“All Apollo’s Arts”: Divine Cures, Afro-Caribbean Knowledge, and Healing Poetry in the British West Indies

This article examines how British American physicians appropriated classical connections between poetry and medicine to heal colonial bodies and to defend colonial identity and poetry. In the western tradition, Apollo, the Greek god of healing and poetry, spoke words that soothed the mind and healed the body. Eighteenth-century poet-physicians in England revived these classical connections between medicine and literature by writing poems that pleased the mind and provided medical instruction. In the colonies, poet-physicians drew on this tradition by presenting poetic descriptions of unfamiliar plants, illnesses, and experiences, which they intended to soothe readers’ minds and to heal their bodies. This article shows that poet-physicians James Kirkpatrick and James Grainger drew on various religious and medical traditions—neoclassical, British, and African—to endow their poetry with healing powers.