John Keats: The Doctors’ Poet?

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1896 William Osler wrote in his pamphlet, John Keats, The Apothecary Poet, ‘All lovers of poetry cherish Keats’ memory for the splendour of the verse with which he has enriched our literature’. Later T. Wilson Parry stated, ‘To me Keats is and ever will be the doctors’ poet’. The abiding question underlying this paper is why Keats appeals to so many members of the medical profession and why so few now read the other medical poets. The paper sets out to address this question. It concludes that the reason why Keats is particularly admired by the medical profession is not just because of his early tragic death nor his training in medicine but because his poetry embodies negative capability and an ability to bear the knowledge that pain and pleasure, love and hate, loveliness and ugliness are intertwined. The entwining of Keats’s whole life experience (including his medical knowledge) in his emotionally truthful poetry makes his work directly accessible and recognizable to those engaged in a profession which binds them close to the painful, insistent and contradictory realities of human life.