When one talks of Bernard Shaw's best plays, one thinks of those plays he wrote from MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION (1895) to ST. JOAN (1923), with a nod at THE APPLE CART (1930) and TOO TRUE TO BE GOOD (1932). After 1923 there is a slackening in his creativity - the plays become impossible for one reason or another - in one case a horrifying political time capsule (GENEVA, his valentine to Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin). But some of the great plays of the early days creak a bit today. MAN AND SUPERMAN, his first five hour play (with DON JUAN IN HELL as a play within the play) is not revived too often. The Fabian sayings at the end were dismissed by George Orwell as "crackerjack sayings" in the 1940s. THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA is a similar defective masterpiece today.
There is no doubt that the medical profession deserves critical review every decade or so, as Sinclair Lewis and A. J. Cronin demonstrated in the 1920s and 1930s. The fact that doctors can show more interest in making pots of money than in curing the ills of man is constantly in front of us. But Shaw's attack in THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA was something else: the plot involves the age old question of who should live and who should die.
Dubedat (Dirk Bogarde) is a great painter, with a devoted wife - but he is a scoundrel. He is dying of tuberculosis, and Mrs. Dubedat (Leslie Caron) goes to see Sir Colonso Ridgeon (John Robinson) to see if he can use his tuberculosis "cure" on her husband. It has gotten good results, and Ridgeon seems willing to use it, but he slowly gets to dislike Dubedat, and begins wondering if his life is worth saving (there are alternative patients to try to help).
SPOILER COMING UP:
Certainly Dubedat (a bigamist and male chauvinist type) is questionable, if very talented. But as Shaw pursues the matter something else enters the issue that is more personal: Ridgeon finds he is falling in love with Mrs. Dubedat. It is this personal element (kept hidden until the end) that raises the play.
But now comes the part that ages it. If you read the long (typically overly long) introduction that accompanies THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA, Shaw was making a commentary on the recent failure of the British surgeon, Sir Almroth Wright, to find a method of eradicating tuberculosis in the London Metropolitan area (THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA was published in 1907). Wright was on the cutting edge of scientific study on tuberculosis, like his German contemporary Robert Koch, developer of tuberculin. Wright tried to convince the public authorities to allow him to inoculate hundreds of people with tuberculin injections and the like. He was certain this would get rid of this great "white death" plague. It didn't work - it produced some interesting statistical data (earning Wright the satiric nickname, "Sir Almost Right"!). But the disease remained as prevalent as ever. Actually it just helped to show the failure of tuberculin as a cure.
Shaw the cynical satirist took up this to attack the intellectual pretensions of the medical profession on "curing" disease. If he meant that Wright had jumped to conclusions, Shaw was partly right, but the alternative of just standing around doing nothing when he had the chance seems ridiculous. Shaw goes beyond the tuberculosis issue - he attacks the profession for having "cut-happy" surgeons like Robert Morley or worse, high class quacks like Alistair Sim (he insists blood poisoning is the cause of most of man's ills, due to everyone having a particular sack in their intestines - one that he is lucky enough not to have, so he's safe!). Only the elderly, wise Felix Aylmer is an acceptable doctor to Shaw - he questions everything with a lifetime of healthy skepticism.
It is entertaining, until you realize that Shaw would simply have doctors visit you, examine you, tell you what is wrong, and then leave without doing anything for you (except if you are dying they'd make you comfortable). This is hardly what is expected of doctors in any society - people want to be better. Shaw would say that the life force would cure itself (he would keep returning to the life force - making it omnipotent in BACK TO METHUSALEH in the 1920s). That a life force may need support he'd dismiss.
One has to remember, Shaw may have read up on Wright's statistical findings, but he probably barely understood them - he was not a scientist, but a social critic and dramatist. A lifetime vegetarian, it is symbolic of the idiocy of his views on medicine that he spent part of his last years defending having to use a beef-liver extract for his health (my God! how could he dare use a doctor's prescription for medicine when he had that life force!) from criticism from other vegetarians about his hypocrisy. Apparently he never chose to notice his hypocrisy either.
There is no doubt that the medical profession deserves critical review every decade or so, as Sinclair Lewis and A. J. Cronin demonstrated in the 1920s and 1930s. The fact that doctors can show more interest in making pots of money than in curing the ills of man is constantly in front of us. But Shaw's attack in THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA was something else: the plot involves the age old question of who should live and who should die.
Dubedat (Dirk Bogarde) is a great painter, with a devoted wife - but he is a scoundrel. He is dying of tuberculosis, and Mrs. Dubedat (Leslie Caron) goes to see Sir Colonso Ridgeon (John Robinson) to see if he can use his tuberculosis "cure" on her husband. It has gotten good results, and Ridgeon seems willing to use it, but he slowly gets to dislike Dubedat, and begins wondering if his life is worth saving (there are alternative patients to try to help).
SPOILER COMING UP:
Certainly Dubedat (a bigamist and male chauvinist type) is questionable, if very talented. But as Shaw pursues the matter something else enters the issue that is more personal: Ridgeon finds he is falling in love with Mrs. Dubedat. It is this personal element (kept hidden until the end) that raises the play.
But now comes the part that ages it. If you read the long (typically overly long) introduction that accompanies THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA, Shaw was making a commentary on the recent failure of the British surgeon, Sir Almroth Wright, to find a method of eradicating tuberculosis in the London Metropolitan area (THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA was published in 1907). Wright was on the cutting edge of scientific study on tuberculosis, like his German contemporary Robert Koch, developer of tuberculin. Wright tried to convince the public authorities to allow him to inoculate hundreds of people with tuberculin injections and the like. He was certain this would get rid of this great "white death" plague. It didn't work - it produced some interesting statistical data (earning Wright the satiric nickname, "Sir Almost Right"!). But the disease remained as prevalent as ever. Actually it just helped to show the failure of tuberculin as a cure.
Shaw the cynical satirist took up this to attack the intellectual pretensions of the medical profession on "curing" disease. If he meant that Wright had jumped to conclusions, Shaw was partly right, but the alternative of just standing around doing nothing when he had the chance seems ridiculous. Shaw goes beyond the tuberculosis issue - he attacks the profession for having "cut-happy" surgeons like Robert Morley or worse, high class quacks like Alistair Sim (he insists blood poisoning is the cause of most of man's ills, due to everyone having a particular sack in their intestines - one that he is lucky enough not to have, so he's safe!). Only the elderly, wise Felix Aylmer is an acceptable doctor to Shaw - he questions everything with a lifetime of healthy skepticism.
It is entertaining, until you realize that Shaw would simply have doctors visit you, examine you, tell you what is wrong, and then leave without doing anything for you (except if you are dying they'd make you comfortable). This is hardly what is expected of doctors in any society - people want to be better. Shaw would say that the life force would cure itself (he would keep returning to the life force - making it omnipotent in BACK TO METHUSALEH in the 1920s). That a life force may need support he'd dismiss.
One has to remember, Shaw may have read up on Wright's statistical findings, but he probably barely understood them - he was not a scientist, but a social critic and dramatist. A lifetime vegetarian, it is symbolic of the idiocy of his views on medicine that he spent part of his last years defending having to use a beef-liver extract for his health (my God! how could he dare use a doctor's prescription for medicine when he had that life force!) from criticism from other vegetarians about his hypocrisy. Apparently he never chose to notice his hypocrisy either.