The Poet-Physician: Keats and Medical Science by Donald C. Goellnicht

Abstract

pers’s essay on Bach’s organ music establishes an ideal of clarity and accessi­ bility that writers would do well to emulate. Ke n n e t h w . grah am / University of Guelph Donald C. Goellnicht, The Poet-Physician: Keats and Medical Science (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984). xii + 291. $26.95 Almost twenty years ago Jack Stillinger taught us to see a Keats very differ­ ent from the Platonized, yearning and somewhat anaemic figure portrayed by Amy Lowell and Middleton Murry. Stillinger’s Keats was red-blooded and anti-transcendental, a poet who “in the end . . . traded the visionary for the naturalized imagination, embracing experience and process as his own and man’s chief good.” 1 Then Stuart Sperry rehabilitated the term “sensation,” investigating the aesthetic tradition to which Keats was heir and pointing out that to the aesthetic thinkers of the eighteenth century — Hartley, Reid, Gerard, Alison, and others — the term “sensation,” as in “O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!,” was far from being a simple concept. Their emphasis on the quick movements of the mind as it receives impres­ sions from the outside world led to “a more organic approach to the problem of perception that would respect both the fundamental truths of sense experience and the active, shaping powers of the mind.” 2 Goellnicht’s book is in the tradition of Stillinger and Sperry, and pays respectful tribute to both critics. In a way, however, Goellnicht seems anxious to correct the impression Sperry might unintentionally have given, that the new Keats of “sense experience” was unthinking or anti-intellectual. Goell­ nicht’s aim is to combat the view that Keats was a poet simply of “ sensations” (or a poet of simple sensations), and therefore anti-rational and anti-science. He claims that Keats’s medical training, far from being tedious and stifling to the imagination, was immensely valuable to his later career as a poet, and argues that the ideal of the “poet-physician” represented to Keats a way of combining the two vocations. In keeping with its theme, The Poet-Physician is a book that tries to convince by the careful weighing of evidence rather than by dramatic flourishes of wit or high-flying polemic. Goellnicht is at his best in the careful explication of relevant biographical and background materials, including those bearing on the climate of contemporary scientific and medical opinion. His literary judgements are sometimes questionable, especially when he sub­ stitutes scientific criteria for literary ones (as in the suggestion on 195-96 that “ Isabella” could have been saved artistically if only Keats had made it 357 a more objective and “clinical” study of hypochondriasis and melancholia). In his first chapter, Goellnicht confronts those biographers who have portrayed the young Keats as a hypersensitive, poetical young man forced by penury and an unsympathetic guardian to embark on a career he loathed. There is considerable circumstantial evidence to suggest that Keats was genuinely interested in medicine, and genuinely determined to use his abili­ ties in that direction to relieve human suffering. The biographers who suggest the contrary — that Keats daydreamed his way through the anatomy lectures at Guy’s Hospital, for instance — base their arguments on some rather ro­ manticized reminiscences by two students who were Keats’s contemporaries at Guy’s and his competitors for various honours, and who may even have been jealous of his success there. (Keats was appointed a dresser at the hospital — a considerable honour for a newly-arrived student — partly through the influence of the famous surgeon Astley Cooper.) Goellnicht handles the biographical questions in a balanced way, giving fair space to the evidence for a “daydreaming” Keats, such as it is, as well as to the evidence for Keats the devoted and conscientious medical student. Much of the incidental information Goellnicht presents is little known even to most scientists today, one suspects, yet is very relevant to our understand­ ing of Keats’s career. For example, it is interesting and significant that the study of botany was an important part of medical education in the nine­ teenth century. Goellnicht is good at explaining what the relationships among the disciplines were...