Wonder Drug (4/6)

Wonder Drug (4/6)

Treating contagious cases carries its dangers: Nurse Therese comes down with TBC and is supposed to leave the Charité - as is usual - to die in a women's house. But with Virchow's help, Ida fights to let Therese remain at the Charité.
Meanwhile, Robert Koch tests his new TBC remedy on himself and his lover, Hedwig. His tuberculine has serious side effects, so Ida is recruited to secretly tend to feverish Koch. She makes friends with Hedwig, who has become a scandal in Berlin as Koch's mistress. Ida can finally talk about her inner conflict with Hedwig: Should she really study medicine in Switzerland rather than get married? Or should she marry Georg and become a doctor's wife? And then there are her confusing feelings for Behring, who is achieving his first successes with his diphtheria serum: He manages to heal infected rabbits. But when he tries to repeat the sensational experiment for his colleagues at the Charité, the demonstration fails. Behring falls into despair. On Ida's urgent encouragement, Koch dares to take the next step with his tuberculine, injecting Nurse Therese as first human patient.

The Charité
Between breakthroughs in medical research and enormous social upheavals in 1888, the Charité is well on its way to becoming the most famous hospital in the world. It is a city within the city, following its own laws and rules. At the beginning of the Wilhelmine Period, up to 4,000 patients are treated annually. Along with the expected injuries caused by the booming Industrialization, patients are suffering from infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid and cholera, as well as from sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis. In addition, there are over 1000 students, taught at the Berlin University, who are being trained in this famous hospital by the eventual Nobel Prize winners and most prestigious doctors of the time: Rudolf Virchow, the founder of the modern health care systems, Robert Koch, the discoverer of the tuberculosis virus, Emil von Behring, whose work contributed greatly to the healing of diphtheria and Paul Ehrlich, who developed the first drug against syphilis.

Sönke Wortmann - The Director
Director Sönke Wortmann is one of the big names in contemporary German cinema. His epic melodrama "The Miracle of Bern" (2003) was a world-wide success and his 2006 Football World Cup documentary, "Germany: A Summer's Fairytale", ranks among the country's most successful documentaries. He has also directed the opulent historical drama "The Pope" (2009) as well as "Maybe, Maybe Not" (1994), the most successful German film of the 1990s.