9.1 Romantic Medicine

The importance of medical thinking in Romantic poetry is now a commonplace of literary-critical discourse (see e.g. Vickers Reference Vickers2004, or the essays in Roe Reference Roe2017). However, its presence is sometimes disguised for present-day readers since medical language – like all forms of living language – is subject to change; the ‘scientific currency’ (de Almeida 1991: 13) of the early nineteenth century differs from our own. As a result, many words that are no longer considered to be primarily medical in denotation or connotation had quite specific medical meanings for Enlightenment and Romantic writers.

New resources have led to new insights into the history of English medical vocabulary. The completion of the Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE, https://ht.ac.uk, 2nd ed., 2020), for instance, linked to the ongoing revision of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and its location online, has enabled the reconstruction of the medical lexicons for particular periods of the history of the language.Footnote ¹ We are increasingly aware moreover of the importance of the OED not just as a source for the lexicon, but also as an extensive repository of citations, allowing for the enhanced study of intertextuality. In addition, the appearance of large machine-readable corpora has made it possible to contextualise particular idiolectal usages much more comprehensively than was possible until recently, and thus draw robustly evidenced conclusions. Such developments have allowed the better understanding of what might be called authorial invention. That is the focus of the current chapter, which is intended as part of a longer-term project on specialised vocabularies in the history of English.

Imaginative writers do not make their own language; rather, they harness, creatively, the linguistic forms that they encounter in the spoken or written modes of their own times, a process that is basic to the notion of style. Had they lived at other times, they would have expressed themselves in different ways. To use a term that would have been familiar to medieval or early modern readers, they practise inventio. According to classical and medieval rhetoricians inventio meant ‘finding something’, distinct from the modern understanding of ‘invention’, that is, ‘creating something new’. Inventio, then, the primary activity involved in literary creation, was essentially about discovery. Once the ‘matter’ was determined through inventio, ‘poetic art’ – in the words of the medieval rhetorician Geoffrey de Vinsauf, Chaucer’s ‘Gaufred, deere maister soverayn’ – ‘came forward to clothe the matter with words’ in an appropriate manner.Footnote ²

In what follows, invention will be examined in texts by three English Romantic writers who were all closely engaged with contemporary scientific (and specifically medical) thinking. They are Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), representing the ‘first generation’ traditionally identified, and John Keats (1795–1821) and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851), representing the second. Their usages will be compared to that of one of the most significant and influential medical practitioners of the period, William Cullen (1710–1790), whose substantial correspondence has recently become accessible for large-scale searching and analysis, and whose impact, both direct and indirect, can be traced in the outputs of all three writers, offering further insights into their creative – and inventive – practice.

9.2 Panting in the Verse of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge, like all the Romantics, was intensely interested in his own personal formation and development, and his writings reveal a great deal about his health. The first volume of Richard Holmes’s authoritative biography (1989) lists in the index a string of ailments ranging from rheumatic fever through neuralgia, problems with his teeth, influenza, and gout. In later life, of course, his opium addiction, acquired initially as a medical response to eye infections that gave him insomnia, was notorious. The second volume (1998) of Holmes’s biography famously opens with Coleridge, en route to Malta, being given an enema – which Coleridge himself recorded in somewhat gory detail – to address the severe constipation his addiction had caused. His family were also afflicted by illness: his father died young, of a heart attack, as did his sister, of consumption, and his brother Luke – who was training as a doctor at London Hospital – died of ‘a fever’ (Holmes Reference Holmes1989: 38). Poetry famously became for Coleridge associated ‘with sickness, feverish dreams, and isolation, set against the consoling, healing presence of the beloved’ (Holmes Reference Holmes1989: 38). More positively, Coleridge was from early in his career profoundly interested in medicine as a scientific discipline, having attended lectures on physiology during his sojourn in Germany in 1798–1799, and assisting his own medical adviser, James Gillman, in writing An Essay on Scrofula, to be submitted for the Royal College of Surgeons’ Jacksonian Prize in 1816 (Holmes Reference Holmes1998: 432). The material Coleridge developed for the Essay prefigured his later metaphysical thinking on biological evolution, The Theory of Life (see Jackson Reference Jackson1977).

It is unsurprising therefore that there are many places in Coleridge’s verse where we can detect a medical presence, albeit at times somewhat hidden. In 1797, Coleridge wrote one of his best-known poems, inspired it seems by having taken ‘two grains of Opium […] to check a dysentery’ while on a walking tour in Somerset. Famously the poem is unfinished, the poet having been – as he tells us in his preface (Coleridge Reference Coleridge1967: 295–6) – ‘unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock’, causing the rest of the poem to have ‘passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but alas! without the after restoration of the latter!’, a trope of interruption that was later to influence writers as different as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Stevie Smith (White Reference White2006–2007). Coleridge was to publish the fragment many years later, in 1816, as what he called – intriguingly – a ‘psychological curiosity’. This poem was the celebrated Kubla Khan, which contains the following lines:

The passage is usually interpreted as drawing on Coleridge’s observation of the scenery in the Quantock Hills in Somerset, transmuted by his imagination. But there is also something more, suggested by citations in the OED from the verse of another Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley:Footnote ³

These citations from The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound explicitly link the word pant with poor health (sicken, pain), and there is some evidence that pant – hitherto found primarily in literary works with a more general set of meanings – had been developing a specifically medical connotation from the later eighteenth century onwards. This evidence is supplied by a recently released corpus of medical correspondence; it is to that corpus that we will now turn.

9.3 Panting in Enlightenment Medical Discourse

William Cullen (1710–1790) was a major and hugely influential figure in the later Scottish Enlightenment. A friend of Joseph Black, William Hunter, and Adam Smith, he held professorships first at Glasgow and subsequently at Edinburgh. However, he continued to practise medicine, and in that role he undertook the usual custom of receiving consultations and then responding. In accordance with contemporary practice, this process was undertaken by letter, both to and from the doctor, and by good fortune a vast archive of these materials survives. An electronic corpus, derived from the archives of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh and of the University of Glasgow, has been published online as The Consultation Letters of Dr Cullen (www.cullenproject.ac.uk).

The following letter from 1782, citing a patient’s ‘distressful pantings’, was written to Cullen by a close colleague and friend, Alexander Stevenson, Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Glasgow from 1766 and a fellow member of Edinburgh’s elite Select Society:

Pant and panting are terms regularly deployed by Dr Cullen’s correspondents, even if not by the good doctor himself. Here is an excerpt from a letter from a Dr James Robertson, dated to 1789:

The expression ‘nervous panting’ is here notable; Cullen was famously on record as stating that ‘[i]n a certain view, almost the whole of the diseases of the human body might be called NERVOUS’ (1827–1828, 2:330), and Robertson seems to have been reflecting this view. Cullen took a holistic view of physiology, connecting his thinking to wider cultural concerns, as flagged by William Bynum: ‘Cullen’s doctrine of the nervous system was central to his more general beliefs about culture, civilization, improvement, and sensibility’ (Bynum 2004b). It seems that ‘nervous panting’ was being used by Robertson in a technical sense with which he expected Cullen to be familiar.

The medical views of Cullen and his circle were well known to Coleridge. He seems to have encountered them through his close friendship with the distinguished physician Thomas Beddoes (1760–1808), who had been taught at Edinburgh by Cullen’s friend Joseph Black (see Vickers Reference Vickers2004: 80–5; see also Vickers Reference Vickers1997). It seems at least possible therefore that Coleridge’s lines from Kubla Khan are worth revisiting in the light of their medical connotations:

The traditional gloss for this image – encouraged by the rise of criticism informed by psychoanalysis – is male ejaculation (see e.g. Logan Reference Logan1985 and references there cited, especially Bliss and Bliss Reference Bliss and Bliss1949), but an alternative interpretation is possible. It can be plausibly argued that the earth is clearly struggling for breath, and the mighty fountain is envisaged as a vomiting forth – or as Cullen’s correspondent (Stevenson 1782 in www.cullenproject.ac.uk) might have termed it, ‘ritchings to Vomit’. The earth is, in such a view, sick, an interpretation aligning with recent ‘ecocritical’ approaches to literary works from the Romantic period (see famously Bate Reference Bate1991; for a recent survey, see Rigby Reference Rigby and Garrard2014). Indeed, it was suggested some time ago – by a critic inspired by a distinct psychoanalytic approach – that there was a link between the explosive force described and Coleridge’s unfortunate enema already flagged (Sloane Reference Sloane1972). It might be suggested that the association of panting with illness could align with such an interpretation.

9.4 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus

We are on firmer ground with the second text discussed here: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818). The story of the writing of Frankenstein is almost as celebrated as the narrative it contains. It is famously the product of competitive ghost-story writing, at Lord Byron’s suggestion, during a stormy summer night in 1816, in the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Two seminal Romantic works arose from that event: The Vampyre by Byron’s personal physician Dr John Polidori (1795–1821), later to inspire Bram Stoker, and Frankenstein itself. Polidori’s discussions of physiology – as Nigel Leask points out, his doctoral thesis was on somnambulism (Leask 2004) – seem to have influenced Mary, though the imaginative creation was undoubtedly her own, drawing on her attendance, at the age of fourteen, at one of the famous Royal Institution lectures delivered by Humphry Davy (1778–1829). Mary went on to read, precociously, Davy’s ‘Introductory Discourse’, in which he spoke of how in the future man would ‘interrogate Nature with Power […] as a master, active, with his own instruments’ (cited in Holmes Reference Holmes2009: 326).

Mary Shelley was, remarkably, only eighteen when she composed Frankenstein. Her achievement was for some time occluded, overshadowed because of her relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet. In recent years, however, the originality and significance of her writings have been given appropriate and independent recognition. In many ways she comes across as a much more sympathetic and attractive figure than her husband. She was brought up by her father, the philosopher William Godwin. Her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, the leading feminist political writer of her generation, had died of puerperal fever a few days after her daughter’s birth. Godwin’s circle included many of the most prominent thinkers and scientists of the period, and Mary was ‘well read and painstakingly educated in the radical tradition’ by her father (Holmes Reference Holmes1995: 170). She had attended Coleridge’s lectures in 1811, delivered to the newly founded Philosophical Institution. Tickets for these lectures were sold at Godwin’s bookshop, among other venues (Holmes Reference Holmes1998: 265).

Mary continued her learning habits into later life, after her elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814, and while in Geneva seems in this way to have encountered what she herself described as ‘the physiological writers of Germany’ (Shelley 1818; see below). Holmes considers that Dr Frankenstein was modelled at least in part on Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1810), originally of Jena and later of Munich, where he is alleged to have attempted to revive dead animals – and even humans – by means of ‘electrical action’ (2009: 329). Ritter died, insane, at the age of thirty-three.

Mary was also influenced, directly or indirectly, by Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), and through him by Cullen. Mary explicitly cited Darwin in the preface to the second edition of Frankenstein:

The last year of Darwin’s study at Edinburgh (1753–1756) coincided with Cullen’s appointment to a chair at that university. The second volume of his Zoonomia (1794), on nosology (i.e. classification of diseases), drew extensively on Cullen’s work, although modified by Darwin’s engagement with the ‘Brunonian’ theories of the radical Edinburgh physician John Brown (1735–1788). Brown had also influenced (albeit with severe reservations) Beddoes’s – and subsequently Coleridge’s – thinking.

9.4.1 Medical Uses of Passion in Shelley’s Frankenstein

This engagement with current scientific – and specifically medical – thinking may be illustrated from Mary Shelley’s use of the word passion, which occurs no fewer than fifteen times in Frankenstein (see Figure 13 in the Image Gallery). For instance, Mary used the word in the prefatory remarks she placed at the very beginning of the first edition, flagging its centrality to the themes of the book:

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The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it developes; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield. I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature, while I have not scrupled to innovate upon their combinations.

(Shelley 1818: 2)

Figure 13 The frontispiece to the second edition (1831) of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus.

Getty Images

Mary seems to have used the word passion with some quite precise meanings, and in this context the OED’s citations are illuminating. The earliest citations, from the Middle and Early Modern English periods, are focused on physical sensation, for example:

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a1398 J. Trevisa tr. Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum (BL Add.) f.316 Mete..bredeþ þe passiouns, colica passio & Iliaca passio.

1547 A. Borde Breuiary of Helthe i. f. xxxix In latyn it is named Ventralis passio. In englyshe..the bely ache or a passion in the bely.

1563 T. Gale Certaine Wks. Chirurg. iv. ii. f. 28^v It is of ryght good effecte in the passions of the ioyntes.

1624 W. Laud Diary 7 Aug. in Hist. Troubles (1695) 13 My passion by Blood, and my fear of a Stone in my Bladder.

1684 tr. T. Bonet Guide Pract. Physician xvi. 566 Thirst is a Passion of the Mouth of the Stomach.

(OED s.v. passion)

Later citations, however, seem to focus rather on mental states, for instance:

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1710 J. Norris Treat. Christian Prudence vii. 323 By the Passions I think we are to understand certain Motions of the Mind depending upon and accompanied with an Agitation of the Spirits.

1733 Pope Of Use of Riches 9 The ruling Passion conquers Reason still.

1791 A. Radcliffe Romance of Forest I. i. 4 A man whose passions often overcame his reason.

1797 Encycl. Brit. XIV. 2/1 The common division of the passions into desire and aversion, hope and fear, joy and grief, love and hatred, has been mentioned by every author who has treated of them.

(OED s.v. passion)

The deployment of ‘passions’ in Anne Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest, a highly influential ‘Gothic’ bestseller, is perhaps significant. Mary and Percy Shelley were certainly reading Radcliffe in 1814 (Holmes Reference Holmes1995: 274). The term was also widely deployed in other high-profile works with a similar meaning, for example in Joanna Baillie’s Plays of the Passions (1798–1812), where, as Norma Clarke flags, ‘often hidden psychological processes [gave] rise to passionate action’ (Clarke 2004).

William Cullen’s correspondence again offers numerous interesting parallel usages, demonstrating how medical terminology is at the heart of the word’s later deployment by fictional writers (Baillie being the niece of the physicians John and William Hunter; William was, as indicated above, a friend of William Cullen, providing another possible link). Here is an incoming letter of 1755 responding to Cullen’s request for advice, signed by a team led by Dr John Stevenson, father of Alexander. We might note the reference to ‘passion of the mind’:

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We have considered your patients case with all due attention, & as we are informed that her present indisposition was initially owing to passion of the mind, we are of opinion that on that account chiefly the case has proved so obstinate, & the cure so difficult & uncertain, tho’ we are not without hopes even of a thorough recovery.

(Stevenson 1755 in www.cullenproject.ac.uk)

In this context, the significance of many of the occurrences of the word passion in Frankenstein becomes more salient. Here, for instance, is the narrator, Dr Frankenstein:

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Memory brought madness with it; and when I thought on what had passed, a real insanity possessed me; sometimes I was furious, and burnt with rage, sometimes low and despondent. I neither spoke nor looked, but sat motionless, bewildered by the multitude of miseries that overcame me. Elizabeth alone had the power to draw me from these fits; her gentle voice would soothe me when transported by passion, and inspire me when human feelings were sunk in torpor. She wept with me, and for me. When reason returned, she would remonstrate, and endeavour to inspire me with resignation […].

(Shelley Reference Shelley1818: 219)

We might note in this passage not only passion, referring to the mental state in quite a precise way, but other words that seem to have developed a specifically medical meaning when Mary Shelley was writing, such as rage and gentle. Here are some relevant citations in the OED for gentle, sense 6d:

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Of a medicine: Acting without violence; mild.

1576 A. Fleming tr. Hippocrates in Panoplie Epist. 289 I would therfore, that a stronger remedie be prepared: for this emplaster is too gentle.

1790 J. B. Moreton Manners & Customs West India Islands 25 If you find yourself costive, take a gentle purge.

1835 J. Forbes et al. Cycl. Pract. Med. IV. 587/2 By mild and frequently repeated doses of gentle aperients.

(OED s.v. gentle)

It seems that Elizabeth’s ‘gentle voice’ was undertaking a distinctly therapeutic function. Here are some similar citations for rage, sense 4b, defined by the OED as ‘Madness, insanity; a fit or attack of madness. Now archaic’. The citation from Percy Shelley might be noted as a link to Mary’s writing:

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1700 J. Dryden Chaucer’s Palamon & Arcite, in Fables 20 Museful Mopings, which presage The loss of Reason, and conclude in Rage.

1774 S. Johnson Patriot 21 By the howling violence of patriotic rage, the nation was for a time exasperated to such madness.

a1822 P. B. Shelley Peter Bell III vii, in Poet. Wks. (?1840) 246/1 To wakeful frenzy’s vigil rages, As opiates, were the same applied.

1874 Appleton’s Jrnl. 4 July 30 Saul, in the last paroxysm of royal rage and madness, slays himself.

(OED s.v. rage)

The words gentle and rage both appear regularly in the Cullen correspondence. Gentle is very frequent, commonly in relation to purging (as in the 1790 OED citation). We may recall the ‘gentle evacuations’ recommended to John Stevenson in 1755, and here is another use of gentle, some twenty years later, in the following letter of advice to Lord Charles Cathcart (1776):

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I am sorry to find the appetite for dinner not so good as before, but Impute it to the milk which after repetition in such quantity is not so easily digested as at first and I am of opinion that your Lordship must either take a gentle vomit, if you vomit with any tolerable ease or if you do not you must diminish for some days the quantity of your milk and I think your noon and afternoon doses are the most fit to be omitted.

(Cullen 1776 in www.cullenproject.ac.uk)

‘Gentle vomit’ seems from the frequency of its occurrence in the corpus to have been a favourite technical expression of Cullen’s circle. As for rage, here is the unhappy Reverend Henry Elliot of Beadnell and Bamburgh in Northumberland, reporting to Cullen in 1778 how, despite a range of treatments, he is still suffering from the ‘rage’ of a ‘wandering mind’:

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[…] after all I applied to your prescription and pukes above mentioned, but still the heats, and all these doubts, & wanderings of the mind seem to rage as much as ever; […].

(Elliot 1778 in www.cullenproject.ac.uk)

9.5 On Burning: Shelley’s Creature and the Case of John Keats

Another word that is linked in Frankenstein to passion is burning. Here speaks Mary Shelley’s Creature, who has been brought to life by means of the doctor’s infernal craft:

In both the cases of the unfortunate Reverend Elliot and the Creature, it is clear that the ‘passion’ is ‘of the mind’, but in this latter instance the ‘passion’ is burning.

The Cullen correspondence interestingly links burning with rage, as in this passage from an enquiry of 1783, concerning an unfortunate schoolmaster, Mr David Watson:

Burning here was evidently the result of gonorrhoea, and the term seems to have become used both for the effect of the disease and the disease itself; the connexion with tormented sexuality is one that may be relevant for Mary Shelley’s Creature as well. The OED defines the term as ‘Heat attendant upon disease or a serpent’s bite; the disease itself; esp. erysipelas or St. Anthony’s fire, and venereal disease’, and offers several relevant citations from the late medieval period to the middle of the nineteenth century, for example:

The medical denotation of burning seems therefore to be established, and in this instance the final figure under review, John Keats (1795–1821), is relevant, both for his deployment of the word in his poetry and also his personal experience, as a professional medical practitioner and as a sufferer from that unfortunate condition.

Keats is best known to present-day readers now as a poet, but by professional training he was an ‘apothecary’, a medically trained practitioner who had studied at one of the premier London teaching hospitals of the period, Guy’s, under a leading surgeon, Astley Cooper (1768–1841). Cooper had himself studied not only at another major institution, St Thomas’s, but also in Edinburgh, where, as William Bynum describes, he had attended Cullen’s lectures (Bynum 2004a). Cullen’s medical taxonomy was a standard part of Keats’s curriculum (Curran Reference Curran and Roe2017: 1709). And this fact has implications for his poetry, since, as Robert Gittings put it many years ago,

Indeed, there is good evidence that Keats saw his poetry as not distinct from his medical practice, something that contemporaries understood and has been emphasised by recent research, ranging from Hermione de Almeida’s foundational Romantic medicine and John Keats (1991) through Nicholas Roe’s recent important edited collection John Keats and the medical imagination (2017). Cooper and his associates always emphasised that ‘the practitioner of “first rank” must know “more than Medicine”’ (de Almeida 1991: 36), and this axiom seems to have underpinned Keats’s thinking:

Medical situations are found, for instance, throughout Keats’s first major poem, Endymion. Sporadic metaphors and similes hint at a medical context, such as ‘nature’s lives and wonders pulsed tenfold’ (Barnard 1988: book I, line 105); Peona, Endymion’s sister and confidante, has healing powers ‘like some midnight spirit-nurse’ (book I, line 413), which allow Endymion’s ‘brain’ to become ‘healthier’ (book I, line 465); ‘atomies’ ‘buzz about our slumbers, like brain-flies,/Leaving us fancy-sick’ (book I, lines 851–3; see also ‘brain-sick’, book II, line 43). The speech of the aged Glaucus in book III plays with images of mortality (‘remorseless as an infant’s bier’, book III, line 520), describing Circe as a kind of anti-physician inflicting sickness: ‘soon these limbs became/Gaunt, withered, sapless, feeble, cramped, and lame’ (book III, lines 637–8). The subsequent resuscitation of the nymph Scylla clearly has a medical parallel. Furthermore, in a discussion of the poem in his letters Keats refers, perhaps significantly, to ‘Pleasure’s Thermometer’ (cf. Barnard Reference Barnard1988: 567–8), demonstrating his engagement with cutting-edge science. However, it should be noted that medical use of the thermometer was not current in Keats’s day, possibly because the instrument had not become appropriately refined for clinical use (Porter Reference Porter1997: 344–6).

Keats uses the word burning a good deal in his poetry. In his posthumously published The fall of Hyperion, for instance, the word appears in the Dreamer’s narrative as follows, with a generalised medical connotation:

Such usages correspond with the widespread use of burning in the Cullen correspondence, referring to a range of symptoms in various parts of the anatomy.Footnote ⁴

However, Keats also seems to have used burning in a more specific sense, for personal reasons. As is now generally accepted by scholars, Keats suffered from gonorrhoea, contracted most probably during his visit to Oxford in 1817 (Gittings Reference Gittings1968: 236; Motion Reference Motion1997: 196–7). Keats seems – in accordance with contemporary, entirely erroneous medical views on the connexion between the diseases – to have been worried that an ulcerated throat (contracted during his visit to Scotland in the summer of 1818) may have been a sign that his gonorrhoea was developing into the much more serious disease of syphilis.

The reference to how Hyperion’s ‘ample palate’ (cited from Barnard Reference Barnard1988: part II, line 32) tasted ‘poisonous brass and metals sick’ (Barnard 1988: part II, line 33) may be connected to this unhappy and humiliating experience. Contemporary medical opinion required, as a remedy for this condition, the sparing use of mercury (quicksilver), usually administered either by rubbing on the skin or in pill form. In 1780, for instance, Dr Cullen wrote to a certain Lachlan Campbell, with reference to a decently anonymous ‘Mr ---’, as follows:

‘Corrosive sublimate’ or mercuric chloride, the chemical compound of mercury and chlorine, was the notorious ‘common blue pill’ that, according to an OED citation from 1861, had ‘literally bec[o]me a part of the national diet’ (s.v. blue pill n.). Keats would have been able to self-prescribe, which he did, taking fairly heavy doses of mercury. However, the therapy had dangers, as Cullen flagged, in terms of inducing a general debility: thus the reference to ‘scorbutic taint’ – that is, scurvy, a diagnosis used rather generally in the eighteenth century. Combined with the hardships Keats underwent during a rain-soaked tour to the highlands and islands of Scotland, this dosage seems to have made him especially susceptible to catching tuberculosis from his brother Tom, a condition from which he eventually died (Gittings Reference Gittings1968: 343).

9.6 Keats on the Sympathetic Touch

Another term Cullen used in his letter to Campbell (1780) was touch: ‘avoiding letting the Mercury touch his mouth’. Touch was one of Keats’s favourite words, often cited by literary critics as linked to his ‘tendency […] to ally his other sensory images more closely with the sense of touch and consequently render them stronger and more concrete’ (Bate Reference Bate1945: 3). Touch occurs no fewer than twenty-one times in Keats’s Endymion, and undoubtedly contributes to the perception that that poem is particularly concerned with sensuality. As the philosopher John Locke put it, touch is ‘a sense spread over the whole body, tho’ it be most eminently placed in the ends of the fingers’ (Elements of natural philosophy xi.50; cited in the OED s.v. touch n.).

However, according to the OED citations, touch had primary and specific medical meanings during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Several citations in the OED confirm Cullen’s usage, flagging that the usage was long established and linked to mercury:

In medical parlance touch had further meanings, and the word was also associated with early gynaecology, for example:

This last meaning of touch is especially relevant to Keats’s usage in Endymion. In book I of the poem, Endymion, in conversation with his sister Peona, develops an argument about the human aspiration for the spiritual life:

The gynaecological reference point is obviously relevant to the image Keats is developing (cf. ‘impregnates’, ‘wombs’).

Further complexities may be distinguished in the use of touch in this passage. It seems that the phrase ‘sympathetic touch’ seems to have had a quite specific – and quite complex – meaning for Keats, the interpretation of which depends in part on understanding contemporary physiological language. ‘Sympathetic’ had both physiological/pathological and anatomical meanings, with two relevant definitions offered by the OED. The first, ‘applied to a condition, action, or disorder induced in a person, or in an organ or part of the body, by a similar or corresponding one in another’, is supported by citations such as the following:

This usage is found in a note of 1780 within the Cullen materials, about a gentleman of sixty-nine simply referred to as ‘A.B.’:

The second OED definition of sympathetic describes the term as ‘designating one of the two great nerve-systems in vertebrates […], consisting of a double chain of ganglia, with connecting fibres, along the vertebral column, giving off branches and plexuses which supply the viscera and blood-vessels and maintain relations between their various activities; belonging to or forming part of this system.’ Citations include:

In the light of these definitions and citations of sympathetic and touch, the collocation of the two words in

becomes explicable. For Keats, music has become the midwife, whereby human invention harnesses natural sounds.

This interpretation is supported by a contemporary meaning of touch recorded in the OED: ‘The action or an act of touching a musical instrument, its strings, keys, etc., in order to produce music; the manner in which an instrument (esp. a keyboard instrument) is touched or handled so as to produce particular tones or effects’ (OED s.v. touch). Relevant OED citations include for the noun:

For the verb:

Keats himself collocates touch and sound in

The link also accounts for yet further elements in the passage under analysis, as when ‘the airy stress […] with a sympathetic touch’

The culminating reference to Apollo – the god of music, as well as of poetry and medicine – is surely significant.

9.7 Romantic Invention

The reference to an Aeolian harp is a characteristically Romantic gesture, which Keats had already used in his early Ode to Apollo of 1815 (see also, for instance, Coleridge’s Effusion XXXV: The Eolian harp and Dejection: an ode). Aeolian harps are string instruments designed to be played by the wind, Aeolus being the relevant Greek god. It is surely also significant that the Aeolian harp functioned as a model for the operation of the human nervous system in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote ⁶

Such examples demonstrate Keats’s astonishing ability to harness polysemy in complex ways. They also demonstrate a traditional artistic activity, as flagged at the beginning of this chapter: inventio. A parallel may be drawn with ‘found art’, as demonstrated for example by Picasso’s famous – notorious? – linking of a bicycle saddle and handlebars to create a bull’s head. Coleridge, Mary Shelley, and Keats are all drawing on available materials to deliver remarkable creative outcomes.

But what perhaps comes across more strongly in all the literary case studies discussed in this chapter is something rather strikingly of the period: they are all profoundly impacted by medical practice, but on Romantic terms. Until comparatively recently, Romanticism was seen as hostile to science, ‘its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity’ (Holmes Reference Holmes2009: xvi). Examples like those cited here demonstrate that such a view is, as Richard Holmes has eloquently argued, simplistic: Romanticism drew profoundly on its scientific inheritance, but transformed this inheritance through ‘imaginative intensity’ (2009: xvi). The result was a breaking-down – through shared ‘wonder’ – of the boundary between sciences and the humanities, developing a holistic conception of the body and the psyche in a way that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are only gradually rediscovering. Analyses of the kind presented here, drawing on both established resources such as the OED and new electronic corpora, are increasingly confirming the correctness of Holmes’s claim.