ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the representations of medical practitioners in fiction, encompassing classic and contemporary literature. Henrik Ibsen completed An Enemy of the People in Italy in 1882 when he was 54 years old, after he wrote Pillars of Society, Ghosts and A Doll House but before The Wild Duck, The Lady from the Sea and Hedda Gabler. Thomas Stockman is a medical officer in the seaside resort town of Baths in southern Norway. As the play opens Dr. Stockman receives a letter from the university to which he had mailed a sample of the city's water. The role of Dr. Thomas Stockman in An Enemy of the People, a favorite of the influential Russian director Stanislavsky, was coveted by the greatest actors. The play has to be understood in the context of Ibsen's own ideological outlook. Ibsen was asserting that liberals are the worst enemies of freedom and that spiritual and intellectual freedom flourish best under absolutism.
