When Doctors Disagree

by P.G. Wodehouse

IT is possible that, at about the time at which this story opens, you may have gone into the Hotel Belvoir for a hair-cut. Many people did; for the young man behind the scissors, though of a singularly gloomy countenance, was undoubtedly an artist in his line. He clipped judiciously. He left no ridges. He never talked about the weather. And he allowed you to go away unburdened by any bottle of hair-food.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Humor

26 pages, Paperback

First published March 26, 2013

About the author

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career.

An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend.

Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).

Reviews

[Jason Koivu · Rating 2 out of 5]

In this early work that lacks the wit of Wodehouse's later material, a woman grows tired of her jealous boyfriend, only to find out that she finds it much worse when he shows no jealousy whatsoever. The usual Wodehouse plot, albeit in miniature for this short story, is set in place, though fairly basic and not nearly as complicated as the stuff he would concoct in later decades. Also, his wordplay is just plain wordy. This feels like practice for the whetting of his rapier wit, which he would brandish with hilarious flourishes one day.

[Prabhash Gokarn · Rating 5 out of 5]

humourous and with a lesson to us all - treat experts with caution - they can be wrong

[Dayo Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

light reading nice chuckles