Save
Lydgate, no doctor in fiction answers this critical demand, or seems
anything to me but a very stiff lay figure from the moment he is called
upon to bring his art into the story, or to figure, except as an
unprofessional personage.
Nor does this arise from poverty of types in the tribe of physicians.
The training of a doctor's life produces the most varied effects for
good or evil, as may chance, upon the human natures submitted to its
discipline, so that I think any thoughtful medical man will tell you
that there is a more notable individuality among his brethren in middle
life than among most of the people he encounters. As for the novelist's
effort--an inartistic one, it seems to me--to bring on his stage
representations of some especial kind of doctor, I have only a grim
smile to give, remembering Mr. Reade's grewsome medico in "Hard
Cash,"--a personation meant, I suppose, to present to the public a
certain irregular London doctor, but which, to the minds of most
physicians, reads like an elaborate advertisement of the man in
question.
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