The Spoon and the Impossibility (Ignaz Semmelweis)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
The women
in the first ward
were dying
at five times
the rate
of the women
in the second ward
and the only difference
between the two wards
was that
the doctors
in the first ward
came to the delivery
straight
from the autopsy room
and the midwives
in the second ward
did not,
and the smell
on the doctors' hands
was the smell
of the answer
and the answer
was on their hands
the whole time.

[Verse 2]
You said
*wash your hands
in chlorinated lime
before you touch
the living woman*
and the death rate
in the first ward
fell
from twelve percent
to one percent
in two months
and your colleagues
looked at the numbers
and looked
at their hands
and chose
their hands
because the idea
that a doctor's hands
could be
the thing
that kills
the patient
was a sentence
the profession's
anterior cingulate cortex
could not
metabolize
without
rewriting
every assumption
it had
about itself.

[Chorus]
They fired you.
They fired you
from the hospital
in Vienna
for making them
wash
and you went
to Budapest
and you made them
wash there too
and the women
in Budapest
stopped dying
and Budapest
fired you too
because the water
was never
the problem.
The problem
was the sentence
and the sentence
was
*your hands
are killing them*
and the sentence
was true
and the truth
was
not
the point.

[Verse 3]
You started
writing letters.
You started
writing
long angry letters
to every obstetrician
in Europe
calling them
murderers
and the letters
were correct
and the letters
were the wrong
instrument
for the job
because a man
screaming the answer
in a letter
sounds the same
as a man
screaming
the wrong answer
in a letter
and the room
could not tell
which one
you were
anymore.

[Outro]
They put you
in an asylum
in eighteen sixty-five
and you died there
two weeks later
of an infection
in a wound
on your hand
and the infection
was caused
by the same
organism
you had spent
your whole life
telling them
to wash off
and the organism
did not know
whose hand
it was on
and did not care
and the irony
is the cruelest
irony
in the history
of the profession
I practice
and I carry it
in the same pocket
I carry
my gloves.

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