“I hope he is not one of your great heroes,”
said Rosamond, half playfully, half anxiously, “else
I shall have you getting up in the night to go to
St. Peter’s churchyard. You know how angry
you told me the people were about Mrs. Goby.
You have enemies enough already.”
“So had Vesalius, Rosy. No wonder the
medical fogies in Middlemarch are jealous, when some
of the greatest doctors living were fierce upon Vesalius
because they had believed in Galen, and he showed
that Galen was wrong. They called him a liar
and a poisonous monster. But the facts of the
human frame were on his side; and so he got the better
of them.”
“And what happened to him afterwards?”
said Rosamond, with some interest.
“Oh, he had a good deal of fighting to the last.
And they did exasperate him enough at one time to
make him burn a good deal of his work. Then
he got shipwrecked just as he was coming from Jerusalem
to take a great chair at Padua. He died rather
miserably.”
There was a moment’s pause before Rosamond said,
“Do you know, Tertius, I often wish you had
not been a medical man.”
“Nay, Rosy, don’t say that,” said
Lydgate, drawing her closer to him. “That
is like saying you wish you had married another man.”
“Not at all; you are clever enough for anything:
you might easily have been something else. And
your cousins at Quallingham all think that you have
sunk below them in your choice of a profession.”
“The cousins at Quallingham may go to the devil!”
said Lydgate, with scorn. “It was like
their impudence if they said anything of the sort
to you.”
“Still,” said Rosamond, “I do not
think it is a nice profession, dear.”
We know that she had much quiet perseverance in her
opinion.
“It is the grandest profession in the world,
Rosamond,” said Lydgate, gravely. “And
to say that you love me without loving the medical
man in me, is the same sort of thing as to say that
you like eating a peach but don’t like its flavor.
Don’t say that again, dear, it pains me.”
“Very well, Doctor Grave-face,” said Rosy,
dimpling, “I will declare in future that I dote
on skeletons, and body-snatchers, and bits of things
in phials, and quarrels with everybody, that end in
your dying miserably.”
“No, no, not so bad as that,” said Lydgate,
giving up remonstrance and petting her resignedly.
Pues no podemos haber aquello que
queremos, queramos
aquello que podremos.
Since we cannot get what we like,
let us like
what we can get.
—Spanish
Proverb.
While Lydgate, safely married and with the Hospital
under his command, felt himself struggling for Medical
Reform against Middlemarch, Middlemarch was becoming
more and more conscious of the national struggle for
another kind of Reform.
