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    The Doctor's Dilemma
    The Doctor's Dilemma
    The Doctor's Dilemma
    Ebook123 pages1 hour

    The Doctor's Dilemma

    By George Bernard Shaw

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    First staged in 1906, "The Doctor's Dilemma" is a play that revolves around a community of doctors, most specializing, unbeknownst to them, in different types of expensive, fraudulent treatments. Dr. Ridgeon, who has actually discovered a vaccine for tuberculosis, is conflicted about administering his limited remedy, for the husband of a woman he is in love with can pay, but his kind yet poverty-stricken colleague Dr. Blenkinsop cannot. Shaw's drama highlights the medical predicament of his day, that of treating patients with unnecessary practices to earn a living. A well-written, verbose play characteristic of Shaw, "The Doctor's Dilemma" still resonates with today's audience because of its thoughtful commentary on the continuing problem of providing adequate healthcare to the poor.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2010
    ISBN9781596257429
    Author

    George Bernard Shaw

    George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856 and moved to London in 1876. He initially wrote novels then went on to achieve fame through his career as a journalist, critic and public speaker. A committed and active socialist, he was one of the leaders of the Fabian Society. He was a prolific and much lauded playwright and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in 1950.

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    • 4/5
      I listened to this full cast audiobook while skimming/reading the play in my Kindle omnibus "The Plays of Shaw".I realized fairly quickly after starting this play that I had seen a film version of it with Leslie Caron. While I enjoyed listening to the play, I would recommend the 1958 movie over this audiobook to anyone interested in it. The pace of the audiobook (too slow) and the necessary (but not always complete) stage directions interrupting the flow both detracted from my enjoyment.Regarding the plot: Shaw has some funny scenes in Act 1 satirizing the successful "Harley Street" physician (Harley Street is a street in London that was well-known for being the location of society doctors; it is similar to the term "Fleet Street" meaning the location of publishers of newspapers). I was surprised by how apt some of the satire still is over 100 years later! The main dilemma is one of morality: is it ethical or right to deny possibly life-saving treatment to someone who is a cad? If the availability of treatment is limited, should the moral and potential future usefulness of the patient be a consideration? Shaw also uses Dubedat to challenge the views of the doctors (and audience) as to the relative importance of artistic genius compared to obeying society's rules. Even the ending raises some interesting questions: Dr. Ridgeon believes that he has saved Jennifer Dubedat unhappiness and pain by preventing her from finding out what a bounder Dubedat really was and letting her go through life with her idealized view of him intact. Regardless of the moral issue of whether he should be making such a decision in the first place, is he right? Perhaps she wouldn't have cared! Her sense of right and wrong are not necessarily the same as Ridgeon's. To add to the "dilemma", the good but poor doctor who got the treatment denied to Dubedat has become something of a know-it-all, no longer the nice man he was before. So doubt is thrown on using character as a guide to who deserves treatment from both sides.
    • 5/5
      This edition of ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma: A tragedy’ comprises of a preface, which consists of a rather long commentary on the behaviour and scandal of doctors during the turn of the twentieth century, and a play, which typifies Bernard Shaw’s wit and skill as satirist. The criticisms in the preface may not seem to be pertinent to modern medicine, however, I did feel that they were relevant in the wider debate surrounding alternative medicines such as homeopathy today. “And every hypochondriacal rich lady or gentleman that can be persuaded that he or she is a lifelong invalid means anything from fifty to five hundred pounds a year to the doctor.” The role of the private practitioner as a trusted authority is compromised by the financial incentives involved by keeping patients ill for longer.In the play, the ‘dilemma’ faced by Sir Colenso Ridgeon (who is the exceptional case of a doctor who does make ‘a very notable contribution to science’) is whether to treat a young, morally bankrupt but incredibly talented artist or to treat a poor, honest but slightly dull, doctor friend of his. The plot is complicated by the fact that Ridgeon is in love with the artist’s doting wife. I found that the play was hugely enjoyable and made me laugh out loud in many places, which was more than enough compensation for the fact that none of the characters were all that likeable.
    • 3/5
      A small bit of historical memorabilia, interesting for the moralizing nature of the Victorian values, and the author's attempt to speak out against them; while his intent is glaringly obvious, it is a message not likely to be picked up by audiences today, who will probably see the character bearing Shaw's message as the cad that the other characters view him, thereby diluting the anti-moralizing message. The ethical dilemma suffered by the doctor is too obvious, the answer too plain, in the days of modern ethics. And few will find the underlying message palatable: that the artist is producing something of value, while the doctor is a wastrel that produces nothing anyone wants. Shaw cannot be faulted for failing to foresee that medicine in the future would become much more respected as it progressed suddenly from the rather stagnant position it had been in for centuries when Shaw was writing. The ethical issues of medicine are still there, but they have shifted; this play could be a good conversation starter.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed it but it was deep and I think a few more reads will get a higher rating

    Book preview

    The Doctor's Dilemma - George Bernard Shaw

    THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA

    BY GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

    A Digireads.com Book

    Digireads.com Publishing

    Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-3290-4

    Ebook ISBN 13: 9781596257429

    This edition copyright © 2011

    Please visit www.digireads.com

    CONTENTS

    THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA

    ACT I

    ACT II

    ACT III

    ACT IV

    ACT V

    THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA

    I am grateful to Hesba Stretton, the authoress of Jessica's First Prayer, for permission to use the title of one of her stories for this play.

    ACT I

    On the 15th June 1903, in the early forenoon, a medical student, surname Redpenny, Christian name unknown and of no importance, sits at work in a doctor's consulting-room. He devils for the doctor by answering his letters, acting as his domestic laboratory assistant, and making himself indispensable generally, in return for unspecified advantages involved by intimate intercourse with a leader of his profession, and amounting to an informal apprenticeship and a temporary affiliation. Redpenny is not proud, and will do anything he is asked without reservation of his personal dignity if he is asked in a fellow-creaturely way. He is a wide-open-eyed, ready, credulous, friendly, hasty youth, with his hair and clothes in reluctant transition from the untidy boy to the tidy doctor.

    Redpenny is interrupted by the entrance of an old serving-woman who has never known the cares, the preoccupations, the responsibilities, jealousies, and anxieties of personal beauty. She has the complexion of a never-washed gypsy, incurable by any detergent; and she has, not a regular beard and moustaches, which could at least be trimmed and waxed into a masculine presentableness, but a whole crop of small beards and moustaches, mostly springing from moles all over her face. She carries a duster and toddles about meddlesomely, spying out dust so diligently that whilst she is flicking off one speck she is already looking elsewhere for another. In conversation she has the same trick, hardly ever looking at the person she is addressing except when she is excited. She has only one manner, and that is the manner of an old family nurse to a child just after it has learnt to walk. She has used her ugliness to secure indulgences unattainable by Cleopatra or Fair Rosamund, and has the further great advantage over them that age increases her qualification instead of impairing it. Being an industrious, agreeable, and popular old soul, she is a walking sermon on the vanity of feminine prettiness. Just as Redpenny has no discovered Christian name, she has no discovered surname, and is known throughout the doctors' quarter between Cavendish Square and the Marylebone Road simply as Emmy.

    The consulting-room has two windows looking on Queen Anne Street. Between the two is a marble-topped console, with haunched gilt legs ending in sphinx claws. The huge pier-glass which surmounts it is mostly disabled from reflection by elaborate painting on its surface of palms, ferns, lilies, tulips, and sunflowers. The adjoining wall contains the fireplace, with two arm-chairs before it. As we happen to face the corner we see nothing of the other two walls. On the right of the fireplace, or rather on the right of any person facing the fireplace, is the door. On its left is the writing-table at which Redpenny sits. It is an untidy table with a microscope, several test tubes, and a spirit lamp standing up through its litter of papers.  There is a couch in the middle of the room, at right angles to the console, and parallel to the fireplace. A chair stands between the couch and the windowed wall. The windows have green Venetian blinds and rep curtains; and there is a gasalier; but it is a convert to electric lighting. The wall paper and carpets are mostly green, coeval with the gasalier and the Venetian blinds. The house, in fact, was so well furnished in the middle of the XIXth century that it stands unaltered to this day and is still quite presentable.

    EMMY [entering and immediately beginning to dust the couch] There's a lady bothering me to see the doctor.

    REDPENNY [distracted by the interruption] Well, she can't see the doctor. Look here: what's the use of telling you that the doctor can't take any new patients, when the moment a knock comes to the door, in you bounce to ask whether he can see somebody?

    EMMY. Who asked you whether he could see somebody?

    REDPENNY. You did.

    EMMY. I said there's a lady bothering me to see the doctor. That isn't asking. It's telling.

    REDPENNY. Well, is the lady bothering you any reason for you to come bothering me when I'm busy?

    EMMY. Have you seen the papers?

    REDPENNY. No.

    EMMY. Not seen the birthday honors?

    REDPENNY [beginning to swear] What the—

    EMMY. Now, now, ducky!

    REDPENNY. What do you suppose I care about the birthday honors? Get out of this with your chattering. Dr. Ridgeon will be down before I have these letters ready. Get out.

    EMMY. Dr. Ridgeon won't never be down any more, young man.

    [She detects dust on the console and is down on it immediately.]

    REDPENNY [jumping up and following her] What?

    EMMY. He's been made a knight. Mind you don't go Dr. Ridgeoning him in them letters. Sir Colenso Ridgeon is to be his name now.

    REDPENNY. I'm jolly glad.

    EMMY. I never was so taken aback. I always thought his great discoveries was fudge (let alone the mess of them) with his drops of blood and tubes full of Maltese fever and the like. Now he'll have a rare laugh at me.

    REDPENNY. Serve you right! It was like your cheek to talk to him about science. [He returns to his table and resumes his writing].

    EMMY. Oh, I don't think much of science; and neither will you when you've lived as long with it as I have. What's on my mind is answering the door. Old Sir Patrick Cullen has been here already and left first congratulations—hadn't time to come up on his way to the hospital, but was determined to be first—coming back, he said. All the rest will be here too: the knocker will be going all day. What I'm afraid of is that the doctor'll want a footman like all the rest, now that he's Sir Colenso. Mind: don't you go putting him up to it, ducky; for he'll never have any comfort with anybody but me to answer the door. I know who to let in and who to keep out. And that reminds me of the poor lady. I think he ought to see her. She's just the kind that puts him in a good temper. [She dusts Redpenny's papers].

    REDPENNY. I tell you he can't see anybody. Do go away, Emmy. How can I work with you dusting all over me like this?

    EMMY. I'm not hindering you working—if you call writing letters working. There goes the bell. [She looks out of the window]. A doctor's carriage. That's more congratulations. [She is going out when Sir Colenso Ridgeon enters]. Have you finished your two eggs, sonny?

    RIDGEON. Yes.

    EMMY. Have you put on your clean vest?

    RIDGEON. Yes.

    EMMY. That's my ducky diamond! Now keep yourself tidy and don't go messing about and dirtying your hands: the people are coming to congratulate you. [She goes out].

    [Sir Colenso Ridgeon is a man of fifty who has never shaken off his youth. He has the off-handed manner and the little audacities of address which a shy and sensitive man acquires in breaking himself in to intercourse with all sorts and conditions of men. His face is a good deal lined; his movements are slower than, for instance, Redpenny's; and his flaxen hair has lost its lustre; but in figure and manner he is more the young man than the titled physician. Even the lines in his face are those of overwork and restless scepticism, perhaps partly of curiosity and appetite, rather than of age. Just at present the announcement of his knighthood in the morning papers makes him specially self-conscious, and consequently specially off-hand with Redpenny.]

    RIDGEON. Have you seen the papers? You'll have to alter the name in the letters if you haven't.

    REDPENNY. Emmy has just told me. I'm awfully glad. I—

    RIDGEON. Enough, young man, enough. You will soon get accustomed to it.

    REDPENNY. They ought to have done it years ago.

    RIDGEON. They would have; only they couldn't stand Emmy opening the door, I daresay.

    EMMY [at the door, announcing] Dr. Shoemaker. [She withdraws].

    [A middle-aged gentleman, well dressed, comes in with a friendly but propitiatory air, not quite sure of his reception. His combination of soft manners and responsive kindliness, with a certain unseizable reserve and a familiar yet foreign chiselling of feature, reveal the Jew: in this instance the handsome gentlemanly Jew, gone a little pigeon-breasted and stale after thirty, as handsome young Jews often do, but still decidedly good-looking.]

    THE GENTLEMAN. Do you remember me? Schutzmacher. University College school and Belsize Avenue. Loony Schutzmacher, you know.

    RIDGEON. What! Loony! [He shakes hands cordially]. Why, man, I thought you were dead long ago. Sit down. [Schutzmacher sits on the couch: Ridgeon on the chair between it and the window]. Where have you been these thirty years?

    SCHUTZMACHER. In general practice, until a few months ago. I've retired.

    RIDGEON. Well done, Loony! I wish I could afford to retire. Was your practice in London?

    SCHUTZMACHER. No.

    RIDGEON. Fashionable coast practice, I suppose.

    SCHUTZMACHER. How could I afford to buy a fashionable practice? I hadn't a rap. I set up in a manufacturing town in the midlands in a little surgery at ten shillings a week.

    RIDGEON. And made your fortune?

    SCHUTZMACHER. Well, I'm pretty comfortable. I have a place in Hertfordshire besides our flat in town. If you ever want a quiet Saturday

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