Middlemarch and medicine
Part 2 of a look at George Eliot’s classic novel and the character of Dr. Tertius Lydgate
The high hopes and stifled ambitions of Dr. Tertius Lydgate in Middlemarch held more fascination for me than the life and ideals of Dorothea Brooke. In fact, though the two stories vie for the reader’s attention throughout the novel, the striking yet painful developments of Lydgate’s life in Middlemarch are masterfully rendered from beginning to end. Indeed, his ‘failures’ are relevant to the experiences of many professionals today. George Eliot’s ability to characterize both Lydgate and his wife Rosamond is evident in her precise descriptions of the two and in her wise and often witty general observations about marriage. Some of the passages I have chosen that describe Dr. Lydgate here will, I hope, make that clear
An independent-thinking outsider from a noble family in Northumberland, Lydgate is cast as the new doctor in town. Though he is poor of purse, he cuts a striking figure in Middlemarch where he is deemed “wonderfully clever,” handsome, and, most important, “a (well-connected) gentleman.” Believing that medicine is the most worthy of careers, his ambition is to become both a cuttingedge researcher and medical practitioner. At the same time, he is often aloof and dismissive, especially when opining upon the stupidities of his noodle-like, older medical colleagues. Educated in Paris, his “conceit,” as Eliot puts it, “was of the arrogant sort, never simpering, never impertinent, but massive in its claims and benevolently contemptuous.” One struggles to grasp such subtleties of phrasing, but there is no question that a combination of social class, intellect, and foreign experience foster Lydgate’s “arrogance.”
Initially, he spends his evenings happily conducting research into bodily tissues with his microscope. That activity alone, were it widely known, would have rendered him a dangerous figure to many Middlemarchians. He is driven by “an intellectual passion” for anatomy, pathology, and “the finely-adjusted mechanism in the human frame.” His hope is to “make a link in the chain of discovery,” following in the giant steps of medical researchers like Hershel and Bichet. But, more practically, he hopes to create a hospital for the town (beyond its regular infirmary), where improvements in medical understanding and treatment can be initiated and practiced. As one local observer notes with some awe, he “wants to raise the profession.” His ideas about “ventilation and diet,” along with treatments for fever, are a part of a fresh set of initiatives that he wishes to pursue as a doctor. Circa 1830, doctors were certainly important in the lives and health of most families, but they were not paid well, their opinions were often ill-based, and their practices were conformist and backward. While studies in anatomy and pathology were growing in importance among medical people, they were mistrusted by most of the public.
Lydgate is a reformer who is well aware of the conservatism of Middlemarchians and the backwardness of his colleagues. His reform views are. However, limited to medicine. In Eliot’s words, “He had his half-century before him instead of behind him, and he had come to Middlemarch bent on doing many things that were not directly fitted to make his fortune or even secure him a good income.” True to his progressive thinking and willingness to take risks, he works pro bono on the plans for the local hospital and is far too passive in collecting the fees owed to him by his patients. As well, being an attractive and eligible young man, he is soon caught up in the social life of Middlemarch. There he finds himself attracted to and flirting with the very attractive and accomplishedRosamondVincy,the daughter of Middlemarch’s mayor. A romantic at heart, Lydgate is an easy catch for “Rosy” who above all wants to marry someone who is not from the town but who is an attractive match for her (untested) dreams.
While a great success at first, the marriage soon becomes a trial for both of them. Preparations for the marriage put Lydgate deeply in debt though he economized as best he could in setting up a comfortable house for Rosamond and himself. A good house, up-to-date fixtures and the payment of capable servants left him deeper in debt than he could have imagined. Warned in his early days to “take care not to be hampered about money matters,” he nevertheless made himself vulnerable to the power of debt and the shame of neediness. For a time his busy medical pursuits kept him inattentive to such matters though he did try to economize in his fashion.
However, once that indebtedness caught up with him, once the Middlemarch merchants presented their yearly bills, he became moody and at times “miserable” at home, all the more because Rosamond insisted on holding her own views about how to deal with the problem once she became aware of it. Nor does she hesitate to act on her views, feeling them strongly and trusting to the good sense she finds in them. “Lydgate,” in Eliot’s comic image, “relied much on the psychological difference between what for the sake of variety I will call the goose and the gander; especially on the innate submissiveness of the goose as beautifully corresponding to the strength of the gander.” How wrong-headed he was in underestimating his wife’s willingness to be submissive and passive. And how amazed he was to find himself powerless before her “terrible tenacity” in following her own views and strategies. The result was a heated, sometimes voiceless, battlefield in the Lydgate parlour.
Middlemarch succeeds brilliantly on two counts: first in describing Lydgate’s slow descent into debt and imminent poverty and secondly in dramatizing the developing psychological tension between husband and wife. What began as a perfect marriage evolved into something quite other. First there was a still-born child. But more movingly, “Between him and her indeed there was that total missing of each other’s mental track, which is too evidently possible even between persons who are continually thinking about each other.”
Improving circumstances eventually allowed Lydgate to escape his debts and achieve some degree of balance in his relationship with Rosamond. He became a fashionable doctor with “an excellent practice” in London. They had four children, but their life together was never the same as it was in the beginning. In terms of outward appearances, so important to Rosamond in particular, it looked like a very good marriage. But when measuring against his great aspirations as a medical researcher, all he had to show in the end was a treatise on “Gout, a disease which has a good deal of wealth on its side.” He died when he was “only fifty,” after catering politely to rich patients and he missed out on much of the promise that had brought him to Middlemarch in the first place. Hence, he “always regarded himself as a failure; he had not done what he once meant to do.” For her part Rosamond flourishes like “the bird of paradise that she resembled,” holding her ground and fulfilling the role of charming wife, capable mother and social figure. One feels Eliot’s masterly hand as she develops this fascinating relationship.
Marriage, Eliot writes in her “Finale,” is “a great beginning,” but it can also be “a bourne.” The “home epic” can lead to “irremediable loss.” In Middlemarch we experience that marriage and come to feel deeply for both Dr. Lydgate and the beautiful Rosamond. In how many marriages today do such attractive foundations lead to such frustrating and unfulfilled results?