That opposition to the New Fever Hospital which Lydgate had sketched to Dorothea was, like other oppositions, to be viewed in many different lights. He regarded it as a mixture of jealousy and dunderheaded prejudice. Mr. Bulstrode saw in it not only medical jealousy but a determination to thwart himself, prompted mainly by a hatred of that vital religion of which he had striven to be an effectual lay representative—a hatred which certainly found pretexts apart from religion such as were only too easy to find in the entanglements of human action. These might be called the ministerial views. But oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command, which need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw forever on the vasts of ignorance.
—George Eliot, Middlemarch
It seems progress always brings out the wingnuts and conspiracy theorists. Today it’s “death panels.” In Lydgate’s case, it was rumoured that the purpose of his hospital was to collect cadavers to indulge his taste for dissection. Who says the classics aren’t relevant any more?
