This compendium summarizes and analyses the play presented, adopting the tone of a scientific editor: concise, precise and attentive to conceptual and ethical detail.

Overview
The work is a five-act stage drama that interweaves medical science, professional rivalry and moral choice. Central to the plot is Sir Colenso Ridgeon, a bacteriologically trained physician recently knighted for a purportedly decisive discovery in tuberculosis treatment. The discovery is articulated as an opsonin-based model: the patient’s blood contains a variable “butter” (opsonin) that modulates phagocytic ingestion of microbes. Ridgeon claims that an “opsonin index” (measured in the laboratory) determines whether an inoculation (vaccine/serum) will cure (positive phase) or kill (negative phase), and that treatment must be timed accordingly.

Principal characters
- Sir Colenso Ridgeon: scientist-physician, proud of his laboratory method, morally conflicted.
- Mrs Jennifer (Dubedat): artist’s widow, devoted to her husband Louis.
- Louis Dubedat: charismatic young artist, morally ambiguous but artistically gifted.
- Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington (B. B.): grand, popular physician; rhetorically persuasive though scientifically sloppy.
- Cutler Walpole: ambitious surgeon; values operation as remedy for “blood-poisoning.”
- Sir Patrick Cullen, Dr Blenkinsop, Leo Schutzmacher, Redpenny, Emmy: supporting figures illustrating social strata and professional postures.

Structure and key events
Act I establishes Ridgeon’s method and introduces a medical coterie debating germ theory, opsonins, anti-toxins and surgery. The professional milieu is satirised: competing theories (opsonin timing vs. anti-toxin/phagocyte stimulation vs. knife) and class dynamics are foregrounded.

Act II stages a social dinner where Ridgeon must choose which patient to admit to his limited, experimental program. He acknowledges a forced triage: ten existing patients occupy his resources (his “raft”); admitting a new patient requires sacrificing one. Two candidates personify the ethical dilemma: Blenkinsop (an honest, poor doctor) versus Louis Dubedat (a young, brilliant but morally suspect artist). Ridgeon hesitates.

Act III–IV dramatise the confrontation in Dubedat’s studio. Ridgeon refuses money and then, by a mixture of professional calculation and personal jealousy (he confesses later), ensures that Ridgeon-derived serum is administered by others (notably B. B.). Louis’s disease fulminates and he dies rapidly; the physicians dispute causation—mis-timed inoculation, over-stimulation, blood-poisoning, or surgical error are invoked. Ridgeon ultimately confesses an intention to prevent Louis’s survival because of personal motives (romantic jealousy toward Jennifer), an admission that complicates professional responsibility.

Act V (epilogue) shows Jennifer prospering publicly with Dubedat’s posthumous reputation; Ridgeon’s moral and scientific authority is left ambiguous. The play closes on unresolved questions of culpability and the distribution of scientific risk.

Themes and assessment
The play interrogates: the limits of laboratory certainty in clinical practice; triage ethics under scarcity; personal bias contaminating clinical decision-making; and the professional vanity of scientific claimants. Shaw satirises the medical profession’s rhetorical confidence—its competing dogmas (opsonin measurement, anti-toxins, surgery)—and exposes how scientific concepts can be weaponised to justify moral acts. The narrative leaves causality and moral blame deliberately equivocal, prompting sustained ethical reflection rather than offering resolution.