ABSTRACT
Middlemarch has a special place in the affections of medical readers because it is a great novel which features a doctor as one of its central characters. Unfortunately for our professional pride, Dr Lydgate falls rather short of the mark as a hero, in spite of a promising start. Nevertheless, his story is a compelling one from which there is much to learn about how to be a doctor and how to be human. But our unfortunate colleague is not the only fascin ating person you will meet when you read Middlemarch. It is a substantial novel of nearly 900 pages (don't be afraid), which inter weaves a number of stories about people of different social status living in or near the fictitious Midlands town of Middlemarch in the early 1830s. Virginia Woolf famously called it 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'.
