Keats’ Medical Milieu

This chapter offers an account of the London teaching hospitals to show that Keats had privileged access to intellectual capital. London was a hotbed of intellectual ferment, as embodied by professional bodies like the Guy’s Hospital Physical Society and which found expression in the Vitalism Debates. The milieu within which Keats lived and worked is explored, focusing particularly upon characteristic aspects of Romantic medical training that are now obsolete, such as dissection of corpses freshly exhumed by ‘resurrection men’. The only known account of Keats in action as a surgeon is discussed, revealing that Keats was not fully persuaded by the prevailing Brunonian hypothesis of physiology. The chapter draws upon unpublished contemporary manuscripts in dating Keats’ medical notes, thus resolving an important and hitherto uncertain issue.

John Keats’ ‘Guy’s Hospital’ Poetry

This chapter focuses on the poems Keats wrote while associated with Guy’s Hospital, October 1815 – March 1817. Looking at Keats’ poems in terms of their dates of composition, juxtaposed with events in the hospital calendar and in his biography, reveals patterns of sociality and conviviality that tie in with Keats’ poetic productivity. After successfully passing his Licentiate Examination in July 1816, Keats chose to renew contact with his mentor Charles Cowden Clarke, who introduced him in turn to the Hunt Circle. The only surviving first-hand account of Keats at Guy’s is explored, showing how the mythmaking around Keats’ reputation affected this narrative. The chapter traces Keats’ development into the physician-poet he became, from his initial recourse to poetry as a distraction to his recognition that it might become a career.

John Keats’ Medical Notebook An Overview

The first chapter offers an overview of Keats’ medical Notebook, discussing its provenance and bibliographic features. It explores Keats’ engagement with his medical studies at the time he took the lecture notes, as evinced by this surviving Notebook, and finds him an attentive and successful student: he took care to keep legible notes and frequently annotated and cross-referenced them, revealing a degree of interest in his medical studies that counters traditional accounts of his indifference or disinterest. The distinctive layout of Keats’s notes is discussed, as well as the likely sources for the notes themselves. Keats’ medical Notebook was a dynamic repository of evolving knowledge to which he returned again and again: the chapter considers the only previous publication of it, as well as its treatment in popular publications including the major Keats biographies.

Conclusion

This brief section summarizes the argument of the book, which showed the various ways in which Keats’ creativity found expression in his two careers as a surgeon and a poet, with the interaction between them mutually enabling and enriching his achievements in both. Many of the characteristics that defined Keats’ greatest poems can be found, in an early form, in the style and contents of his medical Notebook, and his poetic development is visible in both it and in the early poems he wrote while at Guy’s Hospital. Keats’ experiences at Guy’s Hospital enabled him to become the mighty poet who could delineate human emotions and frailties as precisely with his pen as he had exposed human muscles and bones with a lancet during dissections as a surgeon.

John Keats’ Medical Notebook An Annotated Edition

Keats’ medical Notebook is the only autograph manuscript detailing his medical studies during his formative period training at Guy’s Hospital, 1815–17, and this fully annotated edition of it has been newly transcribed and edited from the manuscript. The edition takes care to indicate the distinctive layout of Keats’ medical Notebook, as well as other details of bibliographic interest, offering a faithful reproduction of its contents. Editorial interventions are kept to a minimum, with the bulk of annotation and commentary restricted to the footnotes. The annotations offer contextual information, with the aim of providing sufficient context to make the notes comprehensible for readers without specialized medical knowledge: they are intended as sign-posts to assist understanding, pointing to sources of more detailed information.

Introduction

The introduction sets out the premise of the book: that in Keats’ medical Notebook, we have a manuscript that reveals the true depth of the poet’s medical knowledge as well as the significant influence this exercised on his poetry. Its first part offers an overview of the chapters of commentary, and briefly discusses major works in the field, indicating the ways in which the present book is in dialogue with this body of scholarship. The second part discusses Keats’ medical Notebook as a manuscript, detailing its layout. It reveals the challenges presented by the manuscript, and discusses the editorial principles governing the present edition, explaining their rationale. It concludes with a description of the editorial and bibliographic symbols used in the edition presented in the book.

Endymion and the Physiology of Passion

This chapter focuses on Endymion, the only long poem Keats ever completed, which was written immediately after he left Guy’s Hospital when his medical experience was fresh in his mind. Reading Endymion through the contents of Keats’ medical Notebook allows a fresh perspective on the physiology that underlies and informs the poem’s depictions of passion. Close reading of the poem, and of the biographical circumstances in which it was composed, reveal the extent to which Keats’ medical experience affected his poetic creativity, and the way contemporary criticismrecognised and responded to this aspect of the poem. The chapter concludes with an exploration of Keats’ knowledge of Romantic medical ethics, and how this informed his delineation of the figures of healers. Endymion showcases Keats’ ability to convey extreme emotion through anatomical descriptions and medical vocabulary.

John Keats at Guy’s Scholar and Poet

The fourth chapter opens with a detailed textual comparison, including statistical analysis of lexicography, between Keats’ medical notes and those kept by his fellow-student Joshua Waddington. These prove that the two sets of notes derived from the same source and reveal that although Keats has essentially the same information as Waddington, his habits of concision, reorganization and cross-referencing mean that they are presented in a different – indeed, distinctive – form. The chapter finds that some characteristic features of Keats’ mature poetry are prefigured in his medical notes: striking imagery, verbal rhythms and verbal compression are all typical of Keats’ medical thought. Close readings of some of Keats’ most accomplished poems, including ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and Hyperion, reveal the medical underpinning for much of his greatest poetry, in content, vocabulary, and style.

‘The Only State for the Best Sort of Poetry’

This chapter looks at Keats’ 1820 volume. Its first part focuses the circumstances in which its composition and publication took place, showing how at every turn, questions related to health, disease, medicine and death forced themselves upon Keats’ attention. This part of the chapter is recuperative, exploring how the lived experiences of biography influenced the poetry that came out of it, and evaluating the extent to which these infiltrations were consciously allowed. The concluding part reads poems from the 1820 volume – including The Eve of St Agnes, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Ode on Melancholy’ – showing how these function as knowing interventions to current developments in medicine. The crises that characterized Keats’ life during 1818 – 20 enabled the process of poetic composition, and significantly influenced the final form of the 1820 volume.