200 Years On, We Should Remember Why Medicine Was Central To The Poetry of John Keats

When I left Oxford for the urban heap of London, I found myself retracing the footsteps of Romantic poet and Guy’s medical alumnus John Keats.

On Sunday 1 October 1815, Keats enrolled as student №189 at the Counting House of Guy’s Hospital. The next nine months at Guys would alter his life. Keats planned to study there for a year and then apply for membership in the Royal College of Surgeons. Contrary to later rumours, Keats did well enough to earn a ‘dressership’ at Guy’s for the new year. Only 12 dressers were chosen from 700 students. Keats took lodgings at 28 St Thomas Street sharing with 3 older students. Keats attended, just as Shakespeare did, the bear-baitings in Borough as well as going to cock fights and boxing matches.

Keats’s poetry, as with James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, charts the transitional period between boyhood and manhood. Keats was aware that this was the project of his work as he made clear in the preface to Endymion and the letter in which he uses the mansion of chambers as a metaphor for life. Keats, however, never completed the journey, dying of tuberculosis before he reached full maturity. It is perhaps part of the reason (along with class snobbery) why his celebrated contemporary Byron disliked Keats. Whilst Byron cultivated…