Nothing is more needed than nourishment for the imagination. Medical educators, learners, and those who care about the future of medicine need to understand not only the changes taking place in medicine’s external landscape but the internal transformations taking place in minds and hearts. Humanly speaking, are we enriching or impoverishing students? What alterations are we asking them, explicitly or implicitly, to make in the ways they act, think, and feel? In what ways are we bringing out the best elements in their character—courage, compassion, and wisdom—as opposed to merely exacerbating their worst impulses—envy, fear, and destructive competitiveness?

To a minority of students who care very little about such matters, such questions are likely to seem of little moment. Such students see clearly what they want to achieve—to gain admission to medical school, to graduate, to obtain a residency training position, and to take up the practice of medicine—and they do not trouble themselves about the ways in which their education is reshaping their humanity. When such students show up in class, they simply want to know what will be on the exam, and no matter how intricate or abstruse the material might be, they learn it sufficiently well to pass—and in many cases, ace—the tests.

But there are other students for whom medical school is not simply a proving ground, a gauntlet to be run, or a ticket to a well-paying and secure career. When they see a patient treated poorly, encounter a fellow student who is struggling with confusion and discouragement, or deep in a maze of tests and grades find themselves beginning to lose sight of the goals that brought them into medicine in the first place, they do not merely knuckle down and redouble their efforts. Instead they take such matters into their hearts, muse over them, and find themselves questioning whether medicine is what they really want to do with their lives.

Where can we turn to understand what goes on in the minds and hearts of highly intelligent, genuinely compassionate young adults who find themselves in a state of moral distress about the path they have chosen in life? Who or what can help them find the words to describe what they are going through, to know that they are not alone, and to locate a light at the end of the tunnel that can give them the hope and courage necessary to carry on? To understand and help such students, we need to find and apply the best resources available. One of the best guides on the matter I have ever encountered also happens to be one of the greatest novels in the English language.

The novel in question is Middlemarch. Written by Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880) who, in order to be taken seriously felt compelled to write under the pen name George Eliot, Middlemarch concerns the affairs of a fictitious British Midlands town of the same name. The title evokes not only a kind of provincial mediocrity but also a deep authorial concern with what happens to people training for the professions, echoing the opening of Dante’s Divine Comedy, “In the middle of life’s journey … ”