Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

Altogether our visit to Yorkshire was extremely agreeable. Our host, Dr Allbutt, is a good, clever, graceful man, enough to enable one to be cheerful under the horrible smoke of ugly Leeds; and the fine hospital, which, he says, is admirably fitted for its purpose, is another mitigation. You would like to see the tasteful subdued ornamentation in the rooms which are to be sick-wards. Each physician is accumulating ornamental objects for his own ward – chromolithographs, etc. – such as will soothe sick eyes.

Comment

Comment

An earlier entry et seq. establishes that Eliot stayed from 14 to 16 September with Allbutt and dined with him and the Positivist John Henry Bridges:

Sept. 19. We returned from a visit to Yorkshire. On Monday we went to Leeds, and were received by Dr. Clifford Allbutt, with whom we stayed till the middle of the day on Wednesday. Then we went by train to Ilkley, and from thence took a carriage to Bolton. The weather had been grey for two days, but on this evening the sun shone out, and we had a delightful stroll before dinner, getting our first view of The Priory. On Thursday we spent the whole day in rambling through the woods to Barden Tower and back. Our comfortable little inn was the Red Lion [on the left bank of the Wharfe at Bolton Bridge on the Harrogate road (53.971848, -1.889798), not the Red Lion at Burnsall], and we were tempted to lengthen our stay. But on Friday morning the sky was threatening, so we started for Newark.

Wikipedia has what seems an alternative interpretation of the hospital art:

Though completed in 1868, it had no patients for the first year. Instead it actually housed a temporary loan exhibition (‘National Exhibition of Works of Art’), held to recover some of the £100,000 construction costs.[7][8] Unfortunately, after half a million visitors, the profit came to only £5.[7] It was officially opened on 19 May 1869 by Prince Albert.

I have not read up on the suggestion e.g. in Rolleston that Allbutt formed the basis for Tertius Lydgate in Middlemarch, written shortly afterwards:

The circumstances and character of Tertius Lydgate certainly show certain resemblances to those of Allbutt. Thus Lydgate was suddenly attracted to medicine by reading a book – not Auguste Comte’s Philosophie positive, it is true – but an article on the anatomy of the valves of the heart in an encyclopaedia; he studied in Paris; settled down in a provincial town to keep away from the range of London intrigues, jealousies, and social truckling; was superintendent of a fever hospital where he treated fever on “a new plan” with success; resolved to resist the irrational severance between medical and surgical knowledge; and showed mental independence with an aristocratic bearing. On the other hand, there are, but not very essential, differences; Lydgate was an orphan, and the son of a military man; he underwent a medical apprenticeship and was educated at Edinburgh; he started in Middlemarch in the year 1829; he resigned his post at the Infirmary in early days and left Middlemarch to practise with popular success in London and a continental spa according to the seasons; wrote a book on gout, “a disease which had a good deal of wealth on its side”; died of diphtheria at the age of fifty, his hair having never become white; and always regarded himself as a failure because he had not accomplished what he once intended to do. The mentality and scientific ambitions of Lydgate in 1830 were probably an accurate representation of Allbutt’s some forty years later, but the details of Lydgate’s parentage and other aspects of his life were not those of Allbutt. It would appear that, though some of the facts about Lydgate were taken from Allbutt, care was purposely taken to prevent too obvious a portrait. Sir William Osier, who said that nothing in the careers of Lydgate and Allbutt was in common save the training and high ideals, was told by Dr. H. C. Bastian that George Eliot, during a discussion about Middlemarch, which had then just been published, admitted that “Dr. Allbutt’s early career at Leeds had given her suggestions”. It should be mentioned that in a letter, dated December 5, 1872, to Alexander Main, quoted in C. S. Olcott’s George Eliot: Scenes and People in her Novels, p. 164, George Henry Lewes wrote: “It seemed to him [Sir James Paget] that there must have been a biographical foundation for Lydgate’s career. When I told him that she had never even known a surgeon intimately, and had no acquaintance in any degree resembling Lydgate, he said that it was like assisting at the creation – a universe formed out of nothing.” George Eliot, however, as shown above, certainly knew Allbutt. When this subject was raised in his presence Allbutt preserved a somewhat sphinx-like expression, but never denied it; on one occasion he gave, what for him was very unusual, a rather self-conscious laugh and said, “Oh, I think all of us were Lydgate”. It is not un¬ interesting to add that the late Oscar Browning, whose creation late in life as an O.B.E. was described in “The Times” as “a piece of heavy bureaucratic humour”, confessed in his Memoirs of Sixty Years at Eton, Cambridge, and Elsewhere (p. 193) that George Eliot often advised him to marry; this general injunction, however, he disobeyed, as he felt “that Lydgate’s experience of marriage had not been so successful as to induce the man from whom in some measure she had drawn the character of Lydgate, to try the same experiment” (Rolleston 1929).

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Original

Altogether our visit to Yorkshire was extremely agreeable. Our host, Dr. Allbutt, is a good, clever, graceful man, enough to enable one to be cheerful under the horrible smoke of ugly Leeds; and the fine hospital, which, he says, is admirably fitted for its purpose, is another mitigation. You would like to see the tasteful subdued ornamentation in the rooms which are to be sick-wards. Each physician is accumulating ornamental objects for his own ward – chromo-lithographs, &c. – such as will soothe sick eyes.

85 words.

Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• Air pollution (11) ·
• Allbutt, Clifford (1836-1925) (22), Dewsbury-born physician (Leeds Infirmary 1861-89), inventor of the clinical thermometer, Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge 1892-his death ·
• Art therapy (2) ·
• Auguste Comte (2) ·
• Barden Tower (1) ·
• Bolton Abbey (village) (1) ·
• Bolton Abbey (2) ·
• Bolton Bridge (1) ·
• Bolton Priory (1) ·
• Bridges, John Henry (1832-1906) (1), Positivist, physician to the Bradford Infirmary, 1870-98 medical inspector to the Local Government Board ·
• Browning, Oscar (1) ·
• Chromolithography (1) ·
• Course of Positive Philosophy (1) ·
• Eliot, George (2) ·
• George Gilbert Scott (1) ·
• George Henry Lewes (2) ·
• Henry Charlton Bastian (1) ·
• Ilkley (7) ·
• James Paget (1) ·
• Leeds General Infirmary (13) ·
• 📌Leeds (235) ·
• Middlemarch (1) ·
• Newark-on-Trent (2) ·
• Philosophy of science (1) ·
• Printmaking (1) ·
• Rail transport (22) ·
• Wharfedale (8) ·

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Similar

• 8 January 1925: Writing to Berkeley Moynihan, Clifford Allbutt recalls surgery at Leeds Infirmary in the 1860s
• 14 January 1867: Clifford Allbutt of the Leeds Infirmary writes to the Medical Times praising his five-minute Celsius pocket clinical thermometer
• 16 February 1886: Clifford Allbutt explains to James Crichton-Browne why three years later he was to trade a lucrative medical consulting career in Leeds for a less well paid Commissionership in Lunacy in London
• 27 April 1924: In a letter to Edmund Gosse, Clifford Allbutt recalls the Brontës
• 19 September 1866: Consciously breaking with medical tradition, Clifford Allbutt, physician, and Claudius Galen Wheelhouse, surgeon, cooperate at Leeds Infirmary to cure a pericarditis
• 15 April 1924: Writing to The Lancet, Clifford Allbutt tells how a nursing hack eliminated (typhoid) thromboses in the Leeds fever hospital in the 1860s
• 19 October 1909: Opening a nurses’ home in Dewsbury, Clifford Allbutt describes their predecessors in the Leeds fever hospital in the 1860s
• 13 April 1915: During the wartime Serbian typhus epidemic, Clifford Allbutt recalls the open-air treatment he used in the 1865-66 outbreak in Leeds
• 23 January 1888: Dr Henry Arthur Allbutt of Leeds launches a crowdfunder against being struck off for the affordability of his obstetrics and gynaecology manual for women
• 18 August 1889: Eight survivors of prostate surgery present themselves to a meeting of the BMA in Leeds