ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the figures who occupy the spaces at which the inner workings of the medical establishment bled into the outside world and who expressly constructed the body-conscious Poet-Physician provide some of the most productive points of access. John Thelwall, John Keats, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes occupy such spaces, and their characterizations of the Peripatetic Philosopher, the Poet-Physician, and Death's Fool to mobilize their engagements with the changing nature of medical authority are mediated by their equally ambivalent engagements with poetic authority. So their readers mold and fashion their own version of that same relation in the wake of the mediating influence of Apollo's Poets: readers of Thelwall recognize the advantages and disadvantages of a body-conscious political vision of reform. The readers of Keats recognize the advantages and disadvantages of a body conscious treatment of authority; and readers of Beddoes recognize the advantages and disadvantages of body-conscious questions about the metaphysics of death.
