John Keats and Medicine
Apothecary jar from the Hoffbrand collection © Royal College of Physicians
John Keats trained for seven years as an apothecary and surgeon but never practised. He was apprenticed to Thomas Hammond, an apothecary surgeon in Edmonton, near London, from 1810-1815. There is little historical record of this time, especially his apprenticeship years, as his first surviving letter is from August 1816 and there are only seven from his surgical years at Guy’s Hospital (1815-17) of which none mention his medical training,
Keats died of tuberculosis in 1821 age 25. That means he spent nearly a third of his tragically short life, from ages 14-21, studying medicine. He started writing poetry during his apprenticeship although none of his best known poems are from that time. In his surgical years he wrote O Solitude and On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, which were published in The Examiner. By the time he had given up medicine in March 1817, he was starting to write Endymion.
Medicine in Georgian times was brutal. There was no anaesthesia or antisepsis, leaches were used to bleed and medicines could poison rather than cure. Keats’s training would have been very hands on. How did such a sensitive young man, the champion of beauty and truth, survive? Modern biographers argue the portrayal of Keats as a sensitive soul, killed by hostile criticism of his work, is a posthumous myth and he was actually a much more rounded character: energetic, pugnacious, political, philosophical, supportive of his brothers, a good friend, ambitious, resolute, entertaining, colourful and playful. In 1818 he walked 600 miles around Scotland.
Why did he abandon medicine for poetry? Perhaps he could no longer stand the butchery of surgery. Perhaps he decided he could better heal suffering as a poet, but his motives were probably far less noble. Poetry was his passion and when he saw he might make a living from it as his mentor Leigh Hunt did, he took the chance. Sadly he had money troubles, was criticised for his politics as the “Cockney poet” and never obtained success in his lifetime.
Despite the fact he abandoned medicine, Keats did connect medicine and poetry and wrote in The Fall of Hyperion, “a poet is a sage; A humanist, physician to all men.”
As a doctor and a writer, I was curious to discover more about Keats’s time as an apprentice and surgical student, and the effect he might have had on Thomas Hammond, the doctor training him. This was how I came to write “Mr Hammond and the Poetic Apprentice.”