All Is Forgiven

"Doctors," wrote cantankerous George Bernard Shaw in the preface to The Doctor's Dilemma, which expressed the same bias, "are just like other Englishmen: most of them have no honor and no conscience."

Last week Britain's independent medical weekly, the Medical Press, showed its willingness to forgive & forget the Shavian animus against the profession and blame it all on the disillusionment of youth. (He was 50 when he wrote the play.) "Young Shaw's first indirect contact with our profession," wrote the weekly, "may well have been when his father was operated on by Sir William Wilde [who] succeeded only in converting a convergent strabismus into a divergent one." (To doctor-readers this meant that Ophthalmologist Wilde* had turned the elder Shaw from cross-eyed to wall-eyed.) "Shaw's first personal encounter with our profession," continued the weekly, "occurred during the '70s when a great epidemic of smallpox broke out. Shaw had been vaccinated in infancy and considered himself happily immune. Unfortunately he was mistaken and suffered a severe attack . . . which grievously marked his face. Hence . . . his famous beard and his lifetime antipathy to our profession."

Shaw, concluded the weekly, "was a great and good man, though he did a lot of mischief."

*The father of famed Oscar and subject of an old Dublin joke: "Why are Sir William's nails so black?" "Because," went the answer, "he scratches himself." (For news of other scratches see below.)

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