John Keats and Suffering

Apothecary Jars at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society Museum

[Content warning Human Dissection] 

In my first week as a nineteen-year-old medical student, I had to dissect a body. I'd never even been to a funeral. There was appropriate talk about respecting the bodies, but we were given no support for this task, nothing about what we might feel or how to cope with this experience of being exposed to death. Most medical students want to help people or save lives, not cut into cadavers. The smell of astringent formalin was terrible. The room was full of bodies under sheets, waiting to be revealed. I don't think anyone actually fainted. Afterwards I and the four other students at my table went to Fitzbillie's tea shop for cream buns. I could taste the formalin on my fingers. One of the other students joked and two of them flirted.

Later I sat in my room, shocked, unable to process it. I was far from my family and hadn't made friends yet. I couldn't talk about it; it was too big.  I picked up a pen and wrote a poem. I hadn't written a poem since primary school, but it felt the only way to express how I felt. It wasn't a pretty, rhyming poem, just raw words about the horror I felt seeing the bodies and how they signalled my mortality. It ended, “I wish I had never seen the dead.” Putting those words down on paper helped. I didn't show anyone; it was for me alone.

Over the next few years, when I felt troubled, I wrote poems. About loneliness and isolation, family problems, an uncertain relationship, my grandmother when she died, expecting a baby, after an operation. Then I stopped for many years, apart from a few poems when I took a writing course, but these had a different emotional tone. Perhaps starting to write fiction helped me instead? Until the year when a family member became seriously ill and I found myself writing a few poems, then more when COVID came during the eerie lockdown. What was it about these times and events? Was it the only way I could express myself? It was often when death reared its ugly head.

Some 20 years after I wrote that first poem, when I was working as a GP, I discovered John Keats had been apprenticed to an apothecary surgeon a few miles away and had studied to become an apothecary and then a surgeon for seven years. I’d never known that. That set me thinking about poetry and suffering. Why hadn’t he become a doctor? How would such a supposedly sensitive individual react to the horrors of medicine in his era with no anaesthetics or antisepsis? I’d struggled in our modern era, his was far worse. Did he write poems to express his emotions as I had or to escape from suffering? Might his poems and his life story help people who were suffering?

When I thought more about suffering I saw two facets to it: the suffering of patients and the reactions of doctors witnessing that suffering. Obviously the suffering of patients was the worst. As a junior doctor I felt I had to put aside any feelings I experienced to help the patient. But that left me with them.

I didn’t know much about Keats apart from a few of his famous lines, the soundbites: “a thing of beauty is a joy forever”; “truth is beauty, beauty truth”. I hadn’t studied him at school and only took science subjects from age sixteen, but I wanted to find out more.

I read biographies, his letters and books about medicine in that era. I discovered that as well as the suffering Keats saw as a medical student, he also lost his father, mother and brother Tom. He suffered periods of melancholy throughout his life which he called the “blue devils.” Then there was his own cruel illness, slowly dying of tuberculosis. Sadly, when he became ill his creativity was decreased.

Keats didn’t write poems about his experiences as a doctor. There are a few medical references in his poems, but many more classical allusions. I felt his medical career was almost discounted by some writers. Perhaps his poetry was an escape from suffering for him in a different way, immersing himself in an imagined world, and maybe in some way he hoped it would give comfort to others. In “The Fall of Hyperion” he wrote, “a poet is a sage; A humanist, physician to all men.”

NOTE:

Today I understand the topic of dissection is approached with much more sensitivity and awareness of the effect it might have on medical students. Some don’t even dissect physical bodies but use virtual means.