



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 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