ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the influence of Keats medical training and examines how he manifested, critiqued, and employed the anxieties associated with the body and medicine. It explains the implicit influence that an awareness of that medical context and its accompanying body consciousness had on contemporary readings of his work and on constructions of the public John Keats. To return to the starting point, in many ways it is important that studies of intersections between Romanticism and Medicine center on Keats. The clear interdependence of poetry and medicine in the works, the medical-historical significance of his tenure at Guys, the biographical importance of medicine in both his early and later life. Keats's connections with contemporary medicine have been the subject of much critical debate: early studies of Keats and Medicine focused on his medical training, or, more specifically, the influence of that training on his poetry and these studies often maintain a distinction between poetry and medicine.
