Sir Colenso Ridgeon, newly knighted for discovering a cure for tuberculosis, can take on only one more patient — and two men need the place. One is Dr. Blenkinsop, a shabby, decent slum doctor whose life has done quiet good and harmed no one. The other is Louis Dubedat, a young painter of unmistakable genius who is also a liar, a sponger, and a bigamist. Complicating everything, Ridgeon is half in love with Jennifer Dubedat, the artist's radiant and devoted wife, who has come to beg him to save her husband's life.

Around this dilemma Shaw assembles one of the great comic ensembles of the English stage: the only honest doctor among them, old Sir Patrick Cullen; Cutler Walpole, who cures every illness by removing an organ that does not exist; and the magnificently complacent Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington, whose confident incompetence is lethal precisely because it is sincere. The doctors diagnose by fashion, quarrel like shopkeepers over a case, and close ranks so that none need ever admit that another has killed a patient.

First performed in 1906 and published with Shaw's celebrated, hundred-page "Preface on Doctors," The Doctor's Dilemma is a comedy of ideas dressed as tragedy — a death scene punctuated by absurdity, and a string of questions Shaw refuses to answer for us. Who shall live when the cure is scarce, and can the man who holds it ever judge fairly? Does genius excuse the scoundrel? And what becomes of medicine when a public service is handed to private interest, to men paid by the operation and flattered into a vanity that kills?

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the play in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor's biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection at the back.