The tragic true story of Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian doctor who discovered a method for preventing the lethal disease of childbed fever. The Vienna General Hospital, 1849; one in three new mothers die within days of giving birth. Director Klein deems it 'the price God has put on the great gift of bearing a child.' But Ignaz Semmelweis, assistant to the second ward, cannot believe that it is so. He is haunted by the screams that shoot through his ward and the chime of the death bell as another new mother passes. Fraught with nightmares, he cannot rest until he discovers the cause and cure of the fever. What he finds, however, is a new way of thinking.