Keats and Medicine

Hillas Smith Cross Publishing, £9.50, pp 127 ISBN 1 873295 11 1

Stock images of the poet John Keats have him listening to a nightingale in a Hampstead garden or dying of consumption in the arms of a friend in Rome. Reading Keats and Medicine will perhaps expand them to include him mixing medicines in his master's apothecary shop at Edmonton, or holding limbs ready for amputation when he worked as a dresser at …