ABSTRACT
Coleridge seeks to serve as guardian to the healthful public by establishing himself as the ethical exemplar who is stable and unified. Scrofula effectively embodies for Coleridge the ethical ambiguity of one attempting to fill a double role. The case study of Coleridge's disease is found in the rich text of 'Dejection'. Coleridge's connection of his grief with the weather indicates a source beyond hopeless love, and in the broader complaint he has consistently, yet nebulously, diagnosed as scrofula. This chapter shows that scrofula provides Coleridge with a name for his anxiety over being outdone by Wordsworth and for the dilemma of how to write of himself as an addict without explicitly admitting to addiction. Scrofula unifies all his problems, along with his potential for literary achievement, into a character his readers can sympathize with. Cold weather, he states, exacerbates the symptoms of scrofula and thereby threatens well-being through its diminished impressibility.
