Physician, Heal Thyself: Title and subTitle BreakArthur Miller, Henrik Ibsen, and the Enemies of the People

Like millions of others, I was introduced to Arthur Miller's work by one of my high school teachers. Enthralled by the raw realism of Death of a Salesman, I soon found myself running to the local library to plow through the rest of his literary oeuvre. A few years later, as an English literature major at the University of Michigan, I brazenly introduced myself to Arthur Miller, the man. A Michigan graduate (class of 1938), Miller was a frequent visitor to Ann Arbor and was in town this particular afternoon in the spring of 1981 to deliver a major address.

After his lecture, in which he railed against the foes who controlled Broadway, I scurried up to the podium and offered one of his volumes for signature. Before uncapping his fountain pen, he asked the obligatory question adults pose to all college students: “What are you going to be when you grow up?” I replied that I hoped to enter medical school the next fall. This confession set Miller to reminiscing about the articles he wrote for the school newspaper, The Michigan Daily, about a now-forgotten internal medicine professor who locked human research participants into steam boxes and measured various metabolic components of their breath, sweat, urine, and feces.

As he inscribed my book, Miller inquired if I had ever read Ibsen's An Enemy of the People.¹ I admitted I had not. He gruffly rejoined in his thick Brooklyn accent, “Don't start studying medicine until you do. You will need it.” This turned out to be remarkably astute advice, although neither of us recognized it at the time. Since 1989, I have read and taught Ibsen's medical masterpiece dozens of times to hundreds of students.

The Norwegian poet and playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), of course, is widely regarded as the father of modern drama.^{2 - 3} Perhaps the best 1-line description of this revolutionary artist was offered by the Baltimore journalist H. L. Mencken: “[he was] the best [dramatist] to ever live” . . . a man who was “hymned and danced as anything and everything else: a symbolist, seer, prophet, necromancer, maker of riddles, rabble-rouse, cheap shocker, pornographer, spinner of gossamer nothings.”⁴

One of Ibsen's most controversial works is Ghosts. Published in 1881, the play is centered on a rotting marriage plagued by philandering and syphilis; the latter is tragically passed onto the son, Oswald. Across the continent, bourgeois Europeans sniffed their patrician noses at Ibsen's outrageously bad taste. A smaller group of intellectuals, however, glowed with excitement when either reading translations or seeing productions of Ibsen's thought-provoking play.

Angered by critics calling him a dangerous radical ideologue, Ibsen looked forward to confronting his critics with another scathing commentary on Victorian morality, hypocrisy, and ignorance. He wrote An Enemy of the People in 1882, the year microbiologist Robert Koch discovered that the tubercle bacillus (Mycobacterium tuberculosis) causes tuberculosis. Koch's findings were widely reported in newspapers and magazines across the globe, and Ibsen certainly read about these exploits. There also exists some evidence that Ibsen took the plot from a news article about a Hungarian scientist who discovered that his town's water supply was tainted and who was pilloried for announcing that inconvenient truth.^{5 (p9)}

Regardless of the precise inspiration, An Enemy of the People is about courage, adhering to one's intellectual principles, and the importance of free thought. The play enacts events in the life of a physician named Thomas Stockmann who is hired to run a health spa by his brother Peter, the town's mayor. Unfortunately, the physician determines that pathogenic bacteria, originating from a tannery upstream owned by his wealthy father-in-law, contaminate the spa's waters. Stockmann relays this critical information to the mayor, but the latter refuses to believe the scientific evidence and urges the physician to delay making any sudden announcements lest it cost the town a fortune.

A simultaneously naive and arrogant Stockmann insists that it his duty to close the spa to protect the public's health. As a result, he demands a town meeting at which he expects to win the support and undying gratitude of the townspeople and the press—that is, until the men who run the town and its finances, including his brother, circumvent both his support and the veracity of the bacteriological report.

Railing against his political enemies and the mob of townspeople who take their side, Stockmann warns:

The majority is never right. Never I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population—the intelligent ones or the fools. I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in the world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority. But I’ll be damned if that means it's right that the fools should dominate the intelligent.^{1 (p77)}

Predictably, the townspeople attending the meeting object to being called fools, ridicule the report, and blame the messenger. Consequently, Stockmann, rather than the offending microorganisms, is declared an enemy of the people, his reputation is ruined, and no clear solution to cleaning up the polluted baths is in sight. Yet in a hopeful vein, Stockmann declares a Pyrrhic victory at the final curtain. Telling his wife and children that truth will ultimately prevail, he reminds them that “the strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone.”^{1 (p106)}

Arthur Miller was being modest by not urging me that long-ago afternoon to consult his own “adaptation” of the play. Displeased with the stilted English translations then in print, in 1950 Miller worked from a “pidgin-English, word for word rendering of the Norwegian” that allowed him to “gather the meaning of each speech and scene without the obstruction of any kind of English construction.”^{5 (p11)} Miller's goal was to remind post–World War II theatergoers in the United States of what he believed was the play's central theme: “it is the question of whether the democratic guarantees protecting political minorities ought to be set aside in time of crisis. More personally, it is the question of whether one's vision of the truth ought to be a source of guilt at a time when the mass of men condemn it as a dangerous and devilish lie.”^{5 (p8)}

A sorry series of political events were likely the impetus for Miller's attraction to this text and the dramatic identification of enemies at this point in his life. As he wrote in his memoir Timebends, “At the same time that I was wrestling with this inner turmoil, rumors of weird games going on under HUAC [US House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee] pressure were rocking the theatrical community.”⁶ It is well known that Miller was close to the Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s, although he never admitted to being a card-carrying member, nor would he name the names of other Communist Party members. When Miller testified before HUAC on June 21, 1956, he was cited for contempt because of his lack of forthrightness. Miller received a 30-day suspended sentence and a $500 fine but in 1958 was exonerated by the courts.⁷

Unlike his 1952 allegory of McCarthyism, The Crucible, Miller's An Enemy of the People was hardly a commercial success. It ran on Broadway for less than a month, from December 28, 1950, to January 27, 1951, despite favorable reviews and a cast that included the great husband-and-wife team of Frederic March and Florence Eldridge as Dr and Mrs Stockmann.^{8 - 10} It is only occasionally performed today.

Beside the clearly urban, North American cadences of the dialogue, Miller's version is true to the standard translations with one notable exception. Miller mutes key passages in which Stockmann asserts the primacy of his vision over the community's using the concepts and language also found in Nietzschean philosophy, fascist political tracts, and even the eugenics textbooks of Ibsen's era. In an essay published in the New York Times on December 24, 1950, Miller explains that Ibsen was writing in an era when the explanatory metaphor of social Darwinism was at its peak—an era when many intellectuals self-identified as being the type of human biologically endowed with “the natural right to lead, if not govern, the mass.” Miller justifies his adaptation by insisting, without historical evidence, that Ibsen would never have made such statements in the post-Holocaust era: “the whole case of his thinking was that he could not have lived a day under an authoritative regime of any kind.”¹¹ Nevertheless, in Ibsen's as well as Miller's versions, Stockmann makes a bumptious ass out of himself by refusing to listen to the ideas or thoughts of others and insisting that he, and he alone, knows how to solve the problem.

Both playwrights focused intensely on the power and virtue of the individual in their work: Ibsen upturned his social era by lobbying for the voice of the intellectual over the wealthy and inbred elite; Miller, who came of age during the radical movements of the Great Depression, argued in favor of the common man. For Ibsen and Miller, the sheep-like masses, cynical politicians, irresponsible journalists, and financiers who placed profit above health were all enemies of the people. Yet in the clinical dilemma they describe there exists another enemy who demands identification, if not help. Sometimes the physician can be wrong, too.

In Ibsen's as well as Miller's versions, Stockmann possesses information and expertise that can protect the lives of those in his community. Sadly, he negates his professional effectiveness by succumbing to his own anger and lashing out at the public. By misfiring his alienating tirades at those he most needs to convince, Stockmann creates an insurmountable public health barrier: distrust of the very official the public needs to trust most.

The history of medicine and public health is littered with countless Stockmanns; writ larger, so is the history of humankind. Even when certain that plans and conclusions are correct, everyone has the singular power of arrogance to make a mess out of things.

Nearly a century after Ibsen wrote his brilliant play, the US cartoonist Walt Kelly composed an even more succinct means of identifying enemies—not only of society but, in essence, the planet. On the first proclaimed Earth Day in April 1970, Kelly had his swamp-dwelling character Pogo reflect on a polluted mess and exclaim: “I have seen the enemy and he is us.”¹²