More on Henry Higgins

Abstract

To the Editor .—In an editorial entitled The Henry Higgins Syndrome in the MarchArchives(95:417, 1977) Robert Reinecke, MD, develops a skillful and inventive analogy relating the resident-professor relationship in ophthalmology to that of Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady . In the musical, Henry Higgins' melancholy and Eliza's anger are fed by each one's feeling a sense of perpetual toil and lack of appreciation and respect for the efforts of the other. Dr Reinecke's diagnosis and treatment of this problem has, in a few paragraphs, crystallized that which many of us have felt viscerally but have been unable to state in so clever and appropriate a fashion. It is, therefore, with hesitant sotto voce that an admirer of George Bernard Shaw feels compelled to point out something that bears little on the content or intent of the editorial, but nevertheless produces a chafe through failure to