Money, Sex, and Disease in Middlemarch

"And yet they will all feel warranted in making a wide space between me and them, as if I were a leper! My practice and my reputation are utterly damned... Even if I could be cleared by valid evidence, it would make little difference to the blessed world here. I have been set down as tainted and should be cheapened to them all the same" (697).

In today's reading we see the consequences for Lydgate's unconscious transgression in taking Bulstrode's now "dirty" money. I can't help but notice in the language here (which I've italicized) connotations of disease, money, sex and the seemingly identical ostracism which results from the murkiness of these transactions in peoples lives. I'm thinking along the lines of Sontag's Illness as Metaphor here-- that ignorance surrounding the nature of differences or the gaps in people's knowledge creates the ground for moralistic othering behavior-- perhaps as a primitive mechanism for protecting the group -- at the abberent individual's expense. I think it's especially telling that Eliot chooses keepers of the cultural knowledge-- the Christian Moralist and the Modern Doctor to suffer at the hands of the system.