ABSTRACT
In 1922 a realistic interpretation of Henri de Rothschild’s play The Risk (Le Caducée) at the Strand theater in London received eleven curtain calls at the end of the third and final act. True, the actors were remarkable – Arthur Bouchier and his wife, Kyre Bellew, and the bilingual Carmen Nesville, but so was the subject: medical malpractice. In London, as in Paris, the play stirred up a fuss that must have been welcome to the theater. Though the play’s medical villain was French and his victim was a frivolous American bourgeoise, Londoners were inspired to write letters to the press about the play’s dreadful subject, which was obviously not entirely irrelevant to London medicine. Henri had written the play in 1910 for the Odéon national theater, where André Antoine was then director, and published it in 1912. A much revised version was staged in Paris at the Renaissance theater on 5 February 1921 and then revived in June at the Gymnase for a successful run. A final much revised version of the play was published in 1928. Between 1910 and the 1920s the situations of physicians and women (including women doctors) had changed so much that a play written before World War I would have seemed hopelessly “old hat” on the post-war Paris stage. Henri noted that certain personalities had a different mentality: some of the femmes du monde, for example, had been nurses in the war, which had produced new behavior and language in the medical milieu; the women’s experience would have given them a perspective on life that they could not conceivably have had before. Yet the subject of the play was even more relevant than before the war, and medical ethics was certainly generally thought to have acquired a new importance.2
