Romantic Medicine and John Keats

by Hermione de Almeida

Overview

Using original research in scientific treatises, philosophical manuscripts, and political documents, this pioneering study describes the neglected era of revolutionary medicine in Europe through the writings of the English poet and physician, John Keats. De Almeida explores the four primary concerns of Romantic medicine—the physician's task, the meaning of life, the prescription of disease and health, and the evolution of matter and mind—and reveals their expression in Keats's poetry and thought. By delineating a distinct but unknown era in the history of medicine, charting the poet's milieu within this age, and providing close reading of his poems in these contexts, Romantic Medicine and John Keats illustrates the interdisciplinary bonds between the two healing arts of the Romantic period: medicine and poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195063073
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/15/1990
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.56(h) x 1.33(d)
Lexile:	1680L (what's this?)

About the Author

University of Miami, Florida

Table of Contents

	Introduction: Reading Life	3
Part I	Apollo's Poet	15
1	The London Medical Circle	22
2	Physicians True and False	34
3	Medical and Artistic Vision	43
4	Reading the Faces of Pain	54
Part II	Life	59
5	Naturphilosophie and John Brown	66
6	The Four Elements	74
7	Hunter and the Life of Blood	87
8	The Quarrel over Hunter's Principle	98
9	Polarity and Coleridge	111
10	The Grecian Urn	116
Part III	The Pharmacy of Disease	135
11	The Pharmakon	146
12	Specific Pharmaka	163
13	Antidotes	175
14	The Ambiguity of Snakes	182
15	Morbid Fevers	197
16	Feverous Love	203
Part IV	Organic Perfection	217
17	Glaucus's Cloak	224
18	English Evolution	231
19	European Evolution	240
20	Evolution of Mind	251
21	The Freaks of Imagination	264
22	Saturn's Query of Force	273
23	Apollo's Power of Life: Sympathetic Genius	286
24	The Imagination of Life	299
25	Reading Life	312
	Notes	323
	References	377
	Index of Poems by Keats	403
	Index of Proper Names	405
	Index of Topics	412

Editorial Reviews

"Highly original, colorful, obsessively industrious....It profoundly alters our perception of Keats's imaginative inspiration....De Almeida makes one think again about Romanticism and that is no mean feat. She has said something new about Keats, she has taken risks of interpretation, she has minutely reconstructed not merely a scientific culture but a scientific emotion, a frame of mind we have almost lost."—New York Review of Books

"A rich, detailed study....A book which qualifies as that all-too-rare phenomenon: a genuinely original contribution to Keats and Romantic studies....Provides a wealth of information and suggestive commentary that scholars and critics will be learning from and drawing on for years to come."—Journal of English and Germanic Philology

"An impressive and enlightening piece of work."—Studies in English Literature

"The argument and the ambitious research that supports it generate a multiplicity of new insights into the poetry....The book is a remarkable achievement....She has here made a major contribution to our understanding of Keats and the Romantic period."—The Romantic Movement

"A significant contribution not only to Keats studies but to the intellectual history of the Romantic Period."—Keats-Shelley Journal

From the Publisher