The Doctors Dilemma

The Doctor's Dilemma

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Bernard Shaw #30 in our series by George Bernard Shaw
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Title: The Doctor's Dilemma
Author: George Bernard Shaw
Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5070] [Yes, we are more than
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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: The edition from which this play was taken
was printed with no contractions, thus "we've" is written as "weve",
"hadn't" as "hadnt", etc. There is no trailing period after Mr, Dr, etc.,
and "show" is spelt "shew", "Shakespeare" is Shakespear.

THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA
BERNARD SHAW
1906

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