The Doctor’s Dilemma was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in November 1906 and published by Constable in 1911 with a preface on doctors that is one of Shaw’s most brilliant and ferocious prose performances — a 50-page assault on the medical profession that anticipates by decades the critiques of Ivan Illich and the evidence-based medicine movement.
The play centers on Sir Colenso Ridgeon, a physician who has developed a cure for tuberculosis — but the cure requires expensive, labor-intensive treatment, and Ridgeon can accept only one new patient. Two candidates present themselves: Dr. Blenkinsop, a poor, honest, mediocre general practitioner who is dying of TB, and Louis Dubedat, a brilliant young artist who is also dying of TB but who is, by any conventional moral standard, a scoundrel — a bigamist, a borrower who never repays, and a shameless manipulator of everyone around him.
The dilemma is real: should Ridgeon save the good man or the gifted man? Shaw complicates it further by making Ridgeon fall in love with Dubedat’s wife, Jennifer — creating a personal motive for letting Dubedat die. The play refuses to resolve the dilemma cleanly: Ridgeon saves Blenkinsop and lets Dubedat die (under the care of an incompetent colleague), but Dubedat’s death scene is magnificent — he dies as he lived, performing, and his last words are a statement of artistic faith that is both moving and slightly absurd.
Shaw’s real target is not the individual doctors but the system. His preface argues that the medical profession’s economic structure — doctors are paid per treatment, so they have a financial interest in keeping patients sick — corrupts even well-intentioned physicians. He attacks vaccination, surgery, and the germ theory of disease with a confidence that occasionally outpaces his knowledge, but his central point — that medicine is not a science but a profession with economic interests that may conflict with patients’ wellbeing — remains pertinent.
Collecting The Doctor’s Dilemma
First edition (Constable, London, 1911): Published in the volume The Doctor’s Dilemma, Getting Married, and The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet. Green cloth.
Market values:
- First edition (combined volume): $50–$150
- Later separate editions: $10–$20