Looking After the Drainage: Health, Marketing, and the Turkish Bath in Bernard Shaw’sMisalliance

Abstract

Bernard Shaw often inveighed against the infusion of an entrepreneurial ethos into health care and expounded at length about the detrimental effects of the profit motive in medicine. The booming late-Victorian proprietary-cure industry was especially irksome, its wares relentlessly advertised with virtually no oversight or regulation. Created in the wake of a sensational public government inquiry into mass marketing, Shaw’s comedy Misalliance dovetails its critique of middle-class pretension with an assault on the commodification of health. The unusual portable Turkish bath unit that occupies the centre of its stage picture resonates provocatively against the backdrop of the advent of modern British marketing and Edwardian anxiety over national fitness, and for the playwright it is an object of both critique and emulation.