The expansion of digital archives has opened new possibilities for the study of John Keats and British Romanticism. My research examines the relationship between Keats' poetic imagination and the scientific culture of the early nineteenth century. Although previous scholars such as Walter Jackson Bate and Nicholas Roe have discussed Keats' medical training as part of his biography, few have closely investigated how the natural philosophy and medical science of his time shaped the way he wrote poetry. My research this year has focused on this question.

One of the most important resources for my research has been the digitized materials held by institutions such as Guy's Hospital and the British Museum. Surviving records from Guy's Hospital, including lecture syllabi from Astley Cooper's surgical courses and anatomical demonstration notes, reveal that the intellectual environment Keats encountered as a medical student was far richer than has generally been recognised. By cross-referencing these documents with Keats' letters and his annotations in books, I have been able to reconstruct more precisely the scientific ideas that surrounded him during his training.

Keats studied under Astley Cooper, who was himself closely connected to the eminent anatomist John Hunter. Through Cooper's lectures, Keats was introduced to questions about how the organs of the body function together and what forces sustain living things. These ideas were not simply forgotten once Keats left medicine for poetry. Rather, they continued to shape his imagination. The precision with which Keats describes physical sensations and the interior life of objects in his poems reflects, I would argue, a habit of mind formed through medical study.

One concept that proved particularly important to my research is vitalism — the idea that living things are sustained by an energetic principle distinct from purely mechanical processes. This was a significant, if short-lived, doctrine in early nineteenth-century British science. By examining how vitalist ideas circulated among the medical community that Keats belonged to, and by reading his poetry alongside those ideas, I hope to show that his imaginative vision was deeply informed by the scientific debates of his day. My research ultimately suggests that Keats' poetry and early modern science were not separate worlds, but were engaged in a continuous and productive conversation.