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Doctors were not always powerful. In the 19th century their social status was low, lower than that of the clergy or the legal profession. They were, of course, able to have a reasonable social status, but only if they were well connected, as was Mr Lydgate, the surgeon in George Eliot's Middlemarch, who was 'one of the Lydgates of Northumberland, really well connected', although, as Lady Chettam pointed out, 'one does not expect it in a practitioner of that kind. For my own part I like a medical man more on the footing of a servant, they are often all the cleverer'. Middlemarch (now available in its entirety online, thanks to the wonderful Project Gutenberg) was published in 1871, and describes perhaps better than any other book the ambivalent, but rising, status of the doctor in Britain during its first phase of modernisation"
