there were differences which represented every social
shade between the polished moderation of Dr. Minchin and the trenchant assertion
of Mrs. Dollop, the landlady of the Tankard in Slaughter Lane.
    Mrs. Dollop became more and more convinced by her own asseveration, that
Doctor Lydgate meant to let the people die in the Hospital, if not to poison
them, for the sake of cutting them up without saying by your leave or with your
leave; for it was a known »fac« that he had wanted to cut up Mrs. Goby, as
respectable a woman as any in Parley Street, who had money in trust before her
marriage - a poor tale for a doctor, who if he was good for anything should know
what was the matter with you before you died, and not want to pry into your
inside after you were gone. If that was not reason, Mrs. Dollop wished to know
what was; but there was a prevalent feeling in her audience that her opinion was
a bulwark, and that if it were overthrown there would be no limits to the
cutting-up of bodies, as had been well seen in Burke and Hare with their
pitch-plaisters - such a hanging business as that was not wanted in Middlemarch!
    And let it not be supposed that opinion at the Tankard in Slaughter Lane was
unimportant to the medical profession: that old authentic public-house - the
original Tankard, known by the name of Dollop's - was the resort of a great
Benefit Club, which had some months before put to the vote whether its
long-standing medical man, »Doctor Gambit,« should not be cashiered in favour of
»this Doctor Lydgate,« who was capable of performing the most astonishing cures,
and rescuing people altogether given up by other practitioners. But the balance
had been turned against Lydgate by two members, who for some private reasons
held that this power of resuscitating persons as good as dead was an equivocal
recommendation, and might interfere with providential favours. In the course of
the year, however, there had been a change in the public sentiment, of which the
unanimity at Dollop's was an index.
    A good deal more than a year ago, before anything was known of Lydgate's
skill, the judgments on it had naturally been divided, depending on a sense of
likelihood, situated perhaps in the pit of the stomach or in the pineal gland,
and differing in its verdicts, but not the less valuable as a guide in the total
deficit of evidence. Patients who had chronic diseases or whose lives had long
been worn threadbare, like old Featherstone