University of California, Los Angeles, Writers Extension Program, Los Angeles, CA 90024. E-mail: s.peters02{at}earthlink.net
By the time of his death in 1950, Bernard Shaw had attained an unprecedented celebrity, much of which revolved around the man as well as the artist. Even as the Nobel laureate and Oscar-winning playwright was revered as a visionary and prophet, he amused with his seeming quirks and eccentricities. But the vegetarian parading in knee breeches was also a hypochondriac who longed for another mode of existencebodiless, in a spotless ethereal world. As he obsessively envisioned the human body plagued by pestilence, he sought to protect himself from internal and external contamination, converting private concerns into public campaigns.
The 100-page 1911 Preface to The Doctors Dilemma is part of the lifelong battle he waged against the medical profession. His writings on the subject range from an 1887 book review attacking vivisection through the 1931 collection of articles comprising Doctors Delusions to the 1944 summary comments in Everybodys Political Whats What? As Shaw declared doctors fair game, he portrayed more than 20 physicians in his dramatic works, although they are more likely to be fools than the knaves found in Molière. Throughout, the controlling theme is victimization as Shaws suspicions set the doctor against the patient.
While the nature of his attack was peculiar, the underlying reasons were rooted in biography. In 1881 despite being vaccinated, Shaw caught smallpox. He claimed to be unblemished but his chin and jaw were pockmarked, marks concealed by growing the famous beard. Psychologically marked as well by his encounter with the dread disease, he proceeded to attack doctors and the vaccination that failed to protect him. For him, vaccination was Edward Jenners stunt, a stunt that managed to kill one baby a week. In addition to Jenner, Shaw specifically attacked Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister. The three men had one thing in common: their fame rested on controlling micro-organisms. Shaw denounced the trio as murderers posing as saviours of mankind.
Despite his animus, Shaw counted physicians among his friends, including controversial bacteriologist Sir Almroth Wright, the model for Sir Colenso Ridgeon in The Doctors Dilemma. Ridgeons dilemma, the morality of saving one life over another, was one that Shaw had discussed with Wright. Additionally, Shaw listened to Wrights latest theories on vaccine therapy, including Wrights belief that microbes are vehicles of disease but not the cause, a belief which earned him the label Almroth Wrong from his colleagues.
Undeterred, Shaw also refused to accept the germ theory of disease, labelling as superstition the most spectacular medical advance of the 19th century. For Shaw, even the instruments of fighting infection were suspect. Acutely sensitive to odour, he called the stench of carbolic acid permeating London a poison masquerading as a cure. Even more profoundly, Shaw had a horror of those invisible microbes. Similarly, he shuddered at the thought of underground creatures, even rabbits, and the whole rank subterranean world of decay and death symbolized for him by the cesspool. Out of his own revulsion came his insistence that sanitation, ventilation, and sunshine could both prevent and cure disease. His views resembled those of pythogenesis, the outdated notion that disease is generated spontaneously from filth and spread by a vile gas.
Meanwhile, like Schopenhauer, he believed that sickness was a sign of infirm will, an intolerable thought for him as he sought to control every aspect of his personal, private, and social worlds. Not for him that mind/body harmony dependent on physiological health that Victorians called mens sana in corpore sano. Adamantly believing in the power of mind and individual will, he reversed the aphorism. It is the mind that makes the body and not the body the mind, the Lamarckian vitalist proclaims in the Preface to The Doctors Dilemma.
As Shaw longed to transcend his body, he exercised a rigorous asceticism in personal habits, including ritualistic body cleansing, wearing hygienic wool, and following a stringent vegetarian diet. The onset of some of those habits can be traced to his early life. Influential in the Shaw household was George Vandeleur Lee, who formed part of what Shaw insisted was an innocent ménage à trois. Leemesmeric musician, charlatan, and geniussought the secret of bel canto by vivisecting human cadavers and birds. Whether or not the boy witnessed Lees experiments, Shaw, outraged and shamed by Lees position in the family, became a militant anti-vivisectionist decrying amoral science. Yet from Lee, he learned to value such practices as dietary abstention and sleeping with the window open. From his father, George Carr Shaw, a miserable alcoholic, Shaw learned to hate alcohol, tobacco, alimentary excess, and failure.
In his drama Shaw triumphed over the materials of his life, transforming the virulent into the playful. In Too True To Be Good (1931), Shaw satirizes the doctor who admits he cures no disease while blaming the microbe. Shaws microbe comedically appears on stage as a character who laments that he has caught measles from the patient while being blamed for infecting humans. In The Philanderer (1893), Dr Paramore is a vivisector whose reputation rests on discovering a microbe in the liver that means certain death. When his discovery cannot be confirmed, he is inconsolable, even though it means perfect health for his misdiagnosed patient. While intellectually Shaw might wonder, like his character Blanco Posnet (The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, 1909), whether the croup bacillus was an early attempt to create a higher being, the personal meaning to him was the threat of being metamorphosed into a breeding ground for bacilli.
On the subject of doctors and medicine Shaw put forth a dazzling display of partial truths, the clear prose giving a seeming lucidity to his arguments. The incessant repetition declares what he needed to believe. In extolling the purifying properties of sunshine and fresh air, he moved the theatre of action from a dark crawling world of unseen organisms upward to a brightly lit, clean, deodorized, incorporeal world, the only world his psyche could tolerate.
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