Romantic Medicine and John Keats

By Hermione de Almeida

Oxford University Press, New York and London, 1991

Reviews of Romantic Medicine and John Keats

"Romantic Medicine and John Keats is a highly original, colorful, obsessively industrious piece of research.... it profoundly alters our perception of Keats's imaginative inspiration: Hermione de Almeida makes one think again about Romanticism, and that is no mean feat. She has said something new about Keats, she has taken risks of interpretation, she has minutely reconstructed not merely a scientific culture but a scientific emotion, a frame of mind we have almost lost. She has made Keats’s poetry feel denser, more lived in, more thought out….Most of all, perhaps, she has given an unforgettable impression of how exciting it was to be alive and writing in the age that championed ‘biology, zoology, immunology, clinical diagnoses, and evolution theory’."—Richard Holmes, New York Review of Books

“A fantastic assemblage of new and important information. It is interesting in its own right, but also—and more to the point—is continuously relevant to our understand of Keats and his contemporaries, the Romantic period more generally, and the history of medicine and science in England.”—Jack Stillinger, University of Illinois at Urbana

“Her conception in Romantic Medicine and John Keats is bipartite (medicine and literature) and consists of documentation of four primary concerns of Romantic medicine: the physician’s task; the meaning of life; the prescription of disease and health; the evolution of matter and mind. The larger purpose aims to show what difference this information makes to a reading of Keats’s major poetry, and her presentation of the broad realms of ‘Romantic medicine’ is splendid. Not even those nominalists most skeptical of labels and tags within classification (i.e. Romantic medicine) will be able to assail it….Almost every topic important in the organic life sciences then is treated, as are the social institutions (clinics, hospitals, doctor-patients) that set these theories into motion. Romantic Medicine and John Keats, based on primary sources printed and in manuscript, has obviously been a long time in the making, and its inclusivity illustrates how systematically it has covered the various areas of Romantic medicine….Still, de Almeida’s full-length study bristles with erudition, and no one will ever again wonder about Keats and medicine.—G. S. Rousseau, UCLA, History of European Ideas

“Hermione de Almeida’s Romantic Medicine and John Keats makes up for much of the relative silence of Keats studies with its sheer mass and energy. De Almeida writes against a tradition which sees Keats’s medical training as a distraction from, or as in some other way fundamentally opposed to, his life as a poet. Instead, she sees Keats’s two careers as linked parts of a capacious and philosophical humanism….the book as a whole is an impressive and enlightening piece of work.”—Helena Michie, Rice University, Studies in English Literature

“Keats was a poet to whom the physical was immensely important. It was a brilliant idea to make his poetry the centerpiece around which the author’s scholarly exploration of romantic beliefs and attitudes could be organized. This is a book to be studied, savoured, and used for reference; the period covered has been neglected by medical historians. Hermione de Almeida has enriched our knowledge of Keats and of the times in which he lived.”—Anthony Storr, Oxford University, The Lancet

“This sophisticated guide through the busy, populous world of ‘Romantic medicine’—a term whose validity and usefulness is here convincingly established, argues that Keats ‘could not and would not separate the healing visions of the medicine he knew and the poetry he practiced.’…The argument and the ambitious research that supports it generate a multiplicity of new insights into the poetry. For example, an examination of Hyperion in the context of early speculations on evolution leads to a striking observation: ‘Only Keats, in an age most concerned with the fresh perfections of life, would seek to imagine and embody the experience of generic extinction.’…De Almeida is probably the most intuitive and indefatigable hunter down of arcane literature information since John Livingston Lowes. Few scholars would have had the discipline and stamina to educate themselves as thoroughly as she has done in the dead literature of outmoded science. An historicist who has taken the time to become an historian, she has here made a major contribution to our understanding of Keats and the Romantic period.”—Robert M. Ryan, Rutgers University, The Romantic Movement

“Hermione de Almeida’s book is the most thoroughgoing and comprehensive study that

we have of medicine in Keats’s time and of its possible influence upon him.”—Dennis H. Burden, Trinity College, Oxford, Endeavour

“The scope of this important book is far greater than its title suggests. Its primary concern is not to discover traces of Keats’s medical training in his poetry and thought, although it has much to say on that subject….Hermione de Almeida has recreated the intellectual milieu of the medical and scientific world at the beginning of the nineteenth century….It is impossible in the short space of a review to do justice to the scope of the book or to the wealth of fact and new information supporting the argument. The book is the result of ten years of research….Romantic Medicine and John Keats is a significant contribution not only to Keats studies but to the intellectual history of the Romantic period.”—Leon Waldoff, University of Illinois at Urbana, Keats-Shelley Journal

“Romantic Medicine and John Keats is a rich, detailed study of medical knowledge and practice in early nineteenth-century England. De Almeida remarks many crosscurrents between scientific and aesthetic theories of the time, citing figures such as Coleridge, Goethe, Schiller, Erasmus Darwin, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes who engaged in both literary and scientific studies….This brief summary does not do justice to the wealth of detail and subtlety of argument presented in Romantic Medicine and John Keats. The research de Almeida conducted for this book is truly impressive….[As] an intellectual history of the Romantic period…[and] a genuinely interdisciplinary work…it is a book which qualifies as that all-too-rare phenomenon: a genuinely original contribution to Keats and Romantic studies. Romantic Medicine and John Keats provides a wealth of information and suggestive commentary that scholars and critics will be learning from and drawing on for years to come.”—Beth Lau, California State University at Long Beach, Journal of English and Germanic Philology

“…this is a richly detailed study of the world of London medicine in Keats’s day, both theoretical and practical, informed by numerous primary sources such as lectures, journals, records, and shelf-lists; De Almeida has assimilated enough data to help the engaged student examine Keats’s relationship with medicine and medicine’s relationship with British (and European) culture circa 1815….this book will…prove an important resource for serious scholars at all levels. It contains a strong bibliography of primary and secondary material.”—D. Garrison, Spalding University, Choice

“An enterprise of this magnitude demands from its author exhaustive research, often involving obscure scientific treatises and philosophical manuscripts, and an encyclopedic vision of the transdisciplinary nature of the era. De Almeida meets this challenge admirably, providing us with a clear understanding of Romantic medicine and a host of new insights into Keats’s thought. …For the Keats enthusiast, the most exciting and original work here may be the detailed readings of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “To Autumn.”—Donald C. Goellnicht, McMaster University, Nineteenth-Century Literature

“The book makes a valuable contribution to scholarship in medical, social, and intellectual history by bringing together an impressive range of documentation to illustrate the dynamics of the interplay between literary and medical practice in Keats’s own life and work and in the lives and works of a number of other physician-writers, both Continental and English….If Romantic Medicine and John Keats causes the reader to recognize some of the fallacies that make romantic a term of dismissal, it also conveys a rich appreciation of a medical philosophy that sought seriously to address important questions about body, mind, and spirit—questions that a postmodern generation may need to be reminded of. In that respect the book is a timely and provocative impetus to reflection.—Marilyn R. Chandler, Mills College, Literature and Medicine

Additional Information on Romantic Medicine and John Keats

Description

Using original research in scientific treatises, philosophical manuscripts, and political documents, this pioneering study describes the neglected era of revolutionary medicine in Europe through the writings of the English poet and physician, John Keats. Hermione de Almeida explores the four primary concerns of Romantic medicine--the physician's task, the meaning of life, the prescription of disease and health, and the evolution of matter and mind--and reveals their expression in Keats's poetry and thought. Romantic Medicine and John Keats highlight the literary consequences of contemporary medical philosophy for all Romantic artists even as it give Keats—purported to be the least educated of English Romantic poets—rightful place within the intellectual tumult of his age. As a fertile period of transition between the birth of the clinic and the discovery of the cell, an era of speculative insight located between the imaginative reading of life-signs and the visual knowledge of bacterial life, Romantic medicine engendered biology, clinical medicine, zoology, and evolution theory. Keats’s proximity to the intellectual ferment of London’s medical circles and their European context during his five-year apprenticeship, and his clinical residency at Guy’s Hospital from 1815 to 1816, provide a unique opportunity to examine the revolutionary philosophical aspects of a complex world.

By delineating a distinct but unknown era in the history of medicine, charting the poet's milieu within this age, and providing close reading of his poems in these contexts, Romantic Medicine and John Keats illustrates the interdisciplinary bonds between the two healing arts of the Romantic period: medicine and poetry.

· Hardcover: 432 pages

· Publisher: Oxford University Press, New York and London (1991)

· ISBN-10: 0-19-506307-4

· ISBN-13: 978-0-19-506307-3

· Product Dimensions: 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches