Middlemarch

Lydgate’s Correct Diagnosis and Treatment of Nancy Nash

Lydgate’s Correct Diagnosis and Treatment of Nancy Nash

When Nancy presents herself at the Infirmary, it happens to be one of Lydgate’s days on duty. After questioning and examining her, Lydgate quietly informs the house-surgeon, “It’s not tumor: it’s cramp.” He prescribes a blister and a steel mixture, advises her to go home and rest, and gives her a note for Mrs. Larcher certifying that she is in need of good food. Nancy’s condition initially worsens portentously—the discomfort simply migrates with angrier pain—but Lydgate is subsequently fetched to her attic and continues to attend her at home for a fortnight. Under his treatment she recovers fully and returns to work.

Persistent Misdiagnosis Narrative and Minchin’s Refusal to Correct Error

Persistent Misdiagnosis Narrative and Minchin’s Refusal to Correct Error

Even after Nancy’s recovery, the case continues to be described as one of tumor throughout Churchyard Lane and beyond, with Mrs. Larcher herself perpetuating the error. When Lydgate’s remarkable cure is mentioned to Dr. Minchin, he refuses to admit his original misdiagnosis, instead replying that he had seen it was a surgical case “not of a fatal kind.” Privately annoyed to learn from the house-surgeon—a young man not sorry to vex him—exactly what occurred, Minchin pronounces it indecent for a general practitioner to contradict a physician’s diagnosis so openly, and later agrees with Wrench that Lydgate is inattentive to etiquette. Lydgate himself does not boast of the correction or despise Minchin for it, but the report of a “wandering tumor” spreads through the town, and only the evident success of his treatment gradually overcomes prejudice against his methods.

Lydgate’s Successful Treatment of Pneumonia Patient Borthrop Trumbull

Lydgate’s Successful Treatment of Pneumonia Patient Borthrop Trumbull

In a more conspicuous case, the eloquent auctioneer Mr. Borthrop Trumbull is seized with pneumonia. Having been a patient of Mr. Peacock’s, he sends for Lydgate, whom he had previously expressed an intention to patronize. Trumbull, a robust man, strikes Lydgate as an ideal subject for trying the expectant theory—carefully watching the natural course of the disease to note its stages for future guidance. Lydgate discerns that Trumbull would enjoy being taken into his medical man’s confidence and treated as a partner in his own cure. He accordingly represents the illness as a chance to demonstrate, in clear delineation, all the phases of a pulmonary disorder, calling upon the auctioneer’s rare strength of mind to serve as a test of rational procedure. Trumbull enthusiastically embraces this view, endures abstinence from drugs with the support of the thermometer, the microscope, and a vocabulary suited to the dignity of his secretions, and on rising from his couch publicly credits Lydgate, ringing chimes on the phrase “expectant method” and praising his superior knowledge of the secrets of his profession.

Growing Medical Hostility Towards Lydgate in Middlemarch

Growing Medical Hostility Towards Lydgate in Middlemarch

Before the affair of Fred Vincy’s illness crystallized Wrench’s personal enmity, Lydgate had already become a source of professional irritation. As a new-comer threatening to become a rival, he served as a standing practical criticism of his hard-driven elders, who had had other things to do than busy themselves with untried notions. His practice spread in one or two quarters, and from the first his high family connections ensured that he was generally invited, so that the other medical men had to meet him at dinner in the best houses—an encounter not always conducive to mutual attachment. There was almost unanimous agreement among his colleagues that Lydgate was arrogant, yet ready, for the sake of ultimately predominating, to show a crawling subservience to Bulstrode. That Mr. Farebrother, a chief figure of the anti-Bulstrode party, always defended Lydgate and made a friend of him, was attributed to Farebrother’s unaccountable way of fighting on both sides.

Town Gossip and Autopsy Controversy Surrounding Lydgate

Town Gossip and Autopsy Controversy Surrounding Lydgate

The word “charlatan,” once thrown into circulation, proves impossible to retract. In an era already agitated by the wondrous doings of Mr. St. John Long—attested by noblemen and gentlemen—Mr. Toller remarks 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.” From such exchanges it comes to be held in various quarters that Lydgate plays even with respectable constitutions for his own purposes, and that he is all the more likely to make havoc of hospital patients. The landlady of the Tankard gives voice to the expectation that he would recklessly cut up their dead bodies—an impression fed when Lydgate, having attended Mrs. Goby, who died of a heart-disease not clearly expressed in her symptoms, too daringly asks leave of her relatives to open the body. The offense spreads quickly beyond Parley Street, where the lady had long resided on an income that made any association of her body with the victims of Burke and Hare seem a flagrant insult to her memory.