Romantic Medicine and John Keats (review)

Book Reviews 165 accepting, even in the academy, the reaUty and importance of the human body. —Albert Howard Carter III Eckerd College Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. viii + 418 pp. Clothbound, $45.00. One of the better-known tenets of Keats's poetic doctrine is his notion of "negative capability"—the ability of the true poet or genius to sustain paradox or contradiction without "straining after resolution." Negative capabiUty requires something like an omniscient vantage point from which the seer may understand life and its processes cycücally—one might say, metabolically—and understand appearances or symptoms as momentary manifestations of deeper forces constantly moving Uke the tides with their crosscurrents beneath the surfaces of physical life. Keats defined this concept in a letter to Fanny Brawne shortly before his death in 1821, but it is perhaps in The Fall of Hyperion, a late fragment, that he most strikingly conveys the experience of such vision: Whereon there grew A power within me of enormous ken, To see as a God sees, and take the depth Of things as nimbly as the outward eye Can size and shape pervade. (Part 1, lines 302-6) This power "to see as a God sees" is not only the mark of genius, but more specifically, in the context of Keats's own life and work, the specific gift that brings together the arts of poetry and medicine. To be a healer, so this physician-poet and his Romantic contemporaries believed, one needed to cultivate a way of seeing and understanding that brought thought and feeling simultaneously to a high pitch of intensity, to combine empathy and detachment in a perfect act of comprehension. The value placed upon intensity, sympathy, acute sensitivity to subtle movements of body and soul, and the ability to feel pleasure and pain beyond the ordinary range of human sensation is a well-known aspect 166 BOOK REVIEWS of Romantic epistemology. In Romantic Medicine and John Keats, Hermione de Almeida examines the manifold connections between these values and the world view they imply, and the theory and practice of EngUsh medicine in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Using a remarkable variety of sources ranging from the lectures Keats would have heard as a student at Guy's Hospital to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories that Unked scientific and aesthetic concepts, to the poetry in which both Keats and his contemporaries articulated the terms of life as they understood it, she demonstrates the deep and expUcit congruities between the work of poetry and the work of heaUng. During his apprenticeship to the surgeon Thomas Hammond and his residency at Guy's hospital from 1810 to 1816, Keats had immediate access to some of the newest and most formative medical theories of his generation, which encompassed two important decades of transition between the "birth of the clinic" and the developments in evolutionary theory and medical technology that signaled the beginning of modern scientific medicine. Guy's hospital had eight wards, all used for instruction, in which Keats had daily practice as a surgeon's dresser. The expertise he was expected to develop included a detailed understanding of pharmacology, medical botany, and techniques of the experimental surgery and chemical therapy that were practiced on the patients considered incurable who made up the majority of patients admitted to Guy's for study and treatment. Guy's was one of the foremost institutions of its day in providing practical experience with the panorama of diseases that afflicted the country's poor; its hands-on approach to medical study steeped medical students in the stench and squalor of human suffering and trained their sensations as rigorously as their intellects. Indeed, one of the skills the Romantic physician needed most was sympathetic understanding—a comprehension of illness that could come only from keen observation and an empathy with the suffering of the victim. To heal, the healer needed to know the affliction from the inside, with the aid of the sympathetic imagination. In a chapter titled "Physicians True and False," de Almeida expUcates the relationship between theory and practice in the EngUsh cUnics that emphasized visual...