John Keats' Medical Notebook: Text, Context, and Poems

by Hrileena Ghosh

John Keats was a trained surgeon who studied at Guy's Hospital, London while simultaneously making his way as a poet. This book focuses attention on an important but hitherto neglected Keats the notebook he maintained during this period. Reconstructing the lively medical world that played a formative role in Keats' intellectual and imaginative development, it seeks to show the intriguing connections between Keats' medical knowledge and his greatest poetry. It offers new research on Keats' medical career - including a new edition of his medical Notebook compiled from the manuscript - and recovers the various ways in which Keats' creativity found expression in his two careers of medicine and poetry, enriching both. Topics explored include the 'hospital poems' Keats wrote at Guy's; the medical milieu of his daily life; his methods of working as revealed by his medical Notebook and other archival sources; and the medical contexts that informed his composition of Endymion and the collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems (1820).

John Keats' Medical Text, Context and Poems reveals how Keats' visceral knowledge of human life, gained during his medical training at Guy's, transformed him into 'a mighty poet of the human heart'.

Unknown Binding

Published February 29, 2020

Reviews

[Raquel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an incredibly meticulous edition of (and commentary on) the sole surviving notebook from John Keats' years as a medical student. The scholarship in both the annotated text and the critical analyses are impressive, really shining in the details. The style is clear, but occasionally a bit dry, and it suffers in a number of places from significant repetition. Overall, however, this is a valuable work for both Keats studies and nineteenth-century medical history.