Dilemmas and Delusions Bernard Shaw and Health

Abstract

His marvelous accomplishment, in solid contribution to thought and light stimulation to gayety, is so immense in volume as to have one explanation: perfect health.—Archibald Henderson, Bernard Shaw: Playboy and ProphetHis essential healthy-mindedness and peculiar buoyancy never allowed him to sink into [the fin de siècle writers'] bogs of glorified decay, [and] the very mention of his name seems to clear the poisoned air a little.—Maurice Colbourne, The Real Bernard Shaw Beguiling a Victorian public obsessed with the pursuit of fitness, the International Health Exhibition opened in South Kensington in May 1884. Its expressed intent, to educate the public on a broad range of wellness topics, was greatly overshadowed by its dazzling display of proprietary medical commodities, salutary appliances, and faddish cures. While there were legitimate exhibits that dealt sincerely with issues of sanitation, hygiene, food, drink, and even child care, the event illuminated the extent to which personal and systemic therapeutic remedy and indeed health itself had become a lucrative industry. Less than three weeks before he joined the Fabian Society, the fledgling novelist Bernard Shaw visited one of the exhibition's prominent attractions, Francis Galton's Anthropometric Laboratory, to be quantified and measured. Chart 3655, created on 16 August 1884, contains the following collected data: THE MAN. Colour of eyes, blue-grey.Eyesight.. Greatest distance in inches of reading “Diamond” type—Right eye, 23; left eye, 27.Colour sense (goodness of)—Good.Judgment of Eye.. Error per cent. In dividing a line of 15 inches—in three parts, 1 1/2; in two parts, 1/2.Error in degrees of estimating squareness—1/4.Hearing.. Keenness can hardly be tested here owing to the noises and echoes.Highest audible note—Between 30,000 and 40,000 vibrations per second.Breathing Power.. Greatest expiration in cubic inches—298.Strength.. Of squeeze in lbs. of—right hand, 83; left hand, 80.Of pull in lbs.—57.Span of Arms.. From finger tips of opposite hands—5 feet 11.7 inches.Height.. Sitting, measured from seat of chair—3 feet 1.8 inches.Standing in shoes…………………………………6 feet 0.8 inchLess height of heel………………………………… 0.7 inch____________Height without shoes...................................6 feet 0.1 inch.Weight.. In ordinary indoor clothing in lbs.—142.1 Fittingly, Shaw's exposition occurs under the auspices of an exhibition as simultaneously invested in health and product marketing as he would soon become.What to me is most striking about the Galen lab report is that it captures an unusually quiescent image of Shaw, a stasis that is discordant with our sense of him as a vivacious, frenetic blur during those first decades in London, what Archibald Henderson deems “the quintessence of vital energy.”2 Throughout most of his life, Shaw was an active walker, cyclist, and swimmer, not to mention a compulsive reader, writer, and speaker whose engagement with the world around him was marked by a robust, ferocious vigor. Shaw's use of language is itself acrobatic, his agile balancing of ideas, his graceful rhetorical athleticism across genres. In this sense, it is precisely his sanus agitatus that draws and sustains our interest, the rigor of his writing challenging us to keep up, work out, and stay in shape. In 1897, the Vegetarian noted of Shaw that “in the pursuit of his duties he has to work frequently under most unhealthy conditions and to face all weathers yet any observant stranger would turn and take a second look at Shaw's virile figure in the street.”3 Indeed, more than a century later, we are still eagerly looking and, in some cases, still trying to catch up. Arguably, health was the fundamental preoccupation of Shaw's work, Shavianism's probiotic elixir the unifying thread of a prolific and expansive career.The subject of health winds its way through every part of Shaw's early London years, from committing to vegetarianism and contracting smallpox in 1881 to an exhaustive breakdown in 1898 resulting in a marriage to his ostensible nurse. Salient controversies of health, particularly during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, served Shaw well in providing foundational linchpins for his GBS persona and for buttressing claims of Shavian exceptionalism. During those years of activism on behalf of public health reform, he writes and speaks compellingly and prolifically against a scientific system predicated on germ theory, an economic system that mandated poverty, malnourishment, and squalor for a large swath of the population, and a medical service driven by potion pushers, outright frauds, and needless, invasive procedures (in particular vivisection and inoculation) performed by “flesh plumbers and carpenters.”4 These perspectives anchor countless speeches, newspaper op-eds, and magazine pieces but also infuse his work for the theater, including many of his early plays but most directly The Doctor's Dilemma (1906). In blending artistic language with the discourse of health, Shaw is merely responding to his theatrical environment. In chronicling the furor around the English production of Ibsen's Ghosts in 1891, T. Carlo Matos notes that “the theater world of 1890s London is a powerful example of how contagion and epidemiology can work in an aesthetic context, not merely as content but as a means of responding to and mediating art and its role in shaping public attitudes towards a variety of socio-cultural phenomenon.”5 Even in his criticism, especially during his tenure at the Saturday Review, Shaw often used his attitudes on health and his wellness practices as rhetorical frames that enabled him to diagnose what he viewed as a moribund theater.In an 1896 review, for instance, he explicitly parallels doctors and actors in their professional practice, beginning by characterizing the former in his usual terms: “The average doctor is a walking compound of natural ignorance and acquired witchcraft, who kills your favorite child, wrecks your wife's health, and orders you into habits of nervous dram-drinking before you have the courage to send him about his business.”6 After similarly chastising attorneys, boot makers, and tailors, Shaw asserts that, while we “imagine that these people have professions,” we discover that “what they have is only, in the correct old word, their ‘mystery’—a humbug, like all mysteries. And yet, how we help to keep up the humbug! … Men believe in the professions as they believe in ghosts, because they want to believe in them” (423–24, 425). For Shaw, human beings had redirected their desire for faith in idols and priests toward doctors and marketing men. The commercial theater had also fed upon this need, and even the critic himself is susceptible to their hypnotic prowess. Calling himself the “most ridiculous of all dupes,” Shaw confesses in the review his mistaking of the actor as a skilled craftsman, a “civilizing agent [and] spiritual doctor,” when in fact “it is all a delusion: there is no profession, no art, no skill about the business at all” (425). Just as those who are exploited by the medical industry, Shaw's “desire and hope got the better of [his] observation[, his] imagination of [his] experience” (428). The fraud perpetuated by doctors is akin to the “mystery” of theater; if doctors are ghosts, actors and managers are similar spirits who have offended. For Shaw, then, the critic's job is to “sift the gold of fact and efficiency out of the huge rubbish-heap of professionalism” (425).Gastronomical practice and his dramaturgical philosophy charmingly intertwine in his 1897 review of John T. Day's explicitly antivegetarian play The Fanatic. In it, Shaw expresses his bemusement with “a dramatist who makes the whole interest of his play depend on a passionate faith in the nutritiousness of a cutlet and a glass of wine.”7 Its plot concerns a young woman newly married to a rabid vegetarian and teetotaler who immediately proceeds to feed her such enormous quantities of meatless fare that only, as Shaw writes, “if she were an elephant working out a sentence of hard labor [would] she … possibly be able to get exercise enough to keep pace” (352–53). (The playwright himself had outlined the perils of such overeating in an 1886 Pall Mall Gazette op-ed titled “Failures of Inept Vegetarians.”) When she sickens, a doctor is called in who earnestly if predictably prescribes cutlets and wine. Clear in its answer to, in Shaw's words, the “question … of cucumbers versus corpses” (354), The Fanatic culminates in the doctor's impulsive elopement proposition to his patient and the husband's mysterious yet gracious gesture of dropping dead.Representing in his review the struggle between the husband and the doctor as a “wrangle between … witches as to the merits of their rival incantations,” Shaw asserts that Day's fatal misstep is to misunderstand the collision between “lay ignorance” and “academic error and prejudice” and to “take sides” (354–55). Shaw's appreciation of staging the conflict between one individual “right in theory and wrong in practice” and another “wrong in theory and right in practice” (354) anticipates verbal skirmishes he would soon create in Major Barbara and The Doctor's Dilemma. While he praises the grotesque caricature of the doctor (perhaps unintentional on Day's part), Shaw faults the play's ultimate reliance on “an unsound theory of alimentation” and its concurrent “unhappy relapse” into sentimentality in its conclusion (352). Shaw frequently linked diet and excessive romantic imagination. In an 1898 interview with Vegetarian, he attributes the outbreak of “fire-eating fiction and Jingo war worship, bloody-minded novels [and] cheered music-hall tableaux” to “the spread of meat-eating,” explicitly gesturing to one of its tragic products, the strife on the Sudan that would eventually catalyze the Boer War.8 If for Shaw vegetarianism is essential to counter narcotic sentimentality in general, it is equally imperative in the struggle for a vital theater, similarly sodden with melodramatic convention. When asked in that interview how “vegetarianism and dramatic criticism blend,” Shaw responded, “meat-fed criticism is the best for the managers. The vegetarian article is best for the public.”9During periods when Shaw was debilitated by illness, injury, and outright prostration, GBS reconceives convalescence and medical procedures as occasions of revelation and rejuvenation. In another Saturday Review piece, written in May 1898, the playwright describes being subject to a practice he execrated, vivisection to remedy his infected foot, but, through it, he finally achieves an “[understanding of] the British drama and the British actor.”10 The sedative so splits his character that, when he awakens, only his “sentimental side” initially returns, without his “morality,” “common sense,” or “incorrigible Protestant respectability”: “For the first time in my life, I tasted the bliss of having no morals to restrain me from lying, and no sense of reality to restrain me from romancing…. I acted and lied in the most touchingly sympathetic fashion…. Artistically, I was an immense success: morally, I simply had no existence.”11 Shaw describes a zombie state, bereft of “the chill of a moral or intellectual impulse,” in which his “consciousness [became] absolutely fictitious,”12 and equates it to the anesthetic rather than aesthetic effect of actors, managers, and playwrights in British theater. Inveighing against theatrical bathos as a dangerous blend of vapid conformity and blinding romanticism, it is, for Shaw, the responsibility of the critic to rouse patients etherized on a table and endeavor to cultivate a dialectic theater poised for social reform.Nonetheless, the cost of what increasingly felt like a quixotic struggle for a critic was In a 1897 review titled Shaw his job as that a theater have my that he has … from to a and to have a of some under especially as as those of the as remedy the of the theater, he the a dangerous and it on a at in the part of the When the doctor for the upon up the resulting of [his] Shaw that him who has by actors for three years, the of a as In his review, GBS is to an to the doctor and health system predicated on the with the by an an of and also is that his his to his job as a I if I a play without for the of that with the without only by the and of some and the with its my with an in the of an who had his business and how to When the to for the when he the through his Shaw that his seat in the theater is also but salutary to me to towards the who my my and my as I towards the who my my and my when I was no more to him than an stranger with an eye, is to and he it was a I was not any have of that Shaw from this with it for he to of In his for the Saturday Review titled Shaw that, rather than up to as their and theater managers still him as “the of a of on their and their is clear that it his convalescence to an infected that him to this it is his a of habits is to him that he is to When a vegetarian is very him that he is to and that they him and that it him a I to on my life, and on the of three on to that he has to his a Shaw the that he his of in to he the business of dramatic In he would the effect of his years at the Saturday Review that how the of a London had his become and on his The he from writing and and the a through which GBS his and artistic of Shaw's perspectives on health in his from to and The to and to and In with an toward and fitness, he of and His of and and practices of and a Victorian of to as “a of and in which the and under the of vital or the of the moral or Its a sense of and and, the production of For many at the in the as a for intellectual and moral while were more in and as upon the In any as the of or health and was in Victorian … the of personal health a way of the between the as a whole … and the of moral and which the If with their of and Shaw the that the the intellectual as the unifying and in in his words, “it is the that makes the and not the the of and as well as a of “the a to about Shaw an as the he about his a the in the to and he draws a between two of The what he “the of from “the being used for a by as a the being out before you are on the the being a of The second is by a of and “a of and that the world not itself to you and have of of and as well as by GBS himself the of the young following his of prolific writing and the Shaw's are with his as well as in and and attributes “a of at the human and its to the while his interest in health, its in an of His to and she was as upon as moral by a from and … Shaw's was an against and to him the of In any the on its way to Shaw, and of personal and public wellness an the of his the decades many of Shaw's having to a large in the look increasingly and as in as he the Shaw's display of him in a from which he against the medical If his of germ theory and his have as as his on and have for instance, is a and Shaw a in the of the practice as well as on and to the medical system in the to Doctor's Dilemma as a he enough to the of the Health in still for a its of and In the century, health in the and the of medical on and and including many of Shaw's and as to our time as they to of health these in and are increasingly toward the of Indeed, as well as and to have up around the to and from the that the to a of social economic and health, in the the and industry. in to the to the the or the the against and that in the is the natural of not its While he is at of about the of his Shaw thought in these and to those very From Major Barbara to Shaw his to a of health in which and to the in this of Shaw's wellness practices and his engagement with health medical theory and practice, and in all of its the of his have by and of GBS In to of Shaw's and of that work on the was for this of in broad and its as an has enabled us to that a variety of and on The of and the the of Shaw's and all the in of and and to which his work speaks in the of and the of his plays on Shaw is in with Bernard a that Shaw's on a range of topics, from to air to the to which Shaw is a part of thought and activism at the time and how he is a that him of the Shaw as an of and a of about the of his and writing and its with public and In that sense, the a line of and to that of individual plays and of the in which Shaw's with his and following this is a from The the to the and three for the magazine in the early of of the 1 a of of their a caricature created from even The in the hard light of are John and The from and is titled Bernard Shaw, The of a working in and a GBS me as a very to two issues of and in very In “The and in The Doctor's Shaw's toward the figure of the she the play in of the of the even as it as a of and “The on the Shaw's and the the of the of Shaw by a to a public and while at the time and and as on the her to what is at the plays they and the of reading through those to an a the of Shaw these two had a first child during the of this The not believe in in “The Shaw's on Shaw's with the at Shaw's the in the of with his on public health and the of how and to While can be between the playwright and the of Shaw in with a in which … have the to as a about how we to and our in out to the more expansive of health and the of and spiritual also a doctor to be an Shaw in and for his on medical were to the to [his] to it is such a in a with and in to an of the of the the of against the of and on so him to the through the that Shaw's is about and two that their on Shaw's piece, “The the of Shaw's with his The on the of was a powerful in Shaw's about the of the and in his for and and the of two medical Shaw was by what describes as the and of the and his of the human the between health and hope as his also Shaw's moral and philosophy in Shaw and of and in the of to how Shaw's as his in a world out of around the turn of the century, the of the to the sense of a in In that rather the with a to us from the some the The us with into the of Major of my favorite from whose in the with Shaw one in a collision that his but left the to take the that every Shaw with his on the his in the and While the that Shaw the whole as of the of for the is of as we and at in and of of health, and we discover that Shaw is us with how Shavian thought can