Perhaps that was a more cheerful time for observers and theorizers than

the present; we are apt to think it the finest era of the world when

America was beginning to be discovered, when a bold sailor, even if he

were wrecked, might alight on a new kingdom; and about 1829 the dark

territories of Pathology were a fine America for a spirited young

adventurer. Lydgate was ambitious above all to contribute towards

enlarging the scientific, rational basis of his profession. The more

he became interested in special questions of disease, such as the

nature of fever or fevers, the more keenly he felt the need for that

fundamental knowledge of structure which just at the beginning of the

century had been illuminated by the brief and glorious career of

Bichat, who died when he was only one-and-thirty, but, like another

Alexander, left a realm large enough for many heirs. That great

Frenchman first carried out the conception that living bodies,

fundamentally considered, are not associations of organs which can be

understood by studying them first apart, and then as it were federally;

but must be regarded as consisting of certain primary webs or tissues,

out of which the various organs--brain, heart, lungs, and so on--are

compacted, as the various accommodations of a house are built up in

various proportions of wood, iron, stone, brick, zinc, and the rest,

each material having its peculiar composition and proportions. No man,

one sees, can understand and estimate the entire structure or its

parts--what are its frailties and what its repairs, without knowing the

nature of the materials. And the conception wrought out by Bichat,

with his detailed study of the different tissues, acted necessarily on

medical questions as the turning of gas-light would act on a dim,

oil-lit street, showing new connections and hitherto hidden facts of

structure which must be taken into account in considering the symptoms

of maladies and the action of medicaments. But results which depend on

human conscience and intelligence work slowly, and now at the end of

1829, most medical practice was still strutting or shambling along the

old paths, and there was still scientific work to be done which might

have seemed to be a direct sequence of Bichat's. This great seer did

not go beyond the consideration of the tissues as ultimate facts in the

living organism, marking the limit of anatomical analysis; but it was

open to another mind to say, have not these structures some common

basis from which they have all started, as your sarsnet, gauze, net,

satin, and velvet from the raw cocoon? Here would be another light, as

of oxy-hydrogen, showing the very grain of things, and revising all

former explanations. Of this sequence to Bichat's work, already

vibrating along many currents of the European mind, Lydgate was

enamoured; he longed to demonstrate the more intimate relations of

living structure, and help to define men's thought more accurately

after the true order. The work had not yet been done, but only

prepared for those who knew how to use the preparation. What was the

primitive tissue? In that way Lydgate put the question--not quite in

the way required by the awaiting answer; but such missing of the right

word befalls many seekers. And he counted on quiet intervals to be

watchfully seized, for taking up the threads of investigation--on many

hints to be won from diligent application, not only of the scalpel, but

of the microscope, which research had begun to use again with new

enthusiasm of reliance. Such was Lydgate's plan of his future: to do

good small work for Middlemarch, and great work for the world.




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