3 - ‘Soothing Thoughts’: William Wordsworth and the Poetry of Relief

Summary

William Wordsworth was a typical Georgian patient: that is to say, he always got a second opinion. In April 1808, when both the poet's son John and Sara Hutchinson fell ill, he sought advice from two local medical men (apothecary Mr. Scambler and surgeon Mr. Edmondson), two physicians by correspondence (Dr. Babbington and Dr. Thomas Beddoes), at least one medical treatise (Dr. John Fothergill's 1781 Medical and Philosophical Works), several friends (including Dorothy, Coleridge, and Mr. Rideout), and, not insignificantly, himself. Writing to Coleridge of Sara's nerves, Wordsworth commented, ‘Mr Edmondson said that always when the pain returned, the Leeches should be applied, followed by the blister … but really it ought to be considered that the discomfort and fretful sensations which in Sara's constitution a blister produces may possibly outweigh the advantage from it’. The egalitarian variety of Wordsworth's medical consultation illustrates how Romantic medicine frequently involved open negotiations of authority between doctors and their patients. Status, income, and location permitting, the sick were as likely to seek medical advice from neighbors, friends, and domestic care manuals as they were from graduates of the Royal Colleges, as several medical historians have shown. In this milieu, personal experience could outweigh professional opinion. Edmondson might be a surgeon, but Wordsworth knew Sara's constitution and felt secure enough in his own medical knowledge to question expert advice.

Perhaps his confidence was warranted. By the Victorian period, Wordsworth himself had acquired a reputation as an expert in poetic healing, a therapeutics that has, since the nineteenth century, become a bridge between scientific medicine and other healing arts. As chapters one and two recounted, though medicine has never wholly dismissed art's psychosomatic benefits, in the twentieth century it began to explore literary healing with new rigor, participating in the development of health humanities fields like literature and medicine and narrative medicine. Romantic writing is well-represented in these movements, and Wordsworth is an especially prominent figure. For example, the ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802)’ forms a theoretical backbone for poetry therapy, a subfield in contemporary psychology. The embrace of Wordsworth as a forbear aligns poetry therapy with a tradition of therapeutic holism stretching back to John Stuart Mill. Moreover, Wordsworth's reputation as a healing poet was enhanced in the twentieth century by Romantic scholars like M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Hartman, who made therapeutic claims for his work independently of any interdisciplinary framework.