The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Doctor's Dilemma, by George Bernard Shaw

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Title: The Doctor's Dilemma

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5070]
Posting Date: March 26, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA ***

Produced by Eve Sobol

THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA

By Bernard Shaw

1906

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.

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 diligen