The Price of Innovation — Middlemarch

Opposition to the New Fever Hospital spreads from ministerial jealousy to the illimitable range of objections drawn from ignorance and the Tankard's brandy wisdom. Mrs. Dollop insists Lydgate will poison patients to cut them up; doctors' dinners turn Lydgate's refusal to dispense drugs into an attack on gentlemanly practice; Mawmsey hears that hard-working medical men overdose the king's lieges to earn bread at the shop counter.

Fortune's testimonials complicate the fight. Lydgate corrects Minchin's tumor diagnosis of Nancy Nash into cramp, yet Churchyard Lane keeps the tumor legend alive at the Tankard; Trumbull survives pneumonia under expectant treatment and praises the method while peers call him crawling to Bulstrode. Every medical man in Middlemarch refuses to visit the fever hospital, and Bulstrode's name makes refusal look like principle rather than cowardice.

Lydgate tells Bulstrode they will work harder and the plan will flourish despite ministerial jealousy and Tankard legends. Farebrother warns him to stay separable from Bulstrode and not to get hampered about money or tied to a banker whose religion the town already distrusts; Lydgate remembers debts but dismisses fear while the town brands him charlatan and Burke-and-Hare butcher at the Tankard, the dinner table, and every minister's wife who repeats Mrs. Dollop's poison story.

At home Rosamond plays while Lydgate, serene after great aims, speaks of Vesalius snatching bones from gallows and dying miserably after shipwreck while she keeps time on the piano as if anatomy were a drawing-room anecdote. She says she often wishes he had not been a medical man; he answers that loving him without loving the doctor in him is like liking the peach but not its flavor. She dimples and teases about skeletons and quarrels; he pets her resignedly while reform ambition meets domestic music and gossip hardens into reputation before the fever hospital fight peaks, Rosamond's tastes outrun his income, and the town decides whether a reforming doctor is a saint, a fool, or a body-snatcher in respectable clothes while Rosamond's drawing-room tastes treat his vocation as an inconvenient flavor in the marriage peach and as gossip fuel at the Tankard tonight.

Bulstrode frames the fever hospital as dictatorial charity while every medical man refuses to visit; Lydgate accepts chief authority and tells Farebrother he will not be driven out. At home Rosamond plays while he speaks of Vesalius snatching bones from gallows and dying after shipwreck; she wishes he were not a doctor, and he answers that loving him without loving the physician in him is like liking the peach but not its flavour. Town gossip, professional pride, and domestic music thus share one evening while reform and reputation harden into opposing camps. The hospital and the marriage are already one argument, and neither will cool when the town starts talking politics.