John Keats and the Medical Imagination

Nicholas Roe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319638102
• eBook ISBN: 9783319638119
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book presents ten new chapters on John Keats's medical imagination, beginning with his practical engagement with dissection and surgery, and the extraordinary poems he wrote during his 'busy time' at Guy's Hospital 1815-17. The Physical Society at Guy's and the demands of a medical career are explored, as are the lyrical spheres of botany, melancholia, and Keats's strange oxymoronic poetics of suspended animation. Here too are links between surveillance of patients at Bedlam and of inner city streets that were walked by the poet of 'To Autumn'. The book concludes with a survey of multiple romantic pathologies of that most Keatsian of diseases, pulmonary tuberculosis.

© The Author(s) 2017

N. Roe (ed.)John Keats and the Medical ImaginationPalgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicinehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63811-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Nicholas Roe¹

(1)

University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK

Nicholas Roe

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

John Keats and the Medical Imagination contains ten chapters, originally presented to the Keats Foundation Bicentenary Conference at Guy’s Hospital, London, in May 2015. The conference theme was ‘John Keats: Poet-Physician, Physician-Poet’, marking 200 years since Keats enrolled at Guy’s in October 1815. The chapters gathered here range from freshly researched information about John Keats’s day-to-day life as an apprentice apothecary and at Guy’s Hospital, to new and far-reaching explorations of how medicine and medical pathology informed his poetry and thought. Nearly seventy years ago Robert Gittings highlighted 1819 as the ‘Living Year’ when John Keats completed many of his greatest poems¹; John Keats and the Medical Imagination places the emphasis earlier, in the comparatively neglected ‘Medical Years’, 1810–1817, when the foundations for his later achievements were laid. This book’s principal concern is to recover—so far as is possible—the lived actuality of Keats’s experiences as a medical apprentice, student and practitioner, and to trace how those experiences may have given the poet’s imagined worlds their distinctive forms, colours and languages. The wider contexts of medical and surgical history, and European and classical medical knowledge inform these studies of Keats but are not the book’s primary concern.

Keats’s medical training had two phases. As an apprentice to Thomas Hammond, the surgeon-apothecary at Edmonton, Keats learned the basics of practical medical care—mixing up the medicines, blood-letting and bone-setting, teeth extraction, minor operations and so on. He then transferred to Guy’s Hospital where he attended lectures by eminent surgeons such as Astley Cooper and Henry Cline, Jr, and gained hands-on experience in the dissecting room and operating theatre. Before Keats went to Guy’s, his poems had featured bland, conventional figures of ‘Pity’, ‘Despondence’, ‘Passions’ and ‘Hope’.² After Guy’s, he could imagine the throbbing life of nerves, muscles, arteries, bones and blood—most vividly so in Hyperion, where phrases such as ‘nervous grasp’ (I. 105), ‘laborious breath’ (II. 22) and ‘horribly convuls’d’ (II. 341) give the fallen Titans a forceful physical presence. Lorenzo’s ‘loamed ears’ and ‘miry channel for his tears’ (Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil, 279, 280) recall the resurrected bodies Keats had dissected to learn human anatomy, and for good reason Isabella furls her lover’s head ‘in a silken scarf, —sweet with the dews / Of precious flowers pluck’d in Araby’ (409–11): to disguise the stench of its decomposition. Keats’s medical notebook records a lecturer saying that at the body’s extremities, the colour of blood ‘undergoes a change from its florid’³; five years later, as tuberculosis was destroying his lungs, ‘This living hand’ voiced a bitterly knowing rejoinder: ‘thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood, / So in my veins red life might stream again’ (5–6). By reading Keats’s medical imagination from such embodied perspectives, the essays in this book cast fresh light on his life, letters and poetry.

So where does the story of John Keats’s medical imagination begin? Numerous family deaths during his childhood meant that he was all too familiar with disease and mortality. His little brother Edward died aged one in 1802, his father Thomas in 1804 after falling from his horse, and his maternal grandfather John Jennings in the following year—most likely of stress and old age. His admired uncle Midgley John Jennings succumbed to tuberculosis in 1808 and, two years later, his mother Frances—having been nursed by Keats himself (George Keats recalled that their mother was ‘confined to her bed many years before her death by a rheumatism and at last died of a consumption’).⁴ ‘[T]he death or sickness of some one has always spoilt my hours’, Keats reflected gloomily—acknowledging the bleak reality of life in early nineteenth-century London, where poor housing and sanitation, crowds, refuse and rats made the city a ‘beastly place in dirt, turnings and windings’ that was plagued with infections and diseases.⁵ Opium was an effective painkiller and mercury could help against syphilis, but there were no antibiotics, no anaesthetics. Senna and castor oil were used, then as now, as purgatives; colchicine (from the crocus) helped a bit with gout, and digoxin (digitalis) with ‘dropsy’—fluid retention—but both were also quite toxic and it is hard to know, as with mercury, whether overall these treatments were mildly effective.⁶ Bone-setting and some minor surgical procedures could be successful, as were some attempts at hygiene. Smallpox inoculation was already possible, and within Keats’s lifetime Edward Jenner pioneered vaccination with cowpox—a much safer organism that nevertheless conferred a good immunity. There was not much else, and London swarmed with ‘Pretenders in the Science of Medicine’: ‘Lowndes’ celebrated BILIOUS REMEDY’, ‘STAPLES’S-DAFFY’S ELIXIR’, ‘TOWERS’S STOMACHIC ESSENCE’, ‘WESSEL’S JESUIT’S DROPS’, DALBY’S GENUINE CARMINATIVE’, ‘REYNOLDS’ GOUT SPECIFIC’.⁷ Many of these quacks and their ‘remedies’ were warranted by the establishment as being something better, although the ‘Register of Diseases’ in London for a single month, 20 August to 19 September 1816, speaks for itself: 93 cases of ‘rheumatism’ (acute and chronic), 67 of scabies, 62 of ‘catarrhus’, plus significant numbers with diarrhoea (56), rubeola (47) and syphilis (43).⁸ The highest mortality rate, as in other months, was for pthisis (tuberculosis). Keats’s school at Enfield was well away from the city, in a relatively healthy rural location; even so, it is almost certain that some of his school friends would have fallen ill and died there.⁹

Keats survived the city and his school—but when exactly did he begin his apprenticeship with Thomas Hammond? The date is important, because it allows us to estimate how long Keats may have continued as Hammond’s apprentice. Over the years, there have been various suggestions—and even those best placed to know appear curiously uncertain. When in 1846 Richard Monckton Milnes put the question in a letter to Charles Cowden Clarke—Keats’s school teacher and friend—Clarke noted in the margin: ‘1811’. When Clarke composed his reply to Milnes, however, his more considered view was that Keats had left ‘at fourteen … in the summer of 1810’.¹⁰ Milnes’s Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats accepted that account: ‘on leaving school in the summer of 1810, [Keats] was apprenticed, for five years, to Mr. Hammond, a surgeon of some eminence at Edmonton’.¹¹

Clarke’s vagueness is readily explained: Keats had continued to visit the school for some time after he had formally left, arriving on Wednesdays and Saturdays to talk of books and poetry.¹² From the beginning of Keats’s apprenticeship, therefore, medicine and poetry were connected. The two disciplines were Apollo’s responsibilities, as Keats knew, although they were initially linked by the footpath that led across the meadows from Hammond’s surgery to the schoolhouse at Enfield. As Keats discovered, the fields and hedges where local people gathered simples (herbal remedies) also held possibilities for the poet’s imagination. His poem ‘I stood tip-toe’ dates from autumn 1816, although its natural descriptions mingled with reflections on poets, myths, ‘men of health’ (216), Homer (217), Apollo (218) and the ‘languid sick’ (223) derived from earlier experiences in the countryside around Edmonton and Enfield.

But what did it mean for Keats to think of himself as a poet and as a physician, as someone who had, from the outset, pursued both a living in medicine and a calling to poetry? Clarke was clear that Keats’s medical career was not his own inclination, but ‘had been chosen for him’; Joseph Severn later claimed that Richard Abbey (Keats’s guardian) had forced ‘him to it against his will’.¹³ The likelihood is that Keats would have recognised he had no option and accepted apprenticeship as a fait accompli. With both of his parents dead and the family business at Keates’s Livery Stables now in other hands, he had few immediate prospects; a career in medicine might lead to a respectable job with a good income—a material dimension that Jeffrey Cox’s chapter explores in patterns of life choices subsequently made by Keats and some of his acquaintances. In 1810, the idea of medicine doubtless held some appeal for him—not least because it allowed him to keep in touch with Clarke and poetry when he walked over to Enfield. These early forays from Hammond’s surgery are significant for they foreshadow a later pattern in Keats’s creative life, when he would pursue poetry by physically travelling to remote locations, as in his composition of Isabella at Teignmouth, The Eve of St Agnes at Bedhampton, Lamia at Shanklin and ‘To Autumn’ at Winchester. This pattern is also characteristic of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, in the poem’s lyrical flight from

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs …

(24–5)

and in its forlorn relapse ‘to my sole self’—much as Keats used to return from the pleasures of reading Spenser to resume his duties in Hammond’s surgery.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. John Keats’s ‘Guy’s Hospital’ Poetry
• 3. The Beauty of Bodysnatching
• 4. Mr. Keats
• 5. John Keats in the Context of the Physical Society, Guy’s Hospital, 1815–1816
• 6. John Keats, the Botanist’s Companion
• 7. John Keats, Medicine, and Young Men on the Make
• 8. Keats, Mourning and Melancholia
• 9. ‘The Feel of Not to Feel It’: The Life of Non-sensation in Keats
• 10. Objects of Suspicion: Keats, ‘To Autumn’ and the Psychology of Romantic Surveillance
• 11. Keats’s Killing Breath: Paradigms of a Pathography
• Back Matter