John Keats' Medical Notebook

The poet John Keats trained as a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital, London while simultaneously making his way as a poet. This book focuses attention on an important but hitherto neglected manuscript: the notebook Keats maintained during this time, with the premise that in Keats’ medical Notebook exists a manuscript revealing both the true depth of the poet’s medical knowledge and the significant influence this exercised on his poetry. Reconstructing the lively medical world that played a formative role in Keats’ intellectual and imaginative development, this book explores the intriguing connections between Keats’ medical knowledge and his greatest poetry. It reveals that Keats’ two careers proved mutually enabling and enriching, with their co-existence contributing greatly to his success in both. Opening with a fully annotated edition of Keats’ medical Notebook newly transcribed from the manuscript, the book offers chapters on the provenance of Keats’ medical Notebook; the ‘hospital poems’ he wrote at Guy’s; the medical milieu of Keats’ 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 his 1820 volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems. It shows how the visceral knowledge of human life that Keats gained at Guy’s Hospital transformed him into the ‘mighty poet of the human heart’, with new research recovering the many ways in which Keats’ creativity found expression in both his careers.