'I never took up the lancet again'

 Talking of Keats... I've just read an essay, 'The Medical Keats', by Joseph Epstein, published in his gloriously named collection In a Cardboard Belt! (a reference to a line spoken by Zero Mostel's Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks's The Producers – 'Look at me now! Look at me now! I'm wearing a cardboard belt!'). Of course I'd always known that Keats had some medical training and could be numbered with Chekhov and Rabelais, Sir Thomas Browne and Tobias Smollett, Oliver Goldsmith and Somerset Maugham in the company of writers with medical training (in which company the self-taught apothecary-physician Samuel Johnson could almost be counted). What I had not realised until I read Epstein's essay, was how big a part his medical training played in Keats's life, and how much of that short life it consumed: as Epstein points out, 'Six of his twenty-five years, after all, were spent in medical surroundings and training, and these represented more than half his intellectually conscious life.' He was good at medicine, too, taking a real interest in the subject and passing all his examinations – no mean feat at a time when the great majority of medical students failed and dropped out. 
   Epstein rightly emphasises how tough Keats was, for all his extreme sensitivity. Anyone would have to be tough to endure surgical training at Guy's at that time, especially if you were assigned, as Keats was, to the worst surgeon in the hospital, William Lucas, Jr. William Hale-White (physician son of the author known as Mark Rutherford) wrote in Keats as Doctor and Patient (which Epstein quotes) that 'His surgical acquirements were very small, his operations generally very badly performed and accompanied by much bungling if not worse.' Lucas's colleague Astley Cooper described Lucas as 'neat-handed, but rash in the extreme, cutting amongst most important parts as though they were only skin, and making us all shudder from the apprehension of his opening arteries or committing some other error'. As for conditions in the dissecting room, a contemporary of Keats's wrote that 'On entering the room, the stink was most abominable. About 20 chaps were at work, carving limbs and bodies, in all stages of putrefaction, & of all colours ... while the pupils carved them, apparently, with as much pleasure as they would carve their dinners. One ... amused himself with striking his scalpel at the maggots, as they issued from their retreats.' Such scenes seem not to have unduly disturbed the young Keats, but watching Lucas's butchery surely had an effect, and enhanced his main inhibition – the fear of doing harm. Tough though he was, Keats did not have the steely temperament and massive self-confidence needed to perform surgery, especially in those days before effective anaesthesia and antisepsis. 'My last operation,' he told his friend Charles Brown, 'was the opening of a man's temporal artery. I did it with the utmost nicety; but reflecting on what passed through my mind at the time, my dexterity seemed a miracle, and I never took up the lancet again.'
  Who knows? If the young Keats had not been introduced into literary circles and decided that he must be a poet, he might well have spent the rest of his short life as a physician. Certainly, had he done so, the world would have been immeasurably poorer.