Charité

CHARITÉ - TRAILER (Miniserie, 2017) // UFA FICTION
This is a pretty great show. It takes it's name from Charité Medical Institute in Berlin. Founded in 1709, it is Europe's largest University clinic.

The show has your usual human drama, people being brave or foolish, falling in love, all that kind of thing, but it also chronicles a brief period in transformation of medicine from quackery to science.

The show is kind of amazing in that every scene touches on an element of human society that is very different from the way things are now. Women's rights is front and center, but there are so many things we take for granted now that were alien concepts back then. It makes for a weird experience. Indians (as in people from India) on display in the zoo as cannibals was a bit of a shock.

Several of the primary male characters in the show are historical figures that can be found in Wikipedia. The female lead, Ida Lenz, didn't make it into the history books.

The bacillus causing tuberculosis, M. tuberculosis, was identified and described on 24 March 1882 by Robert Koch. He received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1905 for this discovery. - Tuberculosis

In 1890, Shibasaburo Kitasato and Emil von Behring immunized guinea pigs with heat-treated diphtheria toxin. The first cure of a person with diphtheria is dated to the 1891 Christmas holiday in Berlin. Von Behring won the first Nobel Prize in medicine in 1901 for his work on diphtheria. - Diphtheria

Rudolf Ludwig Carl Virchow . . . helped to discredit humourism, bringing more science to medicine.  . . .  he coined a well known aphorism: "Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale".  . . . [The Charité campus is named for him.]

Ernst von Bergmann was a pioneer of aseptic surgery.

Bernhard Spinola was the director of the Charité hospital in Berlin. Emil von Behring married his daughter.

The lovely Hedwig Frieberg autographed this photo to her admirer Dr. Robert Koch in 1889 as a scandal was about to unravel.

Hedwig Freiberg was an actress who became Robert Koch's second wife.

Heinrich von Minckwitz is listed in the German Wikipedia. He might be the same guy as the one in the show. He was a lawyer, not a medical man.

Paul Ehrlich was a German Jewish physician who invented the precursor technique to Gram staining bacteria.

Kaiser Wilhelm II was the last German Emperor (Kaiser) and King of Prussia. "Bombastic and impetuous, he sometimes made tactless pronouncements on sensitive topics without consulting his ministers, culminating in a disastrous [interview] that cost him most of his influence." Sounds a lot like our current fearless leader.

Arthur Conan Doyle even makes a brief appearance. "Doyle was a staunch supporter of compulsory vaccination and wrote several articles advocating for the practice and denouncing the views of anti-vaccinators." He spent some time as a doctor, but it seems he was more successful as a writer of fiction.

Update February 2019 replaced missing video. This one doesn't have the English subtitles.