Those were the days

T S Eliot was not the most accessible of writers, to put it mildly, but he wanted to show that he could write plays that would please the general public. Reading the products of his attempted demonstration rather puts me in mind of the duke who, reproached for never having ridden on a bus and for therefore being out of touch with the common people, promptly jumped on a bus to prove the accusation false and said to the driver, “Grosvenor Square, and quick!”

Oddly enough, however, Eliot’s plays were a success (the script of The Cocktail Party even became a bestseller in America), which suggests that the tastes of the public may have changed in the intervening years; I will not say in which direction.

Doctors have big parts in The Family Reunion (1939) and The Cocktail Party (1949). Indeed, some of the action in the later play takes part in Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly’s rooms in Harley Street. Sir Henry is a slightly sinister deus ex machina of uncertain medical specialty who seems to know all about the other characters without having to have made inquiries. Dr Warburton, in The Family Reunion, is an old fashioned family doctor whose authority has little to do with his medical efficacy (indeed, is inversely proportional to it) and who is able to order a formidable dowager duchess around like a servant. His threat to decline to treat her further is enough to bring her into line. Those were the days when doctors were doctors and patients were patients.

Dr Warburton is a little like one of those disillusioned doctors in Chekhov, worn out by the existential inevitability of death: “I used to dream of making some great discovery/To do away with one disease or another./Now I’ve had forty years of experience/I’ve left off thinking in terms of the laboratory./

“We’re all of us ill in one way or another:/We call it health when we find no symptom/Of illness. Health is a relative term.”

One of the speeches by Agatha, a maiden aunt, started a strange chain of associations for me. She says: “In a world of fugitives/The person taking the opposite direction/Will appear to run away.”

Now in my copy of The Family Reunion I happened to find an inscription offering the book as a Christmas gift to a well known physician who was not universally loved and who was irreverently known to his juniors by the description of the stools of some of his patients with coeliac disease, namely Pale, Bulky, and Offensive. But the signatory of the note was another physician who, in March 1938, was a co-signatory of the famous letter in the BMJ calling attention to the plight of Jewish and other doctors after the Anschluss. The letter ended with some noble words:

“We beg our colleagues in all countries to watch the progress of events with the closest attention and to do all in their power, whether by public protest or by public or private assistance, to stand by any members of our profession who may suffer hardship under the new regime.”

Dr Warburton is an old fashioned family doctor who is able to order a formidable dowager duchess around like a servant