The medical biopic“Semmelweis“would make a fine double feature paired with the recent Netflix medical history drama “Joy.”

Set a century apart, they’re both about a male-dominated medical profession struggling with issues of childbirth. “Joy” is about the long process of mastering in vitro fertilization, “curing childlessness,” as the scientists involved put it. “Semmelweis” is about a doctor obsessed with making “a woman’s burden” less deadly for mothers giving birth.

Hungary’s submission for consideration in the Best International Feature Oscar competition is about sexism in the patriarchy of the day, anti-Hungarian prejudice in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, the awful mortality rate of women giving birth and an abrasive but heroic young doctor, Ignác Semmelweis, willing to rock the boat in pursuit of righteous results.

In 1847 the obstetrician/pathologist Dr. Semmelweis (Miklós H. Vecsei) has reached the pinnacle of his profession — treating patients and teaching at Vienna General Hospital. But he snaps at nurses, dismisses colleagues and fights fights fights for his patients.

Because they’re still dying. “Puerperal Fever” is always the diagnosis.Well, HIS diagnosis.

His dissections of some of the women — the indigent ones — verify this. But the director of obstetrics, Professor Klein (László Gálffi), is still leading lectures where phases of the moon are considered part of the cause. This was decades before Louis Pasteur verified the “germ theory” that much of European medicine scoffed at in mid-century.

Iit’s not until a new nurse, Emma Hoffman (Katica Nagy), fresh out of the midwife teaching clinic across town, shows up that the doctor has a clue. The less-trained midwives and the physicians at her former clinic aren’t experiencing remotely the mortality rate of Klein’s clinic.

“What kind of ‘epidemic’ rages only INSIDE a clinic,” Semmelweis asks (in Hungarian with English subtitles)?

Director Lejos Koltai and screenwriter Balázs Maruszki tell this story in conventional, hero-villain fashion, with the doctor and his new favorite nurse struggling against Klein and his anti-Hungarian Austrians, who won’t even give him access to mortality records so that he can state the problem and START to search for a solution.

Semmelweis won’t be deterred. Trial and error, observation and cold, hard numbers are his primary tools. What’s the biggest difference between the two clinics? One does dissections, and the other is run mostly by midwives who don’t cut into cadavers. Maybe washing one’s hands and changing the linens occasionally isn’t enough.

Our story sets up Klein and a protege (Tamás Kovács) as our heavies, with Viennese officialdom as perhaps persuadable owing to the doctor’s public heroics, and introduces the stakes by throwing a hysterical and very pregnant homeless woman (Niké Kurta) at Semmelweis in the opening scene.

Even she knows what happens to pregnant women in this “house of death.”

“Semmelweis” is, like “Joy,” a sturdy and somewhat sentimental treatment of a serious piece of medical history. The performances can be strident, and some of the situations — this is slightly fictionalized history, remember — too melodramatic to accept at face value. I don’t see evidence of an Emma Hoffman in this history and one doubts that a coffin maker named Meyer looked at this clinic as a major profit center.

But the film is also a great reminder that science is a process, not a conclusion, and “Semmelweis” parallels that in showing us the missteps to gaining acceptance for germ theory and the idea that a little disinfectant — the RIGHT disenfectant — never hurt anybody.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Miklós H. Vecsei, Katica Nagy, László Gálffi,
Tamás Kovács

Credits: Directed by Lejos Koltai, scripted by Balázs Maruszki. A Bunyik Entertainment release.

Running time: 2:07