Semmelweis

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. Sem...