The Doctor's Dilemma: A Quick Read edition

Discover a new way to read classics with Quick Read.
This Quick Read edition includes both the full text and a summary for each chapter.
- Reading time of the complete text: about 3 hours
- Reading time of the summarized text: 3 minutes

The Doctor's Dilemma is a play by George Bernard Shaw that premiered in 1906. The play is about the moral dilemmas created by limited medical resources and the conflicts between the demands of private medicine as a business and a vocation. The eponymous dilemma of the play is that of the newly honoured doctor Sir Colenso Ridgeon, who has developed a revolutionary new cure for tuberculosis. However, his private medical practice, with limited staff and resources, can only treat ten patients at a time. The play also mentions new developments in the germ theory of disease, namely opsonins, and included socialist and anti-vivisectionist viewpoints. The theme of the play remains current: in any time, there will be treatments that are so scarce or costly that some people can have them while others cannot. The play has been produced on Broadway and in London's West End, and a film adaptation was made in 1958. The most recent high-profile revival was on the Lyttelton stage at the National Theatre in London in 2012.