George Bernard Shaw's interest in the medical profession is apparent not only in his theatre, but also in his extensive writings and speeches about medical ethics, social conditions and scientific theories. Though friends with a number of doctors, Shaw was skeptical of the medical profession and advocated social change as the best cure for disease, rather than the mere provision of medicine or operations as treatments of disease. The practice of his preaching was certainly effective: Shaw died at ninety-four from complications connected with a fall while pruning a tree in his orchard.

Please do not classify me as one who "doesn't believe in doctors." One of our most pressing social needs is a national staff of doctors whom we believe in, and whose prosperity shall depend not on the nation's sickness but on its health.

-- G.B. Shaw, Doctors' Delusions

If you take the great mass of patients that doctors have at the present time, what they want is not really medicine or operations, but money. They want better food and better clothes, and more frequent changes of them. They want well-ventilated and well-drained houses. But what is the use of prescribing these things to unfortunate people who can hardly keep body and soul together?

-- G.B. Shaw, "Socialism and Medicine," Platform and Pulpit

These diseases are products of ugliness, dirt and stink offending every aesthetic instinct ... . Dirt and squalor and ugliness are products of poverty.

-- G.B. Shaw, from Michael Holroyd's Bernard Shaw

The truth is, people like inoculation. Doctors love it, naturally enough, because it has solved the great economic problem of how to extract fees from people who have nothing the matter with them. And people believe the doctors. Besides, it is so much easier to believe in inoculation. It is so comfortable, so dirty, so thoroughly unscientific, so magical and romantic, and so satisfactory a means of disciplining the troublesome and detestable people who insist on poking their noses into refuse heaps and insisting on more inspectors and more sanitation: above all, who brutally tell people that there are no cheap short cuts to health and long life. How delightful it is to seize these people by bodily force and say, "Now if you want to prove that it is no good, you must die; for if you survive we shall say that you would have died if we hadn't inoculated you." With such inducements as these, who can doubt that inoculation is bound to win?

-- G.B. Shaw, Doctors' Delusions

It is the mind that makes the body and not the body the mind.

-- G.B. Shaw, Doctors' Delusions

Shaw contracted smallpox in the Spring of 1883 and "makes little reference to his illness except to say that he emerged from it a convinced anti-vaccinationist... . In 1853 Parliament had made compulsory the [smallpox] vaccination of every child in Britain within three months of birth. [Shaw] had been vaccinated in infancy and the vaccination had taken well... . 'You have been vaccinated in infancy,' a friend wrote, 'so ought if the doctors are to be believed, to have nothing to fear.' ... It was less his helplessness as a smallpox patient that Shaw hated than the unpleasantness of the disease itself into which, he felt, he had been medically tricked."

-- Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw

I, an artist-philosopher, mistrust laboratory methods because what happens in a laboratory is contrived and dictated. The evidence is manufactured. ... If the evidence is unexpected or unaccountable it is remanufactured until it proves what the laboratory controller wants to prove.

-- G.B. Shaw, Everybody's Political What's What?

Jennifer Roberts is a second-year dramaturgy student at the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.