Romanticism and Medicine

Is there such a thing as Romantic medicine? The literary classification of Romanticism and the practice of medicine might initially appear to be incompatible; the former being a cultural form that encompasses ideas about originality, imagination and experience, the latter concerned with the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease. However, the medical historian Roy Porter suggests that while there was little development in the practice of medicine in Britain during the Romantic period (‘those years [did not] bring a revolution in medicine and in health’ –1999, 170) there was a transformation in the understanding of the body. Although the Romantic era neither transformed the practice of medicine nor drastically altered life expectancy, addressing ‘the experience of the body and of suffering was an essential component in that journey into the self that constitutes … the Romantic interlude’ (ibid., 177). Porter suggests that there was a shift from an earlier view of the body as an ahistorical entity responding to the universal laws of physics to one which detected a symbiotic relationship between the self, society and sickness. The body and its suffering can be read as socially constructed entities, the consideration of which intersects with the larger cultural concerns of Romanticism such as personal and political liberty, the conflict between that which is natural and that which is socially constructed, and the distinction between individual solitude and communal responsibility.

‘Soothing Thoughts’

Chapter three begins the book’s survey of palliative poetics developed by Romantic writers, comparing Wordsworth’s ideas about poetic therapy with medical beliefs of the late eighteenth century. The therapeutic holism later ascribed to Wordsworth by literary critics was held by Romantic medicine to be a restorative power of nature, a ‘vis medicatrix naturae’ that could repair a broken constitution in ways doctors could not. But as medicine professionalized, they saw how claims that nature was the real healer could damage their reputation. Their compensatory shift to a palliative ethic was driven in part by a need to renegotiate medicine’s relationship with nature. Similarly, Wordsworth initially hoped his own poetry could replicate nature’s holistic therapy. But in Lyrical Ballads (1798), a collection whose Wordsworthian lyrics extol the superiority of natural medicine, Wordsworth realized his own art could not mimic nature’s healing power. As a result, he turns towards a poetics of palliation grounded in the ‘delight’ outlined by Edmund Burke’s 1757 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.