Middlemarch
from letting out the full force of his mind. It was Mr. Mawmsey’s
friendly jocoseness in questioning him which had set the tone of
Lydgate’s reply. But let the wise be warned against too great readiness
at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the
sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.
Lydgate smiled as he ended his speech, putting his foot into the
stirrup, and Mr. Mawmsey laughed more than he would have done if he had
known who the king’s lieges were, giving his “Good morning, sir,
good-morning, sir,” with the air of one who saw everything clearly
enough. But in truth his views were perturbed. For years he had been
paying bills with strictly made items, so that for every half-crown and
eighteen-pence he was certain something measurable had been delivered.
He had done this with satisfaction, including it among his
responsibilities as a husband and father, and regarding a longer bill
than usual as a dignity worth mentioning. Moreover, in addition to the
massive benefit of the drugs to “self and family,” he had enjoyed the
pleasure of forming an acute judgment as to their immediate effects, so
as to give an intelligent statement for the guidance of Mr. Gambit—a
practitioner just a little lower in status than Wrench or Toller, and
especially esteemed as an accoucheur, of whose ability Mr. Mawmsey had
the poorest opinion on all other points, but in doctoring, he was wont
to say in an undertone, he placed Gambit above any of them.
Here were deeper reasons than the superficial talk of a new man, which
appeared still flimsier in the drawing-room over the shop, when they
were recited to Mrs. Mawmsey, a woman accustomed to be made much of as
a fertile mother,—generally under attendance more or less frequent from
Mr. Gambit, and occasionally having attacks which required Dr. Minchin.
“Does this Mr. Lydgate mean to say there is no use in taking medicine?”
said Mrs. Mawmsey, who was slightly given to drawling. “I should like
him to tell me how I could bear up at Fair time, if I didn’t take
strengthening medicine for a month beforehand. Think of what I have to
provide for calling customers, my dear!”—here Mrs. Mawmsey turned to an
intimate female friend who sat by—“a large veal pie—a stuffed fillet—a
round of beef—ham, tongue, et cetera, et cetera! But what keeps me up
best is the pink mixture, not the brown. I wonder, Mr. Mawmsey, with
_your_ experience, you could have patience to listen. I should have
told him at once that I knew a little better than that.”
“No, no, no,” said Mr. Mawmsey; “I was not going to tell him my
opinion. Hear everything and judge for yourself is my motto. But he
didn’t know who he was talking to. I was not to be turned on _his_
finger. People often pretend to tell me things, when they might as well
say, ‘Mawmsey, you’re a fool.’ But I smile at it: I humor everybody’s
weak place. If physic had done harm to self and family, I should have
found it out by this time.”
The next day Mr. Gambit was told that Lydgate went about saying physic
was of no use.
“Indeed!” said he, lifting his eyebrows with cautious surprise. (He was
a stout husky man with a large ring on his fourth finger.) “How will he
cure his patients, then?”
“That is what I say,” returned Mrs. Mawmsey, who habitually gave weight
to her speech by loading her pronouns. “Does _he_ suppose that people
will pay him only to come and sit with them and go away again?”
Mrs. Mawmsey had had a great deal of sitting from Mr. Gambit, including
very full accounts of his own habits of body and other affairs; but of
course he knew there was no innuendo in her remark, since his spare
time and personal narrative had never been charged for. So he replied,
humorously—
“Well, Lydgate is a good-looking young fellow, you know.”
“Not one that _I_ would employ,” said Mrs. Mawmsey. “_Others_ may do as
they please.”
Hence Mr. Gambit could go away from the chief grocer’s without fear of
rivalry, but not without a sense that Lydgate was one of those
hypocrites who try to discredit others by advertising their own
honesty, and that it might be worth some people’s while to show him up.
Mr. Gambit, however, had a satisfactory practice, much pervaded by the
smells of retail trading which suggested the reduction of cash payments
to a balance. And he did not think it worth his while to show Lydgate
up until he knew how. He had not indeed great resources of education,
and had had to work his own way against a good deal of professional
contempt; but he made none the worse accoucheur for calling the
breathing apparatus “longs.”
Other medical men felt themselves more capable. Mr. Toller shared the
highest practice in the town and belonged to an old Middlemarch family:
there were Tollers in the law and everything else above the line of
retail trade. Unlike our irascible friend Wrench, he had the easiest
way in the world of taking things which might be supposed to annoy him,
being a well-bred, quietly facetious man, who kept a good house, was
very fond of a little sporting when he could get it, very friendly with
Mr. Hawley, and hostile to Mr. Bulstrode. It may seem odd that with
such pleasant habits he should have been given to the heroic treatment,
bleeding and blistering and starving his patients, with a dispassionate
disregard to his personal example; but the incongruity favored the
opinion of his ability among his patients, who commonly observed that
Mr. Toller had lazy manners, but his treatment was as active as you
could desire: no man, said they, carried more seriousness into his
profession: he was a little slow in coming, but when he came, he _did_
something. He was a great favorite in his own circle, and whatever he
implied to any one’s disadvantage told doubly from his careless
ironical tone.
He naturally got tired of smiling and saying, “Ah!” when he was told
that Mr. Peacock’s successor did not mean to dispense medicines; and
Mr. Hackbutt one day mentioning it over the wine at a dinner-party, Mr.
Toller said, laughingly, “Dibbitts will get rid of his stale drugs,
then. I’m fond of little Dibbitts—I’m glad he’s in luck.”
“I see your meaning, Toller,” said Mr. Hackbutt, “and I am entirely of
your opinion. I shall take an opportunity of expressing myself to that
effect. A medical man should be responsible for the quality of the
drugs consumed by his patients. That is the rationale of the system of
charging which has hitherto obtained; and nothing is more offensive
than this ostentation of reform, where there is no real amelioration.”
“Ostentation, Hackbutt?” said Mr. Toller, ironically. “I don’t see
that. A man can’t very well be ostentatious of what nobody believes in.
There’s no reform in the matter: the question is, whether the profit on
the drugs is paid to the medical man by the druggist or by the patient,
and whether there shall be extra pay under the name of attendance.”
“Ah, to be sure; one of your damned new versions of old humbug,” said
Mr. Hawley, passing the decanter to Mr. Wrench.
Mr. Wrench, generally abstemious, often drank wine rather freely at a
party, getting the more irritable in consequence.
“As to humbug, Hawley,” he said, “that’s a word easy to fling about.
But what I contend against is the way medical men are fouling their own
nest, and setting up a cry about the country as if a general
practitioner who dispenses drugs couldn’t be a gentleman. I throw back
the imputation with scorn. I say, the most ungentlemanly trick a man
can be guilty of is to come among the members of his profession with
innovations which are a libel on their time-honored procedure. That is
my opinion, and I am ready to maintain it against any one who
contradicts me.” Mr. Wrench’s voice had become exceedingly sharp.
“I can’t oblige you there, Wrench,” said Mr. Hawley, thrusting his
hands into his trouser-pockets.
“My dear fellow,” said Mr. Toller, striking in pacifically, and looking
at Mr. Wrench, “the physicians have their toes trodden on more than we
have. If you come to dignity it is a question for Minchin and Sprague.”
“Does medical jurisprudence provide nothing against these
infringements?” said Mr. Hackbutt, with a disinterested desire to offer
his lights. “How does the law stand, eh, Hawley?”
“Nothing to be done there,” said Mr. Hawley. “I looked into it for
Sprague. You’d only break your nose against a damned judge’s decision.”
“Pooh! no need of law,” said Mr. Toller. “So far as practice is
concerned the attempt is an absurdity. No patient will like
it—certainly not Peacock’s, who have been used to depletion. Pass the
wine.”
Mr. Toller’s prediction was partly verified. If Mr. and Mrs. Mawmsey,
who had no idea of employing Lydgate, were made uneasy by his supposed
declaration against drugs, it was inevitable that those who called him
in should watch a little anxiously to see whether he did “use all the
means he might use” in the case. Even good Mr. Powderell, who in his
constant charity of interpretation was inclined to esteem Lydgate the
more for what seemed a conscientious pursuit of a better plan, had his
mind disturbed with doubts during his wife’s attack of erysipelas, and
could not abstain from mentioning to Lydgate that Mr. Peacock on a
similar occasion had administered a series of boluses which were not
otherwise definable than by their remarkable effect in bringing Mrs.
Powderell round before Michaelmas from an illness which had begun in a
remarkably hot August. At last, indeed, in the conflict between his
desire not to hurt Lydgate and his anxiety that no “means” should be
lacking, he induced his wife privately to take Widgeon’s Purifying
Pills, an esteemed Middlemarch medicine, which arrested every disease
at the fountain by setting to work at once upon the blood. This
co-operative measure was not to be mentioned to Lydgate, and Mr.
Powderell himself had no certain reliance on it, only hoping that it
might be attended with a blessing.
But in this doubtful stage of Lydgate’s introduction he was helped by
what we mortals rashly call good fortune. I suppose no doctor ever came
newly to a place without making cures that surprised somebody—cures
which may be called fortune’s testimonials, and deserve as much credit
as the written or printed kind. Various patients got well while Lydgate
was attending them, some even of dangerous illnesses; and it was
remarked that the new doctor with his new ways had at least the merit
of bringing people back from the brink of death. The trash talked on
such occasions was the more vexatious to Lydgate, because it gave
precisely the sort of prestige which an incompetent and unscrupulous
man would desire, and was sure to be imputed to him by the simmering
dislike of the other medical men as an encouragement on his own part of
ignorant puffing. But even his proud outspokenness was checked by the
discernment that it was as useless to fight against the interpretations
of ignorance as to whip the fog; and “good fortune” insisted on using
those interpretations.
Mrs. Larcher having just become charitably concerned about alarming
symptoms in her charwoman, when Dr. Minchin called, asked him to see
her then and there, and to give her a certificate for the Infirmary;
whereupon after examination he wrote a statement of the case as one of
tumor, and recommended the bearer Nancy Nash as an out-patient. Nancy,
calling at home on her way to the Infirmary, allowed the stay maker and
his wife, in whose attic she lodged, to read Dr. Minchin’s paper, and
by this means became a subject of compassionate conversation in the
neighboring shops of Churchyard Lane as being afflicted with a tumor at
first declared to be as large and hard as a duck’s egg, but later in
the day to be about the size of “your fist.” Most hearers agreed that