There was another attraction in his profession: it wanted reform, and
gave a man an opportunity for some indignant resolve to reject its
venal decorations and other humbug, and to be the possessor of genuine
though undemanded qualifications. He went to study in Paris with the
determination that when he came home again he would settle in some
provincial town as a general practitioner, and resist the
irrational severance between medical and surgical knowledge in the
interest of his own scientific pursuits, as well as of the general
advance: he would keep away from the range of London intrigues,
jealousies, and social truckling, and win celebrity, however slowly, as
Jenner had done, by the independent value of his work. For it must be
remembered that this was a dark period; and in spite of venerable
colleges which used great efforts to secure purity of knowledge by
making it scarce, and to exclude error by a rigid exclusiveness in
relation to fees and appointments, it happened that very ignorant young
gentlemen were promoted in town, and many more got a legal right to
practise over large areas in the country. Also, the high standard held
up to the public mind by the College of Physicians, which gave its peculiar
sanction to the expensive and highly rarefied medical instruction
obtained by graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, did not hinder quackery
from having an excellent time of it; for since professional practice
chiefly consisted in giving a great many drugs, the public inferred
that it might be better off with more drugs still, if they could only
be got cheaply, and hence swallowed large cubic measures of physic
prescribed by unscrupulous ignorance which had taken no degrees.
Considering that statistics had not yet embraced a calculation as to
the number of ignorant or canting doctors which absolutely must exist
in the teeth of all changes, it seemed to Lydgate that a change in the
units was the most direct mode of changing the numbers. He meant to be
a unit who would make a certain amount of difference towards that
spreading change which would one day tell appreciably upon the
averages, and in the mean time have the pleasure of making an
advantageous difference to the viscera of his own patients. But he did
not simply aim at a more genuine kind of practice than was common. He
was ambitious of a wider effect: he was fired with the possibility that
he might work out the proof of an anatomical conception and make a link
in the chain of discovery.
Does it seem incongruous to you that a Middlemarch surgeon should dream
of himself as a discoverer? Most of us, indeed, know little of the
great originators until they have been lifted up among the
constellations and already rule our fates. But that Herschel, for
example, who "broke the barriers of the heavens"--did he not once play
a provincial church-organ, and give music-lessons to stumbling
pianists? Each of those Shining Ones had to walk on the earth among
neighbors who perhaps thought much more of his gait and his garments
than of anything which was to give him a title to everlasting fame:
each of them had his little local personal history sprinkled with small
temptations and sordid cares, which made the retarding friction of his
course towards final companionship with the immortals. Lydgate was not
blind to the dangers of such friction, but he had plenty of confidence
in his resolution to avoid it as far as possible: being
seven-and-twenty, he felt himself experienced. And he was not going to
have his vanities provoked by contact with the showy worldly successes
of the capital, but to live among people who could hold no rivalry with
that pursuit of a great idea which was to be a twin object with the
assiduous practice of his profession. There was fascination in the
hope that the two purposes would illuminate each other: the careful
observation and inference which was his daily work, the use of the lens
to further his judgment in special cases, would further his thought as
an instrument of larger inquiry. Was not this the typical pre-eminence
of his profession? He would be a good Middlemarch doctor, and by that
very means keep himself in the track of far-reaching investigation. On
one point he may fairly claim approval at this particular stage of his
career: he did not mean to imitate those philanthropic models who make
a profit out of poisonous pickles to support themselves while they are
exposing adulteration, or hold shares in a gambling-hell that they may
have leisure to represent the cause of public morality. He intended to
begin in his own case some particular reforms which were quite
certainly within his reach, and much less of a problem than the
demonstrating of an anatomical conception. One of these reforms was to
act stoutly on the strength of a recent legal decision, and simply
prescribe, without dispensing drugs or taking percentage from
druggists. This was an innovation for one who had chosen to adopt the
style of general practitioner in a country town, and would be felt as
offensive criticism by his professional brethren. But Lydgate meant to
innovate in his treatment also, and he was wise enough to see that the
best security for his practising honestly according to his belief was
to get rid of systematic temptations to the contrary.