Inevitably this innovation would be regarded as a criticism of his fellow-practitioners."" He concentrates so strongly on reforming the practice of medicine in Middlemarch that he fails to realize the importance of the interest of the other doctors, who do not want any change. Therefore, when Lydgate is given the post of medical director at the new hospital all his colleagues set themselves against it. Even potential patients distrust his treatment, as they are accustomed to receiving drugs. His colleagues are working in the interest of the prevailing ideology of their society. Lydgate, however, "once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little- but in the end came to be "shapen after the average-. (140) As Farebrother tells Lydgate: "You have not only got the old Adam in yourself against you, but you have got all those descendants of the original Adam who form the society around you. (168).
"Reification- is another concept within Marxist theory, which is explained as "the conversion of all aspects of human life (including abstract concepts, social relations, and even humans themselves) into things'."" According to Lydgate his colleagues are conversing the patients into things since they treat their patients like interesting case studies, not as individual human beings. He claims that "the ignorance of people- in Middlemarch "is stupendous-. (420) Furthermore, he believes that "if a fair number of the better educated men went to work with the belief that their observations might contribute to the reform of medical doctrine and practice, we should soon see a change for the better. (420).
Reification is clearly related to the notion of "commodification-, which can be explained as the notion of capitalist economy leading to the treatment of human beings as commodities, valued not for their own individual characteristics but for their economic function. With the rise of the middle class in Middlemarch, money, instead of family name, began to function as a tool of power.
