“I find that I cannot exist without poetry” proclaimed John Keats, the beloved English Romantic poet who many forget was trained as a physician. Keats practiced medicine for only 7 years before abandoning the profession. The medicine of his day, in early 19th-century London, faced dire challenges we might recognize as not unlike those of our times: long work hours, inadequate resources, harmful superstition and widespread misinformation, rampant and frequently fatal infectious disease. Keats himself would eventually succumb to tuberculosis as a young man aged only 25. Surely such onerous work conditions contributed to his defection from the hospital and propelled him toward the poetry he imagined could be healing, even as he suspected that he was slowly dying from the dread consumption whose symptoms his letters show he knew all too well.
