The Physician

The Physician is a play in four acts by Henry Arthur Jones, first performed at the Criterion Theatre, London, in March 1897. The play belongs to Jones’s middle period and is one of his more serious dramatic works, taking up the kind of moral and social subject matter that the New Drama movement of the 1890s was bringing into the English commercial theatre.

The central character is Doctor Lewin Carey, a successful London physician whose professional life is built on his reputation for medical skill and his social standing among the wealthy patients who can afford his services. Carey becomes involved in a complicated romantic and moral situation involving a young woman named Edana whose husband is dying of alcoholism and whose own future hangs on various decisions that Carey will be required to make in his professional capacity. The play works through the conflict between Carey’s professional duties, his personal feelings, and the various social pressures that surround the situation.

Jones was working in the mode of serious social drama that the better English playwrights of the 1890s were developing under the influence of Ibsen and the continental theatrical experiments of the period. The Physician takes seriously the moral and professional questions it raises about the responsibilities of doctors, the limits of medical confidentiality, and the conflict between professional duty and personal involvement. The treatment is more substantial than the conventional medical melodrama of the period had been and reflects the growing sophistication of late Victorian theatrical writing on serious subjects.

The play was successful in its original production and was performed in various subsequent productions during the decade after its premiere. It belongs to the substantial body of late Victorian English social drama that took up contemporary professional and moral questions and treated them at greater length and depth than the conventions of earlier Victorian theatre had permitted.

The play runs about a hundred pages in standard published form. Jones produced more than sixty plays across his career and several of them dealt with similar themes of professional responsibility and moral conflict in contemporary English society. For readers interested in late Victorian and Edwardian English drama on serious social and ethical subjects, this is one of the more substantial examples. It pairs naturally with Jones’s other major plays.