Why I read Middlemarch?

The photo is my “dream” house; one will be greeted by a wall of books coming up from the stairs; one doesn’t have to go to the “study room” to see the books.  Books are supposed to be everywhere: desk, table, bed or even floor.

I am still reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch; with the speed at which I have been reading, I probably can never finish it.  I have the Middlemarch book around in the house, but I read it mostly in my iPads or Kindles, two of each.

I have been reading more and more eBooks or iBooks. I even opened an account with Overdrive, so I can borrow eBooks from the libraries.  But I still cannot give up the print books. 

There are doctors and medicine in Middlemarch. When she writes about Dr. Lydgate; she writes as if she were a doctor herself or as if she knew why or how I like medicine; I was amazed, but then I learned she read about medicine; she read Lancet.  She had Dr. Lydgate studied at Edinburgh, London and Paris as she learnt it from Lancet that the three cities were the major medical centers in her days.  While visiting Oxford during the time she was working on Middlemarch, she watched a neurologist (or a neuroanatomist, I doubt there was neurosurgeon in her days) dissects the brain.

She also studied how the medical care was delivered and how doctors practicing medicine in early 1800s when the story was supposed to happen.  I’ll show you the following two paragraphs from Middlemarch to make a point.

“Lydgate felt a triumphant delight in his studies, and something like pity for those less lucky men who were not of his profession. . . . I should never have been happy in any profession that did not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good warm contact with my neighbors.  There is nothing like the medical profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the old fogies in the parish too.”  (Lydgate read far into the smallest hour, like I do.)

“In short, Dr. Spragg had weights, and might be expected to grapple with a disease and throw it; while Dr. Minchin might be better able to detect it lurking and to circumvent it.  They enjoyed about equally the mysterious privilege of medical reputation, and concealed with much etiquette their contempt for each other's skill.”