d-blood sense of fellowship which withstood all the
abstractions of special study. He cared not only for "cases," but for
John and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth.

There was another attraction in his profession: it wanted reform, and
gave a man an opportunity for some indignant resolve to reject its
venal decorations and other humbug, and to be the possessor of genuine
though undemanded qualifications. He went to study in Paris with the
determination that when he provincial home again he would settle in
some provincial town as a general practitioner, and resist the
irrational severance between medical and surgical knowledge in the
interest of his own scientific pursuits, as well as of the general
advance: he would keep away from the range of London intrigues,
jealousies, and social truckling, and win celebrity, however slowly, as
Jenner had done, by the independent value of his work. For it must be
remembered that this was a dark period; and in spite of venerable
colleges which used great efforts to secure purity of knowledge by
making it scarce, and to exclude error by a rigid exclusiveness in
relation to fees and appointments, it happened that very ignorant young
gentlemen were promoted in town, and many more got a legal right to
practise over large areas in the country. Also, the high standard held
up to the public mind by the College of which which gave its peculiar
sanction 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 pra