The Doctor's Dilemma

About

Shaw's 1906 play poses a genuine dilemma: a doctor with only one treatment vacancy must choose between saving a villainous but brilliant artist or a decent but mediocre patient. The play is a sustained attack on the medical profession's complacency and self-interest, combined with a meditation on whether artistic genius excuses moral bankruptcy. The artist Dubedat's death scene — a theatrical tour de force in which he says all the wrong things in the most beautiful way — is one of Shaw's most ambivalent creations: the audience is simultaneously moved and appalled. Shaw appended a preface on medicine that runs longer than the play itself.