I have been conducting research on the relationship between Keats and medical science during the 19th century. This year, my focus has been on the fields of pathology and anatomy, which Keats studied as a medical student before he became a poet. Medical science experienced a number of significant breakthroughs in Britain at the beginning of the 19th century thanks to the Industrial Revolution, and this led to the development of pathology and anatomy through various experiments. My research this year has scrutinised how these developments changed the framework of medical science. 

  One of the most important influences on Keats was the eminent anatomist John Hunter, who established the basis of anatomy in the 18th century. Although Keats never had the opportunity to learn medical skills directly from John Hunter, the surgeon who trained Keats at Guy’s Hospital, Astley Cooper, was a close associate of John Hunter. Cooper’s lectures at Guy’s Hospital instructed medical students on how the organs of the body interacted with one another and tried to have them imagine what factors caused living energies. Keats studied such anatomical concepts through Cooper’s lectures, which improved his understanding of the importance of the internal functions of living things. For one of the remarkable features of Keats’s poetry is that it creates vivid images through the accuracy of the objects it describes. In other words, Keats’s acute sense of depicting objects gives readers a beautiful and deep inspiration by letting them imagine the inside of the objects. Furthermore, Keats had a unique belief about the purpose of human life. He did not hold to the Christian belief in the afterlife but developed his own idea that human beings will be able to have their own values when the environment forms their characters based on their own sensations and thoughts.

  To investigate these connections between Keats and medical science further, I studied John Hunter’s thoughts at the time, particularly his idea of the essence of living things.