![]() ![]() ![]() Also, among the “experiment in ecstasy” Will Ladislaw has undertaken is one that involves “ma himself ill with doses of opium”-though “othing greatly original had resulted from these measures and the effects of the opium had convinced him that there was an entire dissimilarity between his constitution and De Quincey’s” (83). ![]() Then again, when Bulstrode says that his “imperfect health has induced to give some attention to those palliative resources which the divine mercy has placed within our reach” (125) he is almost certainly referring to opium. In Middlemarch, rather more harmless habits prevail thus, Lady Chettam is “addicted” to “homemade bitters” (90) and Fred Vincy to gambling (Eliot 1994, 670–72). These were the days, after all, of the infamous Burke and Hare who murdered sixteen people and sold the bodies to an Edinburgh anatomist for dissection purposes (see Richardson 1987, 132–47).Įliot’s narratives of (what we would now term) addiction are for the most part “stories of ruin” (McCormack 2000, 56): one thinks of Molly Farren in Silas Marner who tragically overdoses on laudanum, or of various “pathetic minor characters” who, like Raffles, “drink themselves into oblivion or death” (Warhol 2002, 100–01). The people of Middlemarch, however, react to Lydgate’s hospital plans with considerable fear, believing that what he really wants to do is “try experiments” on them and “kill a few people for charity” (Eliot 1994, 92). In this focus on fevers, he is a (fictional) successor to Broussais (see Foucault 1973, 174–99) and an ally of British sanitary reformers like Edwin Chadwick and Thomas Southwood Smith, whose efforts would eventually result in the 1848 Public Health Act (see Pelling 2006, 227–28). The “nature of fever or fevers” is one of Lydgate’s special interests (Eliot 1994, 147): the new hospital that he and Bulstrode are planning to build, envisioned as “the nucleus of a medical school” (124), is meant to be dedicated to “fever in all its forms Lydgate was to be chief medical superintendent, that he might have free authority to pursue all comparative investigations which his studies, particularly in Paris, had shown him the importance of …” (453). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |