# The Doctor’s Dilemma — Character guide

> Key figures in The Doctor’s Dilemma by George Bernard Shaw.

- [Louis Dubedat](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_doctor_s_dilemma_se/characters/louis_dubedat.md): Louis Dubedat is the brilliant young artist at the center of the play's medical dilemma: consumptive, magnetic, and utterly without conscience about money, marriage, or truth. He borrows from every doctor he meets while 
- [Sir Colenso Ridgeon](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_doctor_s_dilemma_se/characters/sir_colenso_ridgeon.md): Ridgeon has just been honored for a tuberculosis treatment that works, but his supply of the cure is cruelly limited, and the choice of whom to save falls to him. He is scientific, skeptical, and quietly vain, dismissing
- [Sir Patrick Cullen](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_doctor_s_dilemma_se/characters/sir_patrick_cullen.md): Sir Patrick Cullen is the senior doctor in the play, a veteran of decades of practice who regards his colleagues' theories with amused contempt. He insists that only two things are ever wrong with a man: a cheque or a wo
- [Jennifer Dubedat](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_doctor_s_dilemma_se/characters/jennifer_dubedat.md): Jennifer Dubedat arrives at Ridgeon's practice determined to save her dying husband, armed with his paintings and an unshakable faith in his worth. She is no naive innocent: she tells Ridgeon plainly that to him living t
- [Cutler Walpole](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_doctor_s_dilemma_se/characters/cutler_walpole.md): Cutler Walpole is a prosperous, self-assured surgeon whose pet theory is that a nuciform sac causes most disease and should be surgically removed. He lends Dubedat twenty pounds on the strength of the artist's charming t
- [Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_doctor_s_dilemma_se/characters/sir_ralph_bloomfield_bonington.md): Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington is the most charming and least competent of the doctors, a man whose eloquence and warmth win patients even as his treatments do nothing. He lends Dubedat ten pounds after the artist confid
- [Dr. Blenkinsop](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_doctor_s_dilemma_se/characters/dr_blenkinsop.md): Blenkinsop belongs to the unglamorous end of medicine, the private practice he once kept and now denounces as licensed murder. His own tuberculosis makes him a rival for Ridgeon's limited cure, and his recent luck — a Me
- [Redpenny](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_doctor_s_dilemma_se/characters/redpenny.md): Redpenny is the consulting-room's factotum — half laboratory assistant, half secretary — trading his labor for the informal education of proximity to a leader of the profession. His credulous, hasty friendliness and his 
- [Emmy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_doctor_s_dilemma_se/characters/emmy.md): Emmy knows the doctors' quarter between Cavendish Square and Marylebone Road better than any of its physicians, and she guards Ridgeon's threshold with the authority of an old family nurse. She thinks his great discoveri
- [Schutzmacher](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_doctor_s_dilemma_se/characters/schutzmacher.md): A German-Jewish doctor who represents the commercial side of medical practice.
- [Minnie Tinwell](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_doctor_s_dilemma_se/characters/minnie_tinwell.md): A young maid in the Dubedat household who is fond of Louis.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_doctor_s_dilemma_se/characters