverty and from a frontier background. He was tall and lanky and athletic. He believed that the Union could not grow or even endure half-slave and half-free. He wanted slavery to be contained until it eventually died of its own accord. Lincoln was a country lawyer, never became a judge, but he did become president—over a broken and un-United States.

In other ways the men were much alike. Both made their reputation on the law circuit in Illinois, traveling from place to place, representing their frontier clients in land disputes and other frontier matters, sometimes sleeping two to a bed in crowded inns before moving on to the next court session in the next town. Both believed in the Union, and both claimed to oppose slavery. And both men were known for their public speaking skills which they used to become politicians, U.S. representatives, and eventually presidential candidates.

The book is more about Douglas than Lincoln, but the comparisons are inevitable and run throughout the book. In fact, this same book was originally published in 1942 as The Little Giant: The Story of Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, but retitled and republished in 1964 with this title, Lincoln’s name left off. The two books are the same as far as I can tell.

There is an appendix in the back of the book with excerpts from the Lincoln-Douglas debates, a fascinating primary source document. Just as the abortion debate in our time is actually more nuanced than just pro-abortion versus anti-abortion and yet it comes down to that in the end, the debate in the 1850’s was more complicated than just anti-slavery versus pro-slavery. This look at the man, Stephen Douglas, and the debates which defined his times is a good discussion starter, and a way to look at our times and the debates and issues that will be remembered from our politics and culture. Stephen Douglas was personally opposed to slavery, but he did not want to impose his views on others. And now he is remembered as the pro-slavery candidate.

The Kings of Big Spring by Bryan Mealer

Jan23

The Kings of Big Spring: God, Oil, and One Family’s Search for the American Dream by Bryan Mealer, author of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.

I’m a West Texas girl, not a native of Big Spring but rather of San Angelo, which is about 87 miles southeast of Big Spring on US Highway 87. Bryan Mealer’s extended family and family heritage remind me of mine, lower middle class or poor, mostly, with dreams and sometimes actual accomplishments of striking it rich. However, while my family runs mostly to teachers and retail workers and farmers and insurance salesmen, Bryan’s family seems to have had its fair share of businessmen and high rollers, truck drivers and dirt and cattle haulers. And then there was the oil business, boom and bust and everything in between. I never heard of anyone in my family working as a roustabout or an oil field worker or even anyone involved in the oil business in any way. Bryan’s family members, however, were impacted in many ways by the ups and downs of the oil business.

I’m sure I enjoyed this book as much as I did because it took place, more or less, on my home turf. It was difficult to keep up with all the family members whose stories Mealer tells in his book. But when Mealer writes about his grandfather hauling caliche, I know exactly what that is because I grew up until the age of 11 in a house on a street “paved” with caliche. When he tells about the dust storms and the drought and the people praying for rain, I know exactly what he’s talking about because I experienced all of those things in San Angelo. I never met any oil tycoons, but I knew they were around, and I saw the oil wells, pumping oil out of the ground whenever we drove down the highways of West Texas. Most of all, I knew people just like Mealer’s grandmother Opal, who served the Lord in her Pentecostal church all her life and when she was dying asked the family to sing her into heaven with the old hymns she loved. I also knew a lot of “good ol’ boys” who were married to God-fearing women and eventually got right with the Lord themselves after much prayer and persuasion—and a few who never did.

Mealer’s book takes a kind but truthful look at West Texas culture and West Texas people. There’s a lot more drug use and beer and divorce and domestic violence than I ever experienced in my Southern Baptist upbringing, but maybe I just didn’t know what was goin on under the surface or behind closed doors. I wonder how Mr. Mealer was able to get his family members to be so honest and vulnerable and revealing about their past mistakes and family skeletons, but maybe he has a knack for interviewing people and getting them to open up. The book reminds me of J.D. Vance’s bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy, but it’s even more immediate and recognizable to me because these really are my people. Thanks for the memories, Mr. Mealer.

If you want to read a sample of what is in the book, and some more about the latest oil boom in Texas that isn’t covered in the book, check out this article by Mr. Mealer in the magazine Texas Monthly.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens, again

Jan22

I finished reading Bleak House this afternoon, and although David Copperfield is still my favorite among the works of Mr. Dickens that I have read, I must say that Bleak House is quite a story. It’s a fog-infused novel, fog throughout being the sign and symbol of the people in the story and their lives as they are caught up in the fog of a very complicated and never-ending lawsuit, Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

“The lawyers have twisted it into such a state of bedevilment that the original merits of the case have long disappeared from the face of the earth. It’s about a will and the trusts under a will — or it was once. It’s about nothing but costs now. We are always appearing, and disappearing, and swearing, and interrogating, and filing, and cross-filing, and arguing, and sealing, and motioning, and referring, and reporting, and revolving about the Lord Chancellor and all his satellites, and equitably waltzing ourselves off to dusty death, about costs. That’s the great question. All the rest, by some extraordinary means, has melted away.”

It’s Shakespeare who wrote, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” as a halfway joking solution to the country’s problems. But Dickens must have had the idea in mind when he wrote such an indictment of the damage that being caught up in the system of law and courts and chancery can do to a man’s or woman’s soul, mind, finances, and health. Several characters fall victim to the vicissitudes of the courts and of lawsuits, while others manage to hold themselves above and at least somewhat untouched by the fog and snare of placing their hopes in a successful settlement of Jarndyce and Jarndyce or any other interminable lawsuit.

“In a unique creative experiment, Dickens divides the narrative between his heroine, Esther Summerson, who is psychologically interesting in her own right, and an unnamed narrator whose perspective both complements and challenges hers.”

This double narrative echoes the many double or contrasting characters in the novel as well as the divided pairs that appear throughout the story. As I’ve already noted, the irresponsible, uncaring Skimpole is a contrast to the extremely passionate Mr. Boythorn, a butterfly versus a bull. Timid, balding, and generous, Mr. Snagsby is the opposite of the grasping, greedy opportunist, Mr. Smallweed. Mrs. Jellyby neglects her home, her husband, and her children while she spends all of her time and energy trying to care for the natives far-off Borrioboola; Her daughter Caddy Jellyby acquires a father-in-law who neglects his responsibilities by focusing on himself and his own comfort and “deportment”. Mr Jarndyce, Ester Summerson’s guardian, refuses to pay any attention the lawsuit that carries his name, but Richard, another party in the suit, becomes so obsessed with Jarndyce and Jarndyce that he loses his money and his health worrying over it. Sir Leicester Dedlock has a “family of antiquity and importance” and is said to “always contemplate his own greatness” while the poor, illiterate orphan boy Jo habitually answers any inquiry made to him with the words, “I don’t know nothink.”
Lady Dedlock is rich, bored and unhappy while Esther Summerson is relatively poor, busy, productive, and generally content. I could go on, but if you read the book you will have fun finding more contrasts between the various characters.

And what are these contrasting and complementing characters supposed to teach us? Maybe we can learn that we all run the risk of going to extremes, of our best qualities turning us into caricatures and even exaggerated hypocrites or immoderate fools. Passion is good, but too much passion about everything looks foolish (Mr. Boythorn). Charity begins at home. Good deportment or manners is less important than a good heart. Taking care of business is good, but immersing oneself in the ever-changing circumstances of a business over which one has no control (like the stock market) is a recipe for anxiety and depression. None of us really can say that we know everything or that we know “nothink”.

The contrast between Esther and Lady Dedlock says something different; it’s not about moderation as much as it is about the difference between a “good woman” and a bad one. Is there really much difference between Esther and Lady Dedlock? Is one perfect while the other is a classic fallen woman? Or are they both just women who are trying to make the best of their own circumstances, women who have been molded by the past and their own upbringing, and who make the best choices that they can make in a Victorian society/sinful world?

I’m definitely curious now to watch the miniseries, Bleak House. Since I know the basic plot of the story, I can watch for more contrasts in the TV version as well as looking to see how the actors, writers and TV producers characterize the various people in the novel. The Perfect Esther and the Ever-Generous Mr. Jarndyce as well as the Evil Mr. Tulkinghorn and the Sponging Skimpole may have more nuance and subtleties to their character in a televised production.

Well done, Mr. Dickens.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Jan15

I’m reading Bleak House by Dickens, finally. Partially inspired by the BBC TV show Dickensian, I am about two-thirds of the way through the book, and I thought I’d capture some thoughts here before they escape into the ether.

Bleak House is an odd book. One of the oddities occurs in almost the exact middle of the 740 page novel, when one of the ensemble of characters dies in a particularly weird and spectacular way: he spontaneously combusts. Spontaneous human combustion, or SHC, is a rare and controversial phenomenon in which a person catches fire and burns to death without an “apparent external source of ignition.” I thought maybe it was a Victorian superstition, but when I looked on Wikipedia there were recent reported cases cited of SHC from 2010 and 2017.I guess it’s a thing, although the explanations for the phenomenon vary.

Then, there are the characters who don’t catch on fire and turn into a pile of fat and ashes. They are odd, too. Dickens tends to use his characters to show the extremes of human personality. I’m also reading Karen Swallow Prior’s new book, On Reading Well, and she points out in her first chapter on prudence that “prudence, like all virtues is the moderation between the excess and deficiency of that virtue.” So, in Bleak House, Dickens has one character, Skimpole, who cares too little about his life, his livelihood, and his responsibilities. SKimpole is depicted as a childlike, carefree (or care-less) man who languishes about, happy and imperturbable, sponging off his friends, while sometimes being upbraided or even jailed by creditors. None of this bothers Skimpole who is content to live without any visible means of support and without caring from where the invisible means of his support, his friends, derives.

Enter Mr. Boythorn, another friend of the family at Bleak House, who has the opposite problem from Skimpole: Boythorn cares too much. He makes bombastic, exaggerated speeches throughout the book about how he would like to deal with anyone who inconveniences him. He “would have the necks of every one of them wrung, and their skulls arranged in Surgeons’ Hall for the contemplation of the whole profession.” Or he breathes “such ferocious vows as were never breathed on paper before” as to his intentions in this or that. Both men, Skimpole and Boythorn, are afflicted with a vice, an excess or deficiency of passion, but neither is very effectual in the world at taking care of his own affairs. Skimpole does nothing to take care of himself or anyone else, and Boythorn makes fantastic, exaggerated claims, threats, and promises that can’t possibly be carried out in real life while calmly feeding his bird and again, doing nothing effectual.

Neither man has the prudence that Ms. Prior defines in her book: “Prudence is the love that chooses with sagacity between that which hinders it and that which helps,” or “the perfected ability to make decisions in accordance with reality.” Mr. Skimpole lives in a fantasy world where money, and possessions, and responsibilities are inconsequential and beneath his notice, while Mr. Boythorn cares deeply about anything and everything but lives in another kind of fantasy where words and threats make reality change and get better, the louder and more violent the threat the better. I have certainly been guilty, and seen others enjoy, both kinds of fantasy, to our joint detriment, although I think the passionate speechmaker is something closer to real prudence than the sponging dilettante. At least Mr. Boythorn has a house and pays his own bills.

More on Bleak House tomorrow.

The Doctor Who Saved Babies: Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis

Jan9

I knew that sometime in the nineteenth century someone figured out that disease and germs were transferred to well patients by the dirty, contaminated hands of doctors and nurses and that medical personnel needed to wash their hands before examining a patient. But I didn’t know until I read this biography of the Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis, that it was he who researched, discovered, and popularized this simple but revolutionary practice, saving thousands of lives in his own practice, and perhaps even millions through the next two centuries. (Interesting sidenote: In the United States, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes also independently discovered and wrote a paper on the efficacy of hand-washing and general hygiene in preventing the occurrence of puerperal fever, but no one believed him any more than they did Semmelweis at first.)

Central European history is a part of this Messner biography (published by Julian Messner publishers mostly in the 1940’s through the 1960’s), as Dr. Semmelweis was born (1818) into the Austro-Hungarian Empire and as an adult took part in unsuccessful efforts to free Hungary from the empire. But the emphasis is on Semmelweis himself and his part in making medical history. The biography doesn’t idealize Semmelweis; his flaws and mental health issues are evident, but not overly emphasized either. Semmelweis was obsessed with what he called his Lehre, his protocol for cleanliness that would keep women during and after childbirth from contracting the deadly puerperal fever. This infection killed up to a third of the women giving birth in hospitals because doctors were unknowingly carrying infection from the autopsy room directly to the maternity ward and because of dirty bed linens and open toilets in the middle of wards.

The biography itself is compelling and highly readable as are all of the Messner biographies I have read. The author takes Dr. Semmelweis from his young adulthood in Hungary, through his medical studies in Vienna, and back to Hungary where he practiced medicine, implemented his Lehre in Hungarian hospitals, and eventually succumbed to overwork, mental illness, and blood poisoning (ironically contracted from a lapse in the care that he usually took to wash and oil his hands before handling cadavers) and died at the age of forty-seven.

However, in spite of his comparatively short life, Dr. Semmelweis left a legacy of life and health to those who give birth or undergo surgery in hospitals. Author Josephine Rich ends her book with this tribute:

“It is almost one hundred years since his death, but the results of his work live on. Somewhere in the world, every minute of the day and night, a baby is born. It lives because a dedicated doctor spent all his lifetime tracking down a disease spread by filth and carelessness. Every mother today owes a debt of gratitude to Ignaz Semmelweis, the doctor who saved babies.”

And yet . . . from the CDC: “On average, healthcare providers clean their hands less than half of the times they should. On any given day, about one in 25 hospital patients has at least one healthcare-associated infection.”

This NPR story about Dr. Semmelweis doesn’t agree in all its details with the biography I read, but it does give the basic information about Semmelweis and his Lehr and his struggle to implement it and get other doctors to do the same. If you’re at all interested in medical history or the particular life of Ignaz Semmelweis, I would urge you to track down the book. It’s fascinating. (I have a copy in my library.)