Romantic Medicine and the Poetics of Palliation

This study uses the interdisciplinary lens of Romantic medical ethics to reconsider received ideas about the therapeutic power of Romantic poetry. Studies of literature and medicine in the long nineteenth century have generally considered disease the era’s main medical symbol; they have likewise considered holistic “healing” its major model for poetry’s therapeutic effect, following Geoffrey Hartman’s description of Wordsworth’s ability to “heal the wound of self.” Without denying the importance of these paradigms, my work explores alternate foci: pain instead of disease, and palliation instead of healing. In Britain, professional medical ethics were first codified during the Romantic period in response to a variety of medical and social advances. But because of Romantic medicine’s curative uncertainty and utilitarian intolerance for pain, its ethicists turned from cure to palliation to describe a doctor’s primary duty toward his patients. My study argues that this palliative ethic was taken up by Romantic literary writers to describe their own work. By engaging with contemporary medical ethics treatises such as John Gregory’s 1770 Lectures on the Duties and Qualifications of a Physician and Thomas Percival’s 1803 Medical Ethics, I explore four Romantic authors’ struggle to find an appropriate medical model for their work’s therapeutic benefits. Ultimately, all turned their attention from “healing the wound of self” to palliating the agonies of a world where, as Wordsworth writes, “suffering is permanent, obscure and dark.” Reading William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes through a palliative lens reveals a diversity of perspectives on the therapeutic potential of literary writing and challenges our received picture of their engagement with medical ideas: e.g. Wordsworth, hailed by Matthew Arnold for his “healing power,” found an alternate model for his poetry’s medical benefits, while Keats finally abandoned his early belief that the poet should be “physician to all men.” My study follows these four writers as they variously embrace, qualify, or outright reject the idea that literature could, as Keats had once hoped, “sooth the cares and lift the thoughts of man.”Ph