Chapter 8 - Physician-Poets and Vitalist Theories of Life

Summary

Poetry and medicine have long been intimately linked. William Carlos Williams noted in a worn prescription pad that the ‘use of poetry is to vivify’. Poetry has a history of being used to define life in ways that medical language sometimes cannot. This chapter traces the intersection of poetry and medicine through the figure of the physician-poet, specifically in the eighteenth century. It explores how poetry has been used to question what medical theories mean for broader philosophical questions about the human body and the self. Through poetic works by Sir Richard Blackmore, Samuel Garth, John Arbuthnot, and John Armstrong, this chapter places Williams’s note on poetry’s vivifying quality in the history of physicians using poetry to explore and define aspects of life within the human body.