This essay originally appeared in The Tearoom by . I've never liked doctors. As a writer, I am both overly sensitive to my own mortality and something of a hypochondriac; I find most American physicians either unpleasant or downright terrifying, and I'll avoid doctors at all costs until a visit becomes absolutely necessary.
As a writer, I am both overly sensitive to my own mortality and something of a hypochondriac; I find most American physicians either unpleasant or downright terrifying, and I'll avoid doctors at all costs until a visit becomes absolutely necessary. But one doctor has always had my heart: Tertius Lydgate—literature's first modern doctor. Until the 1874 publication of George Eliot's Middlemarch, few works of literature had ever taken on the topic of medicine.
Until the 1874 publication of George Eliot's Middlemarch, few works of literature had ever taken on the topic of medicine.