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.