256
PARTISAN REVIEW
limited number of patients. He has room for one more. Given two lives,
Dubedat's and that of a colleague, Blenkinsop, a poor general practi–
tioner, which should he save? Which is worth more to humanity, that
of the gifted artist, who is also a bad man, dishonest, sponging, fickle,
or that of the plain man, who is good, hard-working and selfless?
If
there is a choice of a world of good pictures and bad people or a world
of bad pictures and good people, which would you elect?
Shaw evades the question, as he so often does his own queries. He
changes the subject. In fact, it would seem that he had changed it once
already, for the premise of the second act is not the same as that of
the first.
If
all doctors are bunglers, then a discussion between a doctor
and his colleagues as to which life is to be saved becomes ludicrous, for
they are incapable of saving any. Indeed, on the first act's premise, the
life they chose to save would be the one they would lose and vice versa.
But Shaw shrinks from his own logic. He
believes
in Sir Colenso's opsonin
discovery. The preface leaves no doubt of this. It is an additional irony,
which Shaw himself only half-foresaw at the time he was writing the
preface (several years after the play), that opsonin was merely another
medical fad, now remembered, if at all, because Shaw pinned his faith
in it when he wrote
The Doctor's Dilemma.
Other fads succeeded it, and
there is still no cure for tuberculosis-according to the latest bulletins,
the antibiotics are only effecting a temporary cure. The old doctor, Sir
Patrick, was right, when said he had known seven men with cures for
tuberculosis and yet people still kept dying of it.
But in any case, the ethical dilemma presented by the second act
is brushed aside in the third. Sir Colenso decides, but not on the basis
of which life is worth more to humanity. He chooses to save Blenkinsop
because he has fallen
in
love with Dubedat's wife. Other things being
equal, Blenkinsop, the citizen, balancing Dubedat, the artist, self-interest
swings the scale. Dubedat is condemned to death, at the hands of Bloom–
field Bonington. A new movement of the plot begins, in which Sir
Colenso will get his come-uppance. This starts in the fourth act, where
the artist, by "dying well," embarrasses the doctor who must witness it.
Sir Colenso's fall is complete, in the final scene in the art gallery, where
he learns that Jennifer has remarried. Moreover, his character has de–
teriorated. Being a murderer has made Sir Colenso something of a sar–
donic humorist. He now stands outside the eminent physician and
smiles bitterly on him, as a licensed murderer. He is a better doctor and
a worse man than his colleagues, because he can kill or cure deliberately,
while they do it through inadvertence. The doctor's dilemma appears in
a revised form, as the patient's dilemma: which would you rather have
