John Keats and the North Middlesex Hospital

One day at the end of a busy GP surgery, I logged on to the North Middlesex Hospital website to find some referral details. My eye was caught by a history tab and after I’d sorted the referral I clicked on it. It told me The North Middlesex used to be a workhouse and its first medical director was Mr Hammond, who took on fourteen-year-old local boy John Keats as his apprentice in 1809. Keats later became a doctor at Guy’s hospital and found fame as a poet. I was astonished. I’d never known Keats trained as a doctor and wanted to discover more.

Picture shows North Middlesex Hospital Former Administration Building built 1909, now trust headquarters.

At first my research was frustrating. It appeared much of this wasn’t strictly true! Biographies about Keats told me the apothecary surgeon Mr Hammond who trained Keats died in 1817. The Edmonton Union Workhouse was formed in 1842 so they couldn’t be the same person. I now think it must have been Thomas Hammond’s son Henry Samuel who was medical director of the workhouse. Also most biographers think Keats started his apprenticeship in 1810 not 1809. And he wasn’t famous in his lifetime. But the main essence was true. John Keats spent seven years studying medicine, nearly a third of his tragically short life as he died of consumption age 25. And five years of those were as an apprentice in Edmonton, London, a few miles up the road from where I was working.