Critical Difference: September 2009 Archives

In The New York Times Magazine today, The Ethicist answers an intriguing question from a Lincoln Center chorus singer: "Making disruptive noises at a concert is certainly rude, but if you are sitting close enough to distract the performers, does it rise to unethical?"

Doubtless, George Eliot would have a lot of catching up to do if she time-traveled to the early 21st-century United States, but "Middlemarch" suggests she'd grasp our health care debate, and its various distortions, almost instantly. In her fictional 1830s landscape, as now, there's hardly anything more threatening than a clever, good-looking young upstart who arrives on the scene and immediately starts fiddling with people's health care in the name of reform.

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!