Chapter: 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
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
it would have to be cut out, but one had known of oil and another of
"squitchineal" as adequate to soften and reduce any lump in the body
when taken enough of into the inside--the oil by gradually "soopling,"
the squitchineal by eating away.

Meanwhile when Nancy presented herself at the Infirmary, it happened to
be one of Lydgate's days there.  After questioning and examining her,
Lydgate said to the house-surgeon in an undertone, "It's not tumor:
it's cramp."  He ordered her a blister and some steel mixture, and told
her to go home and rest, giving her at the same time a note to Mrs.
Larcher, who, she said, was her best employer, to testify that she was
in need of good food.

But by-and-by Nancy, in her attic, became portentously worse, the
supposed tumor having indeed given way to the blister, but only
wandered to another region with angrier pain.  The staymaker's wife
went to fetch Lydgate, and he continued for a fortnight to attend Nancy
in her own home, until under his treatment she got quite well and went
to work again.  But the case continued to be described as one of tumor
in Churchyard Lane and other streets--nay, by Mrs. Larcher also; for
when Lydgate's remarkable cure was mentioned to Dr. Minchin, he
naturally did not like to say, "The case was not one of tumor, and I
was mistaken in describing it as such," but answered, "Indeed! ah!  I
saw it was a surgical case, not of a fatal kind." He had been inwardly
annoyed, however, when he had asked at the Infirmary about the woman he
had recommended two days before, to hear from the house-surgeon, a
youngster who was not sorry to vex Minchin with impunity, exactly what
had occurred: he privately pronounced that it was indecent in a general
practitioner to contradict a physician's diagnosis in that open manner,
and afterwards agreed with Wrench that Lydgate was disagreeably
inattentive to etiquette.  Lydgate did not make the affair a ground for
valuing himself or (very particularly) despising Minchin, such
rectification of misjudgments often happening among men of equal
qualifications.  But report took up this amazing case of tumor, not
clearly distinguished from cancer, and considered the more awful for
being of the wandering sort; till much prejudice against Lydgate's
method as to drugs was overcome by the proof of his marvellous skill in
the speedy restoration of Nancy Nash after she had been rolling and
rolling in agonies from the presence of a tumor both hard and
obstinate, but nevertheless compelled to yield.

How could Lydgate help himself?  It is offensive to tell a lady when
she is expressing her amazement at your skill, that she is altogether
mistaken and rather foolish in her amazement.  And to have entered into
the nature of diseases would only have added to his breaches of medical
propriety.  Thus he had to wince under a promise of success given by
that ignorant praise which misses every valid quality.

In the case of a more conspicuous patient, Mr. Borthrop Trumbull,
Lydgate was conscious of having shown himself something better than an
every-day doctor, though here too it was an equivocal advantage that he
won.  The eloquent auctioneer was seized with pneumonia, and having
been a patient of Mr. Peacock's, sent for Lydgate, whom he had
expressed his intention to patronize.  Mr Trumbull was a robust man, a
good subject for trying the expectant theory upon--watching the course
of an interesting disease when left as much as possible to itself, so
that the stages might be noted for future guidance; and from the air
with which he described his sensations Lydgate surmised that he would
like to be taken into his medical man's confidence, and be represented
as a partner in his own cure.  The auctioneer heard, without much
surprise, that his was a constitution which (always with due watching)
might be left to itself, so as to offer a beautiful example of a
disease with all its phases seen in clear delineation, and that he
probably had the rare strength of mind voluntarily to become the test
of a rational procedure, and thus make the disorder of his pulmonary
functions a general benefit to society.

Mr. Trumbull acquiesced at once, and entered strongly into the view
that an illness of his was no ordinary occasion for medical science.

"Never fear, sir; you are not speaking to one who is altogether
ignorant of the vis medicatrix," said he, with his usual superiority of
expression, made rather pathetic by difficulty of breathing.  And he
went without shrinking through his abstinence from drugs, much
sustained by application of the thermometer which implied the
importance of his temperature, by the sense that he furnished objects
for the microscope, and by learning many new words which seemed suited
to the dignity of his secretions.  For Lydgate was acute enough to
indulge him with a little technical talk.

It may be imagined that Mr. Trumbull rose from his couch with a
disposition to speak of an illness in which he had manifested the
strength of his mind as well as constitution; and he was not backward
in awarding credit to the medical man who had discerned the quality of
patient he had to deal with.  The auctioneer was not an ungenerous man,
and liked to give others their due, feeling that he could afford it.
He had caught the words "expectant method," and rang chimes on this and
other learned phrases to accompany the assurance that Lydgate "knew a
thing or two more than the rest of the doctors--was far better versed
in the secrets of his profession than the majority of his compeers."

This had happened before the affair of Fred Vincy's illness had given
to Mr. Wrench's enmity towards Lydgate more definite personal ground.
The new-comer already threatened to be a nuisance in the shape of
rivalry, and was certainly a nuisance in the shape of practical
criticism or reflections on his hard-driven elders, who had had
something else to do than to busy themselves with untried notions.  His
practice had spread in one or two quarters, and from the first the
report of his high family had led to his being pretty generally
invited, so that the other medical men had to meet him at dinner in the
best houses; and having to meet a man whom you dislike is not observed
always to end in a mutual attachment.  There was hardly ever so much
unanimity among them as in the opinion that Lydgate was an arrogant
young fellow, and yet ready for the sake of ultimately predominating to
show a crawling subservience to Bulstrode.  That Mr. Farebrother, whose
name was a chief flag of the anti-Bulstrode party, always defended
Lydgate and made a friend of him, was referred to Farebrother's
unaccountable way of fighting on both sides.

Here was plenty of preparation for the outburst of professional disgust
at the announcement of the laws Mr. Bulstrode was laying down for the
direction of the New Hospital, which were the more exasperating because
there was no present possibility of interfering with his will and
pleasure, everybody except Lord Medlicote having refused help towards
the building, on the ground that they preferred giving to the Old
Infirmary.  Mr. Bulstrode met all the expenses, and had ceased to be
sorry that he was purchasing the right to carry out his notions of
improvement without hindrance from prejudiced coadjutors; but he had
had to spend large sums, and the building had lingered.  Caleb Garth
had undertaken it, had failed during its progress, and before the
interior fittings were begun had retired from the management of the
business; and when referring to the Hospital he often said that however
Bulstrode might ring if you tried him, he liked good solid carpentry
and masonry, and had a notion both of drains and chimneys.  In fact,
the Hospital had become an object of intense interest to Bulstrode, and
he would willingly have continued to spare a large yearly sum that he
might rule it dictatorially without any Board; but he had another
favorite object which also required money for its accomplishment: he
wished to buy some land in the neighborhood of Middlemarch, and
therefore he wished to get considerable contributions towards
maintaining the Hospital.  Meanwhile he framed his plan of management.
The Hospital was to be reserved for fever in all its forms; Lydgate was
to be chief medical superintendent, that he might have free authority
to pursue all comparative investigations which his studies,
particularly in Paris, had shown him the importance of, the other
medical visitors having a consultative influence, but no power to
contravene Lydgate's ultimate decisions; and the general management was
to be lodged exclusively in the hands of five directors associated with
Mr. Bulstrode, who were to have votes in the ratio of their
contributions, the Board itself filling up any vacancy in its numbers,
and no mob of small contributors being admitted to a share of
government.

There was an immediate refusal on the part of every medical man in the
town to become a visitor at the Fever Hospital.

"Very well," said Lydgate to Mr. Bulstrode, "we have a capital
house-surgeon and dispenser, a clear-headed, neat-handed fellow; we'll
get Webbe from Crabsley, as good a country practitioner as any of them,
to come over twice a-week, and in case of any exceptional operation,
Protheroe will come from Brassing.  I must work the harder, that's all,
and I have given up my post at the Infirmary.  The plan will flourish
in spite of them, and then they'll be glad to come in.  Things can't
last as they are: there must be all sorts of reform soon, and then
young fellows may be glad to come and study here."  Lydgate was in high
spirits.

"I shall not flinch, you may depend upon it, Mr. Lydgate," said Mr.
Bulstrode.  "While I see you carrying out high intentions with vigor,
you shall have my unfailing support.  And I have humble confidence that
the blessing which has hitherto attended my efforts against the spirit
of evil in this town will not be withdrawn.  Suitable directors to
assist me I have no doubt of securing.  Mr. Brooke of Tipton has
already given me his concurrence, and a pledge to contribute yearly: he
has not specified the sum--probably not a great one.  But he will be a
useful member of the board."

A useful member was perhaps to be defined as one who would originate
nothing, and always vote with Mr. Bulstrode.

The medical aversion to Lydgate was hardly disguised now.  Neither Dr.
Sprague nor Dr. Minchin said that he disliked Lydgate's knowledge, or
his disposition to improve treatment: what they disliked was his
arrogance, which nobody felt to be altogether deniable.  They implied
that he was insolent, pretentious, and given to that reckless
innovation for the sake of noise and show which was the essence of the
charlatan.

The word charlatan once thrown on the air could not be let drop.  In
those days the world was agitated about the wondrous doings of Mr. St.
John Long, "noblemen and gentlemen" attesting his extraction of a fluid
like mercury from the temples of a patient.

Mr. Toller remarked one day, smilingly, to Mrs. Taft, that "Bulstrode
had found a man to suit him in Lydgate; a charlatan in religion is sure
to like other sorts of charlatans."

"Yes, indeed, I can imagine," said Mrs. Taft, keeping the number of
thirty stitches carefully in her mind all the while; "there are so many
of that sort.  I remember Mr. Cheshire, with his irons, trying to make
people straight when the Almighty had made them crooked."

"No, no," said Mr. Toller, "Cheshire was all right--all fair and above
board.  But there's St. John Long--that's the kind of fellow we call a
charlatan, advertising cures in ways nobody knows anything about: a
fellow who wants to make a noise by pretending to go deeper than other
people.  The other day he was pretending to tap a man's brain and get
quicksilver out of it."

"Good gracious! what dreadful trifling with people's constitutions!"
said Mrs. Taft.

After this, it came to be held in various quarters that Lydgate played
even with respectable constitutions for his own purposes, and how much
more likely that in his flighty experimenting he should make sixes and
sevens of hospital patients.  Especially it was to be expected, as the
landlady of the Tankard had said, that he would recklessly cut up their
dead bodies.  For Lydgate having attended Mrs. Goby, who died
apparently of a heart-disease not very clearly expressed in the
symptoms, too daringly asked leave of her relatives to open the body,
and thus gave an offence quickly spreading beyond Parley Street, where
that lady had long resided on an income such as made this association
of her body with the victims of Burke and Hare a flagrant insult to her
memory.

Affairs were in this stage when Lydgate opened the subject of the
Hospital to Dorothea.  We see that he was bearing enmity and silly
misconception with much spirit, aware that they were partly created by
his good share of success.

"They will not drive me away," he said, talking confidentially in Mr.
Farebrother's study.  "I have got a good opportunity here, for the ends
I care most about; and I am pretty sure to get income enough for our
wants.  By-and-by I shall go on as quietly as possible: I have no
seductions now away from home and work.  And I am more and more
convinced that it will be possible to demonstrate the homogeneous
origin of all the tissues.  Raspail and others are on the same track,
and I have been losing time."

"I have no power of prophecy there," said Mr. Farebrother, who had been
puffing at his pipe thoughtfully while Lydgate talked; "but as to the
hostility in the town, you'll weather it if you are prudent."

"How am I to be prudent?" said Lydgate, "I just do what comes before me
to do.  I can't help people's ignorance and spite, any more than
Vesalius could.  It isn't possible to square one's conduct to silly
conclusions which nobody can foresee."

"Quite true; I didn't mean that.  I meant only two things.  One is,
keep yourself as separable from Bulstrode as you can: of course, you
can go on doing good work of your own by his help; but don't get tied.
Perhaps it seems like personal feeling in me to say so--and there's a
good deal of that, I own--but personal feeling is not always in the
wrong if you boil it down to the impressions which make it simply an
opinion."

"Bulstrode is nothing to me," said Lydgate, carelessly, "except on
public grounds.  As to getting very closely united to him, I am not
fond enough of him for that.  But what was the other thing you meant?"
said Lydgate, who was nursing his leg as comfortably as possible, and
feeling in no great need of advice.

"Why, this.  Take care--experto crede--take care not to get hampered
about money matters.  I know, by a word you let fall one day, that you
don't like my playing at cards so much for money.  You are right enough
there.  But try and keep clear of wanting small sums that you haven't
got.  I am perhaps talking rather superfluously; but a man likes to
assume superiority over himself, by holding up his bad example and
sermonizing on it."

Lydgate took Mr. Farebrother's hints very cordially, though he would
hardly have borne them from another man.  He could not help remembering
that he had lately made some debts, but these had seemed inevitable,
and he had no intention now to do more than keep house in a simple way.
The furniture for which he owed would not want renewing; nor even the
stock of wine for a long while.

Many thoughts cheered him at that time--and justly.  A man conscious of
enthusiasm for worthy aims is sustained under petty hostilities by the
memory of great workers who had to fight their way not without wounds,
and who hover in his mind as patron saints, invisibly helping.  At
home, that same evening when he had been chatting with Mr. Farebrother,
he had his long legs stretched on the sofa, his head thrown back, and
his hands clasped behind it according to his favorite ruminating
attitude, while Rosamond sat at the piano, and played one tune after
another, of which her husband only knew (like the emotional elephant he
was!) that they fell in with his mood as if they had been melodious
sea-breezes.

There was something very fine in Lydgate's look just then, and any one
might have been encouraged to bet on his achievement.  In his dark eyes
and on his mouth and brow there was that placidity which comes from the
fulness of contemplative thought--the mind not searching, but
beholding, and the glance seeming to be filled with what is behind it.

Presently Rosamond left the piano and seated herself on a chair close
to the sofa and opposite her husband's face.

"Is that enough music for you, my lord?" she said, folding her hands
before her and putting on a little air of meekness.

"Yes, dear, if you are tired," said Lydgate, gently, turning his eyes
and resting them on her, but not otherwise moving.  Rosamond's presence
at that moment was perhaps no more than a spoonful brought to the lake,
and her woman's instinct in this matter was not dull.


"What is absorbing you?" she said, leaning forward and bringing her
face nearer to his.

He moved his hands and placed them gently behind her shoulders.

"I am thinking of a great fellow, who was about as old as I am three
hundred years ago, and had already begun a new era in anatomy."

"I can't guess," said Rosamond, shaking her head.  "We used to play at
guessing historical characters at Mrs. Lemon's, but not anatomists."

"I'll tell you.  His name was Vesalius.  And the only way he could get
to know anatomy as he did, was by going to snatch bodies at night, from
graveyards and places of execution."

"Oh!" said Rosamond, with a look of disgust on her pretty face, "I am
very glad you are not Vesalius.  I should have thought he might find
some less horrible way than that."

"No, he couldn't," said Lydgate, going on too earnestly to take much
notice of her answer.  "He could only get a complete skeleton by
snatching the whitened bones of a criminal from the gallows, and
burying them, and fetching them away by bits secretly, in the dead of
night."

"I hope he is not one of your great heroes," said Rosamond, half
playfully, half anxiously, "else I shall have you getting up in the
night to go to St. Peter's churchyard.  You know how angry you told me
the people were about Mrs. Goby.  You have enemies enough already."

"So had Vesalius, Rosy.  No wonder the medical fogies in Middlemarch
are jealous, when some of the greatest doctors living were fierce upon
Vesalius because they had believed in Galen, and he showed that Galen
was wrong.  They called him a liar and a poisonous monster.  But the
facts of the human frame were on his side; and so he got the better of
them."

"And what happened to him afterwards?" said Rosamond, with some
interest.

"Oh, he had a good deal of fighting to the last.  And they did
exasperate him enough at one time to make him burn a good deal of his
work.  Then he got shipwrecked just as he was coming from Jerusalem to
take a great chair at Padua.  He died rather miserably."

There was a moment's pause before Rosamond said, "Do you know, Tertius,
I often wish you had not been a medical man."

"Nay, Rosy, don't say that," said Lydgate, drawing her closer to him.
"That is like saying you wish you had married another man."

"Not at all; you are clever enough for anything: you might easily have
been something else.  And your cousins at Quallingham all think that
you have sunk below them in your choice of a profession."

"The cousins at Quallingham may go to the devil!" said Lydgate, with
scorn.  "It was like their impudence if they said anything of the sort
to you."

"Still," said Rosamond, "I do _not_ think it is a nice profession,
dear."  We know that she had much quiet perseverance in her opinion.

"It is the grandest profession in the world, Rosamond," said Lydgate,
gravely.  "And to say that you love me without loving the medical man
in me, is the same sort of thing as to say that you like eating a peach
but don't like its flavor.  Don't say that again, dear, it pains me."

"Very well, Doctor Grave-face," said Rosy, dimpling, "I will declare in
future that I dote on skeletons, and body-snatchers, and bits of things
in phials, and quarrels with everybody, that end in your dying
miserably."

"No, no, not so bad as that," said Lydgate, giving up remonstrance and
petting her resignedly.

 This chapter jumps from one minor character to another, describing the impressions of average Middlemarchers about Lydgate's work as a doctor. Opinion is divided - most people acknowledge that he's smart, but the fact that Lydgate refuses to prescribe medicine that isn't needed makes some people distrust him. But his new-fangled methods work. He has a lot of successful cases, sometimes for patients who had gone first to a different doctor who prescribed the wrong thing. Naturally, this doesn't make him popular with the rest of the doctors in the area. So, none of the other doctors in Middlemarch will help out at the new hospital, which just means that Lydgate will have to work harder and longer hours. But that means giving up other jobs that would pay him better. The hospital is, after all, a charitable institution, and not all the patients there can pay. Farebrother and Lydgate are still good friends, and Farebrother hints that Lydgate should keep himself a little more distant from Bulstrode. Farebrother also hints that Lydgate should learn a lesson from his own mistakes, and be careful not to get into debt. Bulstrode is powerful, but not all that well liked, and Lydgate's association with Bulstrode at the hospital could hurt his chances. The chapter closes with a discussion between Rosamond and Lydgate about his work. She says she hates the medical profession, which obviously hurts his feelings. But she's just so darn cute when she says it, he can't really take her seriously. She doesn't hate medicine, really, just the fact that it keeps him busy and away from her!

