15 - Keats and Romantic science

Summary

It is richly ironic that Keats's medical training, once cited as a sign of his low cultural standing, has been credited in recent scholarship for the precision and intellectual sophistication of Keats's response to the momentous scientific and medical developments of his era. “So back to the shop Mr John,” Blackwood's ”Z.” sarcastically concluded a notorious attack on Keats as a “Cockney” poet, mocking him as an “uneducated and flimsy stripling” in the grip of “mania” and “malady,” who would do better as a “starving apothecary than a starved poet.” “Z.” knew that Keats had been an apprentice to an apothecary-surgeon - the standard way for those without university educations to enter medical practice - and his review evoked the dated stereotype of the quackish, low-status apothecary, dispensing “plasters, pills, and ointment boxes” (524) with knowledge gained mainly from haphazard, hands-on experience. What “Z.” ignored (and recent scholarship has painstakingly established) is that Keats became a licensed apothecary at a time when medical education was undergoing significant reform, completing his training at Guy's, one of the most advanced teaching hospitals. Having earned a reputation at Enfield Academy for a brilliant, probing, and retentive mind, Keats found himself at Guy's, an institution that was helping to reshape the profession of medicine with the latest currents in scientific thought. How did this experience mark Keats's thinking and writing?