Middlemarch
public purpose. If a fair number of the better educated men went to
work with the belief that their observations might contribute to the
reform of medical doctrine and practice, we should soon see a change
for the better. That’s my point of view. I hold that by refusing to
work with Mr. Bulstrode I should be turning my back on an opportunity
of making my profession more generally serviceable.”
“I quite agree with you,” said Dorothea, at once fascinated by the
situation sketched in Lydgate’s words. “But what is there against Mr.
Bulstrode? I know that my uncle is friendly with him.”
“People don’t like his religious tone,” said Lydgate, breaking off
there.
“That is all the stronger reason for despising such an opposition,”
said Dorothea, looking at the affairs of Middlemarch by the light of
the great persecutions.
“To put the matter quite fairly, they have other objections to him:—he
is masterful and rather unsociable, and he is concerned with trade,
which has complaints of its own that I know nothing about. But what has
that to do with the question whether it would not be a fine thing to
establish here a more valuable hospital than any they have in the
county? The immediate motive to the opposition, however, is the fact
that Bulstrode has put the medical direction into my hands. Of course I
am glad of that. It gives me an opportunity of doing some good
work,—and I am aware that I have to justify his choice of me. But the
consequence is, that the whole profession in Middlemarch have set
themselves tooth and nail against the Hospital, and not only refuse to
cooperate themselves, but try to blacken the whole affair and hinder
subscriptions.”
“How very petty!” exclaimed Dorothea, indignantly.
“I suppose one must expect to fight one’s way: there is hardly anything
to be done without it. And the ignorance of people about here is
stupendous. I don’t lay claim to anything else than having used some
opportunities which have not come within everybody’s reach; but there
is no stifling the offence of being young, and a new-comer, and
happening to know something more than the old inhabitants. Still, if I
believe that I can set going a better method of treatment—if I believe
that I can pursue certain observations and inquiries which may be a
lasting benefit to medical practice, I should be a base truckler if I
allowed any consideration of personal comfort to hinder me. And the
course is all the clearer from there being no salary in question to put
my persistence in an equivocal light.”
“I am glad you have told me this, Mr. Lydgate,” said Dorothea,
cordially. “I feel sure I can help a little. I have some money, and
don’t know what to do with it—that is often an uncomfortable thought to
me. I am sure I can spare two hundred a-year for a grand purpose like
this. How happy you must be, to know things that you feel sure will do
great good! I wish I could awake with that knowledge every morning.
There seems to be so much trouble taken that one can hardly see the
good of!”
There was a melancholy cadence in Dorothea’s voice as she spoke these
last words. But she presently added, more cheerfully, “Pray come to
Lowick and tell us more of this. I will mention the subject to Mr.
Casaubon. I must hasten home now.”
She did mention it that evening, and said that she should like to
subscribe two hundred a-year—she had seven hundred a-year as the
equivalent of her own fortune, settled on her at her marriage. Mr.
Casaubon made no objection beyond a passing remark that the sum might
be disproportionate in relation to other good objects, but when
Dorothea in her ignorance resisted that suggestion, he acquiesced. He
did not care himself about spending money, and was not reluctant to
give it. If he ever felt keenly any question of money it was through
the medium of another passion than the love of material property.
Dorothea told him that she had seen Lydgate, and recited the gist of
her conversation with him about the Hospital. Mr. Casaubon did not
question her further, but he felt sure that she had wished to know what
had passed between Lydgate and himself. “She knows that I know,” said
the ever-restless voice within; but that increase of tacit knowledge
only thrust further off any confidence between them. He distrusted her
affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
CHAPTER XLV.
It is the humor of many heads to extol the days of their forefathers,
and declaim against the wickedness of times present. Which
notwithstanding they cannot handsomely do, without the borrowed help
and satire of times past; condemning the vices of their own times, by
the expressions of vices in times which they commend, which cannot but
argue the community of vice in both. Horace, therefore, Juvenal, and
Persius, were no prophets, although their lines did seem to indigitate
and point at our times.—SIR THOMAS BROWNE: _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_.
That opposition to the New Fever Hospital which Lydgate had sketched to
Dorothea was, like other oppositions, to be viewed in many different
lights. He regarded it as a mixture of jealousy and dunderheaded
prejudice. Mr. Bulstrode saw in it not only medical jealousy but a
determination to thwart himself, prompted mainly by a hatred of that
vital religion of which he had striven to be an effectual lay
representative—a hatred which certainly found pretexts apart from
religion such as were only too easy to find in the entanglements of
human action. These might be called the ministerial views. But
oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command, which
need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw
forever on the vasts of ignorance. What the opposition in Middlemarch
said about the New Hospital and its administration had certainly a
great deal of echo in it, for heaven has taken care that everybody
shall not be an originator; but there were differences which
represented every social shade between the polished moderation of Dr.
Minchin and the trenchant assertion of Mrs. Dollop, the landlady of the
Tankard in Slaughter Lane.
Mrs. Dollop became more and more convinced by her own asseveration,
that Dr. Lydgate meant to let the people die in the Hospital, if not to
poison them, for the sake of cutting them up without saying by your
leave or with your leave; for it was a known “fac” that he had wanted
to cut up Mrs. Goby, as respectable a woman as any in Parley Street,
who had money in trust before her marriage—a poor tale for a doctor,
who if he was good for anything should know what was the matter with
you before you died, and not want to pry into your inside after you
were gone. If that was not reason, Mrs. Dollop wished to know what was;
but there was a prevalent feeling in her audience that her opinion was
a bulwark, and that if it were overthrown there would be no limits to
the cutting-up of bodies, as had been well seen in Burke and Hare with
their pitch-plaisters—such a hanging business as that was not wanted in
Middlemarch!
And let it not be supposed that opinion at the Tankard in Slaughter
Lane was unimportant to the medical profession: that old authentic
public-house—the original Tankard, known by the name of Dollop’s—was
the resort of a great Benefit Club, which had some months before put to
the vote whether its long-standing medical man, “Doctor Gambit,” should
not be cashiered in favor of “this Doctor Lydgate,” who was capable of
performing the most astonishing cures, and rescuing people altogether
given up by other practitioners. But the balance had been turned
against Lydgate by two members, who for some private reasons held that
this power of resuscitating persons as good as dead was an equivocal
recommendation, and might interfere with providential favors. In the
course of the year, however, there had been a change in the public
sentiment, of which the unanimity at Dollop’s was an index.
A good deal more than a year ago, before anything was known of
Lydgate’s skill, the judgments on it had naturally been divided,
depending on a sense of likelihood, situated perhaps in the pit of the
stomach or in the pineal gland, and differing in its verdicts, but not
the less valuable as a guide in the total deficit of evidence. Patients
who had chronic diseases or whose lives had long been worn threadbare,
like old Featherstone’s, had been at once inclined to try him; also,
many who did not like paying their doctor’s bills, thought agreeably of
opening an account with a new doctor and sending for him without stint
if the children’s temper wanted a dose, occasions when the old
practitioners were often crusty; and all persons thus inclined to
employ Lydgate held it likely that he was clever. Some considered that
he might do more than others “where there was liver;”—at least there
would be no harm in getting a few bottles of “stuff” from him, since if
these proved useless it would still be possible to return to the
Purifying Pills, which kept you alive if they did not remove the
yellowness. But these were people of minor importance. Good Middlemarch
families were of course not going to change their doctor without reason
shown; and everybody who had employed Mr. Peacock did not feel obliged
to accept a new man merely in the character of his successor, objecting
that he was “not likely to be equal to Peacock.”
But Lydgate had not been long in the town before there were particulars
enough reported of him to breed much more specific expectations and to
intensify differences into partisanship; some of the particulars being
of that impressive order of which the significance is entirely hidden,
like a statistical amount without a standard of comparison, but with a
note of exclamation at the end. The cubic feet of oxygen yearly
swallowed by a full-grown man—what a shudder they might have created in
some Middlemarch circles! “Oxygen! nobody knows what that may be—is it
any wonder the cholera has got to Dantzic? And yet there are people who
say quarantine is no good!”
One of the facts quickly rumored was that Lydgate did not dispense
drugs. This was offensive both to the physicians whose exclusive
distinction seemed infringed on, and to the surgeon-apothecaries with
whom he ranged himself; and only a little while before, they might have
counted on having the law on their side against a man who without
calling himself a London-made M.D. dared to ask for pay except as a
charge on drugs. But Lydgate had not been experienced enough to foresee
that his new course would be even more offensive to the laity; and to
Mr. Mawmsey, an important grocer in the Top Market, who, though not one
of his patients, questioned him in an affable manner on the subject, he
was injudicious enough to give a hasty popular explanation of his
reasons, pointing out to Mr. Mawmsey that it must lower the character
of practitioners, and be a constant injury to the public, if their only
mode of getting paid for their work was by their making out long bills
for draughts, boluses, and mixtures.
“It is in that way that hard-working medical men may come to be almost
as mischievous as quacks,” said Lydgate, rather thoughtlessly. “To get
their own bread they must overdose the king’s lieges; and that’s a bad
sort of treason, Mr. Mawmsey—undermines the constitution in a fatal
way.”
Mr. Mawmsey was not only an overseer (it was about a question of
outdoor pay that he was having an interview with Lydgate), he was also
asthmatic and had an increasing family: thus, from a medical point of
view, as well as from his own, he was an important man; indeed, an
exceptional grocer, whose hair was arranged in a flame-like pyramid,
and whose retail deference was of the cordial, encouraging
kind—jocosely complimentary, and with a certain considerate abstinence