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.

historicizes the concept of public health in the context of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century urban Low Countries. It begins by outlining how then-prevalent Galenic or humoural theories defined health, and how such ideas were employed by various Netherlandish governing bodies through a focus on spatial interventions. Analyses of street paving, water regimes, fire prevention, and military safety demonstrate how health interests involved mitigating communal risks through adaptations in the built environment. Preventative measures thus shaped cities’ morphology from the outset of urbanisation. Town governments were willing to invest major sums to improve safety and well-being and realized a program aimed at preserving flow. The creation and adaptation of complex infrastructures also stimulated further sanitary and maintenance routines. These required coordination concerning the division of responsibilities and tasks, and the policing of such arrangements.

This essay aims to show that medicine had a deep and dynamic relationship with poetry in the eighteenth century and the Romantic period. It uses Dr John Arbuthnot’s poetry to demonstrate how profoundly medical theories affected the idea of the human, and goes on analyse Alexander Pope’s ‘Cave of Spleen’ in The Rape of the Lock to demonstrate the complex effects medical theories and other discourses, including folklore and religion, create in a canonical, and highly gendered, poem of the early period. The essay describes the main medical theories of this ‘long’ century (humouralism, mechanism and (al)chemistry, the nerves and sensibility, vitalism and Brunonianism) and their uneven evolution, and analyses their effects on a variety of poets, including Anne Finch, Mark Akenside, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, and Percy Shelley. It also focuses on the ‘regimen’ poetry of physician-poets Edward Baynard and John Armstrong, arguing that all kinds of discourses are bound up with both poetry and medicine, and that poetry, even of the didactic kind, is not reducible to medical discourse, and is capable of intervening in and shaping medical debates and medical knowledge.