if Ferguson accepts the hospital’s offer of an associateship, he will end up like Cunningham, a doctor for whom he feels nothing but distaste. At the meeting of trustees, it is roundly acknowledged that if Ferguson goes into private practice, ‘‘[W]ith his wife’s connections, he ought to . . . er . . . do very nicely.’’ But according to Hochberg, Ferguson ‘‘doesn’t know enough, yet; he’s apt to make mistakes’’; Ferguson is neither ready for an associateship nor private practice, but at Laura’s behest, he is willing to ‘‘sacrifice his career for a nice office and an easy practice.’’ Ferguson well recognizes the mistake he is about to make in terms of his medical career. Though he claims to be ‘‘delighted’’ by the opportunity, in reality he ‘‘looked so glum’’ after speaking to one of the doctors about his acceptance of it. Already, with the decision he has made, Ferguson is becoming more and more like Cunningham.

This potential of developing into Cunningham is taken away after Laura breaks off the engagement, which means Ferguson loses the offer of the associateship and the chance to progress himself through the Hudson family connections. However, the chain of events instead offers Ferguson another alternate future: becoming a Levine. This oncepromising intern gave up the chance to ‘‘be somebody’’ when he married. Disowned by his wealthy mother, he was forced to discontinue his studies in order to go into private practice to support his wife. The facts of his life since he left the hospital bear out his loss. When Levine first went into practice, he was sure and confident. He wouldn’t allow Hochberg to help him even a little bit. However, without connections, as Ferguson now is, Levine was reduced to ‘‘Tenements! Fifty-cent patients! Poverty! Dirt! Struggle!’’ The past six years have been a struggle for Levine and his wife, who has since developed tuberculosis. When Ferguson first meets Levine, the former intern presents the picture of a man whom life has beaten down, with his shabby clothing and worry lines crossing his forehead. By the end of the play, desperately trying to build up a new practice in Colorado, he is reduced to begging Hochberg for the loan of a few dollars.

Levine has come to feel some sense of regret for the choices he made in the past. He considers Ferguson lucky to have the opportunity to study with Hochberg and sighs sadly when speaking of the same opportunities that he squandered. Kingsley makes the parallelism clear: If Ferguson follows through on his intention of marrying and going into private practice to earn a living, he will become like Levine, haunted by bitterness and the memories of what he gave up. Levine considers himself a ‘‘human sacrifice,’’ and Ferguson will undoubtedly become another sacrifice, with his ambitions and ideals destroyed.

One other future faces Ferguson, a future represented by Hochberg himself. Hochberg has devoted his life to his work and urges Ferguson, whom he believes has great potential, to follow in his footsteps. His dedication to the medical profession shows itself in his utter lack of personal life; with Ferguson, he talks only of patients and of the studies that lie ahead. The rest of the doctors, as well as discerning patients such as Hudson, greatly revere Hochberg. When he enters the library where they gather, he is immediately bombarded with requests and opinions. Hochberg has earned this position because he placed his medical career above everything else. He continually reminds Laura that Ferguson needs to concentrate on his studies, holding out as an example a doctor who works with him now who ‘‘even has a cot rigged up in one of the laboratories’’ to ease his 16-plus hour days. As Ferguson’s mentor, Hochberg will undoubtedly sculpt the younger man into a version of himself.

While Bailey finds Hochberg a sympathetic character who is ‘‘full of wisdom and patience,’’ other readers may choose to question the surgeon’s narrow focus and its accompanying lack of humanity. His attitude is most clearly seen when he learns of Ferguson’s intention to marry Barbara. Calling Ferguson’s desire to do the honorable thing ‘‘[M]id- Victorian idealism,’’ he urges Ferguson to reconsider letting this ‘‘accident . . . ruin yourself—the rest of your life—destroy your ambition.’’ He believes that in helping a woman whose ruin he helped bring about, Ferguson will merely be ‘‘throwing his life away.’’ With his admonitions, he reveals his essential belief that nothing is important but the medical profession. He puts the important work that good doctors do—saving lives—ahead of everything else.

At the end of the play, with Barbara’s sudden death, Ferguson has the chance to choose between these three models or to carve out his own style of doctoring. After Laura rescinds her earlier demands that he give up his studies with Hochberg, declaring that she will marry him nonetheless, Ferguson has the opportunity to combine his professional love and his personal love. Instead, Ferguson decides to follow in Hochberg’s footsteps. He affirms his commitment to the medical profession when he tells Laura ‘‘This is where I belong!’’ Ferguson has come to accept, like Hochberg before him, that for the physician the reward is in ‘‘something richer than simply living’’—it is in sacrificing his own life to the greater need of society.

Source: Rena Korb, Critical Essay on Men in White, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Sidney Kingsley’s three-act play, Men in White, is a mix of social commentary on moral issues and soapopera drama. But more than this, it is a deeply felt philosophical treatise on humanity. The visible, driving emotional force of the play is a young intern’s struggle to integrate his career with an upcoming marriage. Its hospital setting uses lifeand- death issues, love, and betrayal to pull the audience toward a conclusion. The drama of the intern’s tortured conscience over a sexual impropriety, which eventually causes the death of a young nurse, rakes the conclusion with profundity. The actual cause of her death, a botched, back-street abortion, becomes an underlying moral theme, seldom discussed in the 1930s. Beneath this veneer, however, many other serious issues are brought forth: medical ethics, the economics of medicine following the Depression, integrity in actions, and altruism in a most dedicated form.

Rather than using medicine as a mere setting for entertainment, Kingsley takes on the philosophical issues of ethics, truthfulness, compassion, altruism, and even greed, in a very simple, yet dramatic format. One line, brought into the body of the text through the remembered voice of the young intern’s father, sums up Kingsley’s theme for Men in White: ‘‘My dad used to say, ‘Above all is humanity!’ He was a fine man—my dad.’’ The intern goes on to say how his father died because he refused to give up medicine as a career in favor of his own health. Then he says, ‘‘Above all else is humanity—that’s a big thought. So big that alongside of it you and I don’t really matter very much. That’s why we do it, I guess.’’ Kingsley’s ideas about personal values come through in scene after scene. Had he not become a playwright and actor, he may well have become a physician or some other server of humanity.

Along with praise, reviewers and critics have found fault with Men in White, yet it was a triumph on stage and screen. In a review in Sidney Kingsley: Five Winning Plays, edited by Nena Couch, Thomas E. Luddy of Salem State College in Massachusetts says that the usual response of critics to Kingsley’s plays has been that ‘‘they practice outdated dramaturgy (19th-century naturalism), argue a suspect sociology (determinism), and embrace a dead politics (socialism).’’ In the 1930s, ideas of the nineteenth-century may have become stale to the point of feeling outdated, but it was these elements that contributed to the success of Men in White. Kingsley’s use of personal struggle and dedication in an unkind world gave its audience a point of identification. Luddy believes, however, that because of ‘‘the writing power, the mastery of issues, and complexity of the stage vision,’’ Kingsley’s plays have a permanent place in the theatre. The themes and style of Kingsley’s plays can be seen in many contemporary TV shows. Social elements and laws of nature, always present in society and often presented as dramatic themes, create an emotional impact for an audience.

One person who thought little of Kingsley’s writing power in Men in White and of his mastery of issues was Elia Kazan. Kazan was a member of the Group Theatre company, as was Kingsley, that first performed Men in White in 1933. In his autobiography, A Life, published in 1988, Kazan wrote that it was ‘‘the style of Lee Strasberg’s production and their own [the Group’s] ensemble playing [that] had provided Sidney Kingsley’s bone-bare text with what it didn’t deserve.’’ What it didn’t deserve, according to Kazan, was its great success on Broadway, and the Pulitzer Prize it won the following year. It was even the ‘‘first great success’’ for the Group, said Kazan, giving its members ‘‘a long flow of full salaries.’’ In 1934, while still on Broadway, Men in White was released as a film by MGM, starring Clark Gable and Myrna Loy. It was a success, although Kazan never acknowledged its attributes. Its issues and emotional base did not make it a success for Kazan.

MGM recognized the opportunity for success with Kingsley’s theme and issues, however; issues common to all societies, issues of substance, brought forth through love, death, and sacrifice. This is dramaturgy with naturalism that reaches across social boundaries. Beyond soap-opera dramatizing, the emotional impact of the issues thrives.

In reading only the script, it is true that the dialogue, settings, and characterizations are all quite average. The story is simple, the scenes minimal. Yet, when reading the original text as published by Covici Friede in 1933, with footnotes intact, it is apparent that Kingsley’s purpose was not merely to create an actable play, with hopes of stardom, but rather to purport some profound philosophical ideas. His dedication of the play reads ‘‘To the men in medicine who dedicate themselves, with quiet heroism, to man.’’ Following the dedication in the text, and before the opening scene of the play, Kingsley places a lengthy excerpt from the Hippocratic oath, which as Kingsley says, ‘‘physicians have bound themselves since the days of antique Greece.’’ As an oath, it is a most serious commitment for men of medicine, meant to bind them with heart, mind, and spirit to the principles of altruism. They are sworn by ‘‘all the gods and goddesses’’ to do only good for the benefit of the sick and all men.

Through the play’s dialogue, Kingsley speaks seriously about the nature of humanity, of the importance of man’s humanity toward his fellows as being the most important element of their lives. In the hospital setting, it is the service of the physician to his patients—above all else—be it home, health, money, or personal need that he attempts to bring forth. However, it is in the footnotes of the original text where Kingsley records not only his own views on these issues, but backs them up with serious thought from respected sages of the past. Some footnotes are merely historical in nature or give medical definitions to the reader, while others are educational, regarding advances in anesthesia and sterilization techniques. Many of Kingsley’s more serious concerns are brought out in the footnotes of the opening pages. A footnote on the first page of dialogue quotes the German born physician and researcher Hermann Nothnagel: ‘‘All knowledge attains its ethical value and its human significance only by the humane sense in which it is employed. Only a good man can be a great physician.’’ He makes a footnote reference to the enormous bulk of information that had come to the science of medicine by then, and to the great task of the physician to absorb and use it. Another footnote quote is by Karl Marx, from Garrison’s History of Medicine: ‘‘The education of most people ends upon graduation; that of the physician means a lifetime of incessant study.’’ Throughout both footnote and text, Kingsley continues to make a strong case for the seriousness and dedication needed to succeed in medicine. The principles of a dedicated humanity are extremely important to this author.

Perhaps the play’s most important issue, and the one it is most often remembered for, is abortion. While abortion plays a prominent part in the stage production, it is also discussed in the footnotes. Kingsley takes the issue seriously. He comments clearly on the criminal state of abortion: politically, ethically, and socially. Expanding on a footnoted quote by a former president of the American Medical Association on the number of abortions in New York and Chicago being greater than the number of children born, Kingsley says:

Most of these operations are performed on otherwise respectable, law-abiding, married women. Proof enough that here is another social problem that can’t be eliminated by legislation. No one wants to encourage the indiscriminate use of this grim practice. However, the lash of the law, instead of correcting the evil, only whips it into dark corners, creating a vicious class of criminal practitioner—bootleg doctors and ignorant midwives who work in dark, back-room apartments. A saner, healthier attitude is that adopted by the Soviet government, which is fostering birth control education, and instituting legal abortion clinics in a spirit best expressed by the motto inscribed over the door of one such clinic: ‘You are welcome this time, but we hope you will never have to come here again.’

The Group Theatre ensemble produced plays that dealt with moral issues. When Kingsley presented his ‘‘bare-bones text’’ to the Group, he opened the door for the rest of the process to complete itself—that process being creativity. Kazan was right in this regard, that the play needed a skilled ensemble to present it. When a dramatic work is written as a play, it is never finished on the page. Not until it is interpreted and performed by its actors is it a completed work. Kingsley was able to, with his simple presentation and complex issues, give his players just the right formula for a successful performance. Its ingredients were: an altruistic and well meaning leading man; an obstacle for the leading man in terms of a fiancée who doesn’t fully understand his need for dedication to medicine; a small but important outside love interest; a plotdriving mentor, always pushing for the hero’s success; one less-than-competent wealthy physician; comic relief in the form of two rather less-thanserious interns; a serious sociopolitical issue of the day (i.e., the state of medicine and hospitals in a floundering society recovering from a major Depression); and a seldom discussed social issue, abortion. Without the depth and intensity of the emotional issues, this may well have been bare-bones. But it is not and was not bare-bones, not when the surface had been pierced by the accomplished actors of the Group, who were able to bring all of the background sentiments and seriousness of the issues to the foreground. They brought personal feelings and experience to the stage and created believable, flesh-and-blood characters.

Apart from the emotional intrigue of the play, Kingsley did a successful job with pacing to give it dramatic impact (even with its contemporary soapopera flare). At the end of the first act the hero has an undescribed, but obvious, sexual liaison. At the end of act 2 he is in the operating room helping to undue the damage he had done at the end of act 1 (the girl with whom he had a sexual liaison had an abortion outside the hospital and was at the hospital due to complications from a botched underground procedure). Meanwhile, the hero’s fiancée is also in attendance and discovers that her fiancé is the cause of the poor girl’s condition. This is the major plot point of the entire play. At the end of act 3, all truth is revealed and actualized. The young nurse dies, from even more complications, the hero is sent into the world with a blessing to do his best for humanity and himself, and the fiancée has understood and accepted his need for dedication and service, somewhat forgiving him for his indiscretion. Her parting words are, ‘‘Maybe some day we’ll get together, anyway.’’ An audience loves the possibility of happily ever after.

Sidney Kingsley wrote a number of plays. Some were successful and some not, but the success of Men in White came from not only the drama of life, death, love, and sex, along with a talented ensemble and receptive audience, but also from the depth of the author’s obviously heartfelt issues involving medicine and altruism. Men in White was a combination of elements that worked.

Source: Ray Warren, Critical Essay on Men in White, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Sidney Kingsley’s Men in White had a profound impact on American audiences of the 1930s. The production was amongst only a handful of theatrical successes set against the backdrop of the depression era and Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. The play earned Kingsley a Pulitzer Prize, remarkable for a work represented by stilted, or stiff, cookie-cutter character types and a rather predictable story line. It was an obvious victory, however, when noting the work’s consideration of the medical profession. Kingsley specifically created Dr. Ferguson, a young rising star and physician, to illuminate this addiction to the medical profession. It is the audience which then becomes hooked, however, captivated by a young doctor’s ineffectual struggle to separate his professional from his personal life.

Kingsley uses his characters to convey the progressive, powerful nature of modern medicine. At the outset of the play, Dr. McCabe is ‘‘worried’’ by all of the ‘‘new medical literature’’ that ‘‘keeps piling up,’’ fearing ‘‘it will all end in confusion.’’ Dr. Hochberg agrees, adding, ‘‘where the sciences in general are going to end, with their mass of detail—nobody knows.’’ The practice of medicine is depicted by McCabe and Hochberg as an everchanging frontier, a science constantly reinventing itself, creating new challenges for practitioners. There is never enough for a physician to observe, to learn, to accomplish.

Central to the play is Dr. Ferguson, a physician and rising star. He is a young doctor consumed by his passion for medicine. He too marvels at his dedication to medicine, admitting that ‘‘it wasn’t much fun . . . but still . . . it’s the only thing I really want to do.’’ He later adds ‘‘above all else is humanity—that’s a big thought. So big that alongside of it you and I don’t really matter very much.’’ According to Ferguson, medicine is a power far greater than he is, a force he cannot understand but to which he is compelled to respond. This idea is pivotal to understanding Kingsley’s work—medical crises at the hospital prove to be uncontrollable lifechanging events for his characters, both professionally and personally.

Evangeline Morphos, in her work ‘‘Sidney Kingsley’s Men in White,’’ discusses Kingsley’s insistence on creating a realistic hospital environment as a factor in characterization and as a function of unity for the play. On the subject, she quotes Kingsley: ‘‘I take a long time developing a play because I am developing a whole environment, on the premise that a man’s—or woman’s—environment is enormously important to their life and their life’s work.’’ This statement gives credence to Morphos’s idea that Kingsley’s hospital environment creates unity and confines the action to a single location. The idea of confinement is of central importance to the struggle occurring throughout the work, that of a young doctor attempting to juggle his personal relationships with his professional duties. During the course of the play Ferguson’s life is illuminated only within the walls of the hospital. Neither he nor any of the other characters are observed elsewhere. Kingsley, from the outset, successfully presents a view of medicine as being more than a profession—it is an all-consuming lifestyle.

Morphos comments on the subject matter of the work, stating ‘‘Men in White presents a series of crises set against the backdrop of hospital life. The ultimate crisis involves a young intern’s choice between his fiancée and his research.’’ Ferguson’s personal struggle to create a balance between his relationship with his fiancée Laura and hospital life serves to create tension in the play. In several instances, Ferguson is called upon by the hospital staff and must choose between his personal plans with Laura and his obligation to the hospital. Despite his desire for a relationship, Ferguson consistently makes choices that sabotage any efforts with Laura.

In act I, scene ii, an intimate moment between lovers is interrupted by a loudspeaker call and Laura stating ‘‘don’t move,’’ only to be countered by Ferguson, who exclaims ‘‘It’s no use, Laura! That’s my call! Let me up!’’ Laura pleads her case with him, only to find out that he has also rejected her plans for the evening in order to perform a blood transfusion. This inspires yet another serious conversation and an ultimatum from Laura. What is of interest here concerns Ferguson’s response to the situation. Laura has just threatened to ‘‘break off now and try to forget’’ him, yet he is once again distracted by the loud speaker. He forgoes any attempts to resolve the conflict and becomes instantly engrossed in the medical emergency at hand.

Ferguson’s reaction to his argument with Laura is to take comfort in an affair with Barbara, a nurse who can understand his struggles as a doctor. It is Barbara’s passion for medicine to which Ferguson is drawn. Ferguson’s affair, however damaging, is little more than a predictable reflex action. The attraction medicine holds for him compels Ferguson to respond to crises in a particular manner. Based on his responses, it is easy to anticipate the failure of Ferguson’s relationship with Laura, despite his desire for the relationship. Medicine is the ultimate force driving him, inhibiting his ambitions to pursue any life outside of the hospital. It is also easy to empathize with Ferguson because he operates under the illusion of free choice, when in fact, the audience can already see he has none.

It is a bizarre love triangle (Laura/Ferguson/ medicine) playing on a swell of emotion from the audience as tension rises and falls, scene by scene. Estelle Manette Raben, in her piece ‘‘Men in White and Yellow Jacket as Mirrors of the Medical Profession,’’ comments on Ferguson’s commitment to medicine, claiming that ‘‘the hospital presents its demand for a type of almost religious celibacy.’’ She continues, observing ‘‘doctors are thereby exhaulted to a position that the public seems to have wanted them to occupy and that doctors were all too willing to accept—namely, a total devotion to their profession.’’ As Raben also points out, this is clearly apparent in the case of Dr. Levine, who chose marriage over medical training. The consequence of his decision, the audience comes to learn, is that he is left with both an ailing career as well as an ailing wife and has been disowned by his mother. In act I, scene iv, Levine speculates on the opinion of one of his former professors, stating ‘‘I know just what he says: Levine—the fool!—wealthy mother—chance to work with Hochberg—to be somebody. Threw it all away . . . for a pretty face.’’

However understandable this devotion to medicine may be, the victims of Ferguson’s professional devotion happen to be women. Women are on the periphery of this medical mayhem, their protests muted. Raben provides clarification on this point. She identifies within the body of the work the existence of what she calls ‘‘institutionalized sexism,’’ which ‘‘manifests itself through every female character.’’ This idea is readily observable—the main females characters of the play, whether nurse or fiancée, are portrayed as impediments to Ferguson’s professional progress and are sacrificed for his sake.

Laura is characterized as being a selfish, impulsive child rather than a competent adult. Often Hochberg’s interaction with Laura is that of an overbearing father chiding or scolding his ill-behaved daughter rather than a mutual discussion between respectful adults. Hochberg expends considerable effort to influence the course of Ferguson’s professional career, not with Laura’s help but despite what he clearly views to be her interference, without respect for the couple or their wedding plans. In act II, scene ii, for example, Hochberg responds to Laura, who has just returned with Ferguson from their wedding rehearsal, saying ‘‘Laura, you deserve to be spanked! Don’t you realize what that boy’s work means?’’ Hochberg engages in this dialogue repeatedly throughout the course of the play. Laura is consistently portrayed as an impediment or roadblock to Ferguson’s progress, not appreciated as a supportive figure in his life.

Barbara is the object of Ferguson’s desires and a victim of an illegal abortion. While the audience is never privileged to learn the details of their onenight stand, the event does cost the nurse her life. Even more startling, as critic Raben is also quick to point out, is Hochberg’s reaction in act III, scene i, to the news that Ferguson is responsible for the pregnancy. He immediately suggests to Ferguson that, if Ferguson did not force himself on the girl, he should not feel responsible for her unwanted pregnancy nor her dismissal from the hospital. Furthermore, when Ferguson comments on the fact that Barbara has been thrown out of the hospital, her life disgraced by the incident, Hochberg refutes Ferguson’s idea to marry her and is quick to remark, ‘‘Don’t worry. We’ll find something for her.’’ Hochberg simply dismisses a grave situation as being a casual mistake rather than acknowledging what is really a terrible tragedy for one young woman.

It is easy to surmise or guess that the female characters only serve as impediments or roadblocks to medical progress. Ferguson, at the end of the play, has gone through several major crises—he has contemplated a loveless marriage, faced the deadly consequences of an irresponsible affair, and dismissed his fiancée—yet he returns to medicine, seemingly unchanged by this dramatic chain of events. Raben has a rather interesting theory behind this behavior, stating ‘‘the women in the play function essentially as props to emphasize the male doctors’ superior social status and commitment.’’ The main female characters in the play are presented as hurdles to Ferguson’s professional success. Laura is portrayed as the self-centered, childish, demanding fiancée and Barbara as a life burden to Ferguson. Throughout the play Ferguson struggles with the idea of coupling his romantic life with his professional life, but by the play’s end he is unable to synthesize both aspects of self, all attempts at compromise having failed. Ferguson’s triumph is his return to medicine despite his personal challenges.

Scientific thought is presented as the superior rationale, an idea mirroring the work of one of Kingsley’s contemporaries, Aldous Leonard Huxley, author of Brave New World. Huxley’s novel is much like Kingsley’s play, insomuch as it has been called a novel of concepts or ideas, the characters having little depth, not unlike Kingsley’s characters. Nor is Kingsley’s hospital terribly different, philosophically speaking, than Huxley’s utopia. In utopia, babies are produced in a lab, born and classified by order of intelligence. The children are conditioned psychologically after birth to excel in a specific, predetermined profession based on their intelligence—not unlike Ferguson’s environment, one fostered by his father and society at large. In utopia, Hypnopaedia is just one of the psychological techniques employed, by utilizing the power of suggestion. This method induces people to behave in certain ways. During the course of the play, Dr. Hochberg engages in a similar type of mental conditioning or priming when speaking to Ferguson of his future career objectives, and as a result retains him as an understudy. Utopia, not unlike Kingsley’s world of medicine, also encourages reliance on the scientific, the rational, rather than a dependence on the emotional world. Finally, utopia is an emotionless world run entirely by men, not unlike St. George’s Hospital.

Sidney Kingsley and Aldous Huxley had separate artistic agendas. Huxley’s novel was a social commentary warning of world like utopia based on the nature of contemporary society, whereas Men in White celebrated it. Juxtaposing or comparing the works makes clear the climate and influences Kingsley was working under, and explains his success as a playwright with the completion of Men in White. The idealistic content of the play was responding to an audience enchanted with scientific advancement and captivated by the nobility, and also by the heroism of practicing medicine. This sentiment is perhaps captured best by the words of Hippocrates, who believes that ‘‘where the love of man is, there also is the love of the art of healing.’’

Source: Laura Kryhoski, Critical Essay on Men in White, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.