ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the representations of medical practitioners in fiction, encompassing classic and contemporary literature. It discusses the stories of The Flying Doctor and The Doctor in Spite of Himself by Moliere, Pygmalion and Three Other Plays by George Bernard Shaw and The Good Soldier Svejk by Hasek Jaroslav. The chapter begins with the French playwright and actor Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Moliere, the creator of modern French comedy and one of the great masters of this art in Western literature. In an early one-act comedy, Le Medecin Volant, Lucille, the daughter of the respectable citizen Gorgibus, fakes illness to escape a marriage arranged by her father. For Moliere himself the doctors of that epoch could do nothing as he lay dying from a lung hemorrhage caused by pulmonary tuberculosis. In 1933 George Bernard Shaw came to America for the first time, and in 1938 he received an Academy Award (Oscar) for the screen play Pygmalion.
