ABSTRACT
Robert Icke’s award-winning play The Doctor (2019) is ‘very freely adapted’ from the comedy Professor Bernhardi (1912), in its day one of the most controversial works of Austrian doctor-writer Arthur Schnitzler. Judith Beniston reads the two plays in parallel: the scandal that is unleashed when a Jewish doctor refuses a Catholic priest access to a dying patient serves for both writers as the starting point for a critical interrogation of medicine’s enduring entanglement with broader political, institutional and social structures. While Schnitzler focuses prophetically on the pernicious effects of antisemitism, Icke dissects twenty-first-century identity politics. In both Professor Bernhardi and The Doctor, professional infighting and public outrage jeopardise cutting-edge research and destabilise the title figure’s understanding of what it means to be a doctor. Schnitzler’s diagnosis of rottenness in the state of Austria inspires Icke’s inspection of Britain’s national health – through the lens of its National Health Service.
