The Case of Tertius Lydgate

THE CASE OF TERTIUS LYDGATE ROBERTE. STREETER* One of the most engrossing portraits of a medical man in English fiction is that of Tertius Lydgate in George Eliot's Middlemarch. Eager to develop a new hospital for the treatment of contagious diseases, intelligently aware of current medical research, resourceful in ministering to his patients, Lydgate appears to be a model practitioner. Nevertheless, his career collapses as he makes an ill-advised marriage and gradually loses professional standing in the community. What has gone wrong? His creator George Eliot supplies the diagnosis . Lydgate is in full command of his scientific and clinical life: there he is knowledgeable, responsible, and responsive. But he is fatally lacking in sensitivity to the nuances of the social world he has entered. He misreads the characters, the actions, and the motives of the people among whom he moves. Most notably, he errs in choosing the beautiful but light-minded Rosamond Vincy to be his wife. Her charm during courtship leads Lydgate to believe that Rosamond will be a passively ornamental adjunct to a busy doctor: she proves to possess a whim of iron. Of course, if Lydgate had been able to read, with care and pleasure, the novel Middlemarch in which he is only a character, his obtuseness to social and human realities might have been diminished. One suspects that George Eliot, had she been free to prescribe rather than describe, would have advised Lydgate, after a hard day at the surgery, to relax with a good novel instead of with the artless prattle of Miss Vincy. In any event, the fate of Lydgate is a cautionary tale: all of us, whatever our professions, need all the help we can get in interpreting the welter of circumstances—symptoms, symbols, what have you—that make up our worlds of work and of personal relations. For the past 2 centuries the writers of novels have served as lay experts in sorting *Professor Emeritus, Department of English Language and Literature, University of Chicago. Address: 22 Circle Drive, Dune Acres, Chesterton, Indiana 46304.© 1989 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 0031-5982/89/3202-0624101.00 Perspectives in Biohgy and Medicine, 32, 2 · Winter 1989 \ 1 7 1 things out for us. In doing so they have not attempted to develop theories of social interaction, to propagandize for moral positions, or to invent new psychologies. At their best they have created fictional worlds which, as we read, alert us to the complexity and unpredictability of the world we inhabit. The working novelist is the sworn enemy of the pat formula and the facile answer; thus, the products of his or her imagination should be of particular interest to the inquisitive doctor. One of the most celebrated of American novelists offered, to tyros in his trade, advice useful to people in many professions: try to be one of those persons on whom nothing is lost. Let me propose, then, an agreeable and informal kind of continuing education for the practitioner wishing to share the range of perspectives offered in works of the imagination. Read, or reread, some of the 20 novels on the accompanying list. This does not pretend to be a definitive honor roll of the Twenty Greatest Novels in World Literature, or even in English and American literature. The novels recommended here were chosen primarily for their possible relevance to the concerns of men and women engaged in a demanding profession practiced within an explicit social setting. Thus, most of these novels present a recognizable version of what Trollope called "the way we live now"; the list does not tap the rich trove of narrative fantasy. However, at the other extreme I have tried to exclude works that deal too directly with medical matters. Therefore, that splendid novel Middlemarch, which supplies a caption for these remarks, is not included in the list. Two or three other considerations shaping the list merit mention. I have confined the list to works composed in English, not from any chauvinistic preference for the Anglo-American fictional tradition, but from the truism that readers interpret most perceptively the linguistic signs of their own language. I have tried to avoid works of immense...