Shaw on Disease

George Bernard Shaw, now 89, has always had an excellent constitution, moderate habits, and a dislike of doctors. In his preface to The Doctor's Dilemma (1911), he charged the profession with "an infamous character." Last week he was still at it. In four articles distributed by International News Special Service, Shaw attacked a new history of medicine by Edinburgh's Dr. Douglas Guthrie: "I am floored by the extraordinary discrepancy between his history and my experience."

P:Dr. Guthrie's statement that surgery has become painless "shocks one as a thundering lie ... but of course means only that the patient does not feel the touch of the surgeon's knife. . . ." (The pain comes after operations.)

P:Guthrie repeats the convention that Lister is the father of antiseptic surgery. Shaw says--accurately--that other surgeons practiced cleanliness before Lister.

P:"Another impression left by his history is that smallpox was abolished by vaccination." Shaw claims that smallpox, like plague and cholera, was conquered by sanitation, in spite of vaccination, which he says--actually kept smallpox going until quarantine stopped it in the '80s.

Thunders Shaw: "Not a word of all this from Dr. Guthrie. ... Not a hint that ... microbes are products of the zymotic diseases; that these diseases are products of ugliness, dirt and stink offending every esthetic instinct and thus depressing the life force ... [and that] zymotic disease can be abolished by abolishing poverty."

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