George Bernard Shaw a penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication

parture in scientific doctrine which is associated with the
name of the great naturalist Charles Darwin began, it was
not only a reaction against a barbarous pseudo-evangelical
teleology intolerably obstructive to all scientific progress, but
was accompanied, as it happened, by discoveries of extraor-
dinary interest in physics, chemistry, and that lifeless method
of evolution which its investigators called Natural Selection.
Howbeit, there was only one result possible in the ethical
sphere, and that was the banishment of conscience from
human affairs, or, as Samuel Butler vehemently put it, “of
mind from the universe.”
Hypochondria
Now Heartbreak House, with Butler and Bergson and Scott
Haldane alongside Blake and the other major poets on its
shelves (to say nothing of Wagner and the tone poets), was
not so completely blinded by the doltish materialism of the
laboratories as the uncultured world outside. But being an
idle house it was a hypochondriacal house, always running
after cures. It would stop eating meat, not on valid Shelleyan
grounds, but in order to get rid of a bogey called Uric Acid;
and it would actually let you pull all its teeth out to exorcise
another demon named Pyorrhea. It was superstitious, and
addicted to table-rapping, materialization seances, clairvoy-
ance, palmistry, crystal-gazing and the like to such an extent
that it may be doubted whether ever before in the history of
the world did soothsayers, astrologers, and unregistered thera-

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Heartbreak House
peutic specialists of all sorts flourish as they did during this
half century of the drift to the abyss. The registered doctors
and surgeons were hard put to it to compete with the unreg-
istered. They were not clever enough to appeal to the imagi-
nation and sociability of the Heartbreakers by the arts of the
actor, the orator, the poet, the winning conversationalist. They
had to fall back coarsely on the terror of infection and death.
They prescribed inoculations and operations. Whatever part
of a human being could be cut out without necessarily kill-
ing him they cut out; and he often died (unnecessarily of
course) in consequence. From such trifles as uvulas and ton-
sils they went on to ovaries and appendices until at last no
one’s inside was safe. They explained that the human intes-
tine was too long, and that nothing could make a child of
Adam healthy except short circuiting the pylorus by cutting
a length out of the lower intestine and fastening it directly to
the stomach. As their mechanist theory taught them that
medicine was the business of the chemist’s laboratory, and
surgery of the carpenter’s shop, and also that Science (by
which they meant their practices) was so important that no
consideration for the interests of any individual creature,
whether frog or philosopher, much less the vulgar
commonplaces of sentimental ethics, could weigh for a mo-
ment against the remotest off-chance of an addition to the
body of scientific knowledge, they operated and vivisected
and inoculated and lied on a stupendous scale, clamoring
for and actually acquiring such legal powers over the bodies
of their fellow-citizens as neither king, pope, nor parliament
dare ever have claimed. The Inquisition itself was a Liberal
institution compared to the General Medical Council.