Thornton Wilder and The Angel That Troubled the Waters: A Plea for Physician Healing

Excerpt

The Angel That Troubled the Waters (1928), a short “play” by Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) published the year he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Bridge of San Luis Rey, warrants a contemporary revisit. Wilder identified the drama as a “three-minute play.” It was intended only to be read and not performed.1 The author provided an allegorical perspective on the health of physicians utilizing Jesus’ sermon on the Pool of Bethesda in the Gospel of John as background.2 It was said that an angel intermittently appeared at the pool where those with physical infirmities—the blind and lame—anxiously awaited miraculous healings. In the Gospel story, the angel would stir the pool with his finger, and those in the pool at that precise moment would be healed. In Wilder’s drama, a doctor in need of healing for an unidentified ailment, labeled a newcomer, arrives at the pool. He appears free of physical disease and is denied access. The physician is described as “broken on the wheels of living.” …