ABSTRACT
In December 1936 and January 1937, Earle Parkhill Scarlett (1896–1982) published a two-part article, meticulously researched, titled ‘Medicine and Poetry’. Outwardly, the article catalogues physicians who were also major or minor poets, but read closely, Scarlett’s glosses on such poets reveal an uncanny psychological insight into a form of sensibility. Physicians educated in reading the body could also read the world. In other words, they were experts in close noticing, and their medium for such sensate work was the abstraction of the metaphor. Not quite ‘abstract’, for metaphors are always embodied, but the transition from the literal to the metaphorical is cognitive – and not, say, the work of the surgeon’s knife to which John Keats refers in Scarlett’s careful reading of the English surgeon who abandoned medicine for the Word. As Keats said to a friend,
my last operation was the opening of a man’s temporal artery. I did it with the utmost nicety, but, reflecting on what passed through my mind at the time, my dexterity seemed a miracle, and I never took up the lancet again.
The opening of the temporal artery may have prevented loss of vision in Keats’ patient, but this moment provided Keats with a vision and a confirmation of calling as a poet. The Word became Keats’ patient that he treated with extraordinary care and sensuality.