Volume 38, Number 12 · June 27, 1991
The Cabinet of Doctor Keats
By Richard Holmes
Romantic Medicine and John Keats
by Hermione de Almeida
Oxford University Press, 418 pp., $45.00
One of the great intellectual attractions of Romanticism is that it arose in a period when science and art were still talking intelligently to each other. There was no social gap between the Two Cultures. The greatest British experimental chemist of the day, Sir Humphry Davy, published a collection of his own poetry and corrected the proofs of the Lyrical Ballads. Erasmus Darwin formulated his theories of botany, and the sexual life of plants, in bouncing verse. Coleridge attended the lectures of Davy to 'renew his stock of metaphors,' and engaged in the vitalist controversy about the nature of biological life with the surgeons William Lawrence and John Abernethy between 1816 and 1819. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley all owned microscopes at some point in their careers. (Shelley had to pawn his, when he eloped.) Mary Shelley studied galvanic theory. Keats attended, and made notes on, the lectures of both the chief surgeon at Guy's Hospital, Sir Astley Cooper, and the leading critic William Hazlitt. Even Lord Byron peered cautiously through a telescope in the Swiss mountains (though it may be questioned exactly what form of heavenly bodies he was observing).
Review, 1785 words
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