The Making of a Doctor — Middlemarch

Eliot pauses the web to introduce Lydgate properly, warning that neighbors already love, envy, ridicule, or plan to marry him while he remains virtually unknown. Middlemarch expects great things yet cannot imagine he equals the established physicians. He is twenty-seven, ambitious, and not like the common county doctor. As a boy he read everything; as a youth he pulled down a dusty Cyclopaedia, opened Anatomy, and saw the heart's valves as finely adjusted mechanism. Before he climbed down, vocation had come: an intellectual passion that would not cool.

He studied in London, Edinburgh, and Paris convinced medicine could unite science and social good. He planned reforms, refused to dispense drugs for profit, and dreamed of extending Bichat's tissue work in provincial Middlemarch while doing good small work locally. Pathology in 1829 was still a dark America for a spirited adventurer; he meant to link daily observation with far-reaching inquiry through microscope and scalpel. Eliot notes how youthful ardor cools imperceptibly in middle age, but Lydgate means to avoid that fate. His conceit is massive and benevolently contemptuous; his blind spots include furniture, women, and wanting his birth known without telling it. He once thought of joining the Saint Simonianists in Paris to turn them against their own doctrines.

Paris also gave him galvanic experiments and a melodrama at the Porte Saint Martin, where the actress Laure stabbed her husband on stage for real. Lydgate leaped to the stage, nursed her, adored her, pursued her to Avignon, and asked her to marry him with reverent tenderness. She answered calmly: her foot slipped on purpose; she wearied of her husband and would never have another. He saw her among stupid criminals and returned to galvanism shaken.

He vowed a strictly scientific view of women, trusting his now experienced judgment. Eliot asks that his faults not withdraw our interest, for character is still unfolding. No one in Middlemarch is likely to know this story of impetuous folly and chivalrous kindness. The town will swallow him through vague suppositions instead. Lydgate's confidence is real; so is the risk that passion and prejudice will outrun the reforms he means to live by.