Beware of Pity

Stefan Zweig’s novel Ungeduld des Herzens, (literally “The Heart’s Impatience”) is well known as a study of two types of pity, but it is also noteworthy for its portrayal of one of the most iconic doctors in fiction. The action is set in 1914 in a garrison town near Vienna. Edith von Kekesfalva is a rich, pretty, 17-year-old girl, who has been left crippled by polio. Initially, her father consulted numerous distinguished physicians, but now she is attended by Dr Condor, a family physician from Vienna. Lieutenant Hofmiller, a cavalry officer, feels sorry for Edith and falls into the habit of visiting her almost every day. She mistakes his pity for affection and falls in love with him. He allows himself to be drawn into becoming engaged to her, but when he thinks of how his engagement to a crippled girl, the daughter of a Jewish parvenu, would look to his fellow-officers, and the resulting loss of face, he reneges on his promise and decamps through the night.

Zweig uses the Dr Condor character to illustrate the difference between the unsentimental compassion of the doctor and the self indulgent pity of the army officer. He contrasts the two physically. Condor is small, plump and bald, careless in his dress, whereas the handsome young lieutenant, by the custom of the Austrian military caste, is always in uniform, even when off-duty. Condor’s home and practice are in a poor district of Vienna. Pointing up Hofmiller’s engagement to Edith, Condor married one of his patients, not pretty and with no money, because she was going blind, and without him would have been incapable of going on living. As a student, he watched his father waste away from diabetes, which was then untreatable. He decided to specialise in incurable conditions, reasoning that cases are only incurable within the compass of present knowledge, and that it is precisely the incurable that the doctor should try to cure.

Condor sees sickness as an offence against natural law and order, and so the doctor must attack it ruthlessly, using every weapon at his command. There must, he insists, be no pity for the sick, for, as he says, goodness and truth never yet succeeded in curing a single human being. In contrast to this harsh-sounding philosophy, his life is actually ruled by his compassion for the sick. Most of his waking hours are taken up by his patients. Zweig was a friend and admirer of Freud (see also BMJ 2007;335:567, doi 10.1136/bmj.39289.491343.59), and it has been suggested that this may have influenced the portrayal of Condor.

Zweig himself, in the introduction, differentiates two types of pity. There is the weak and sentimental kind, wanting to be rid as quickly as possible of the sight of another’s unhappiness, an inward-looking emotion. The second type, compassion, is unsentimental but creative, and persistent in its efforts. In Beware of Pity, Stefan Zweig personifies these two emotions in the characters of Hofmiller and Condor. For this reason, the novel is worthy of consideration as a medical classic.