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Scotland and Keats’s Health in 1818
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This chapter explores Keats’s biographical circumstances during 1818 to show that they made it almost a statistical impossibility for him to emerge from that year free of a tubercular infection. Keats’s biography is read against current awareness of the conditions in which tuberculosis is most virulent, to reveal the factors that, operating in lethal combination, rendered Keats’s contraction of tuberculosis in 1818 unavoidable. These risk factors range from the circumstantial (weather), to personal decisions the consequences of which could not have been anticipated (Keats’s tour of Scotland), to contemporary medical treatments (mercury). Singly they might have been resisted, but in combination they proved lethal. As this chapter shows, it was an unfortunate conjunction of circumstances—Keats returning unwell from Scotland, then caring for his contagious brother Tom—that ensured Keats’s death sentence from pulmonary tuberculosis.
Title: Scotland and Keats’s Health in 1818
Description:
This chapter explores Keats’s biographical circumstances during 1818 to show that they made it almost a statistical impossibility for him to emerge from that year free of a tubercular infection.
Keats’s biography is read against current awareness of the conditions in which tuberculosis is most virulent, to reveal the factors that, operating in lethal combination, rendered Keats’s contraction of tuberculosis in 1818 unavoidable.
These risk factors range from the circumstantial (weather), to personal decisions the consequences of which could not have been anticipated (Keats’s tour of Scotland), to contemporary medical treatments (mercury).
Singly they might have been resisted, but in combination they proved lethal.
As this chapter shows, it was an unfortunate conjunction of circumstances—Keats returning unwell from Scotland, then caring for his contagious brother Tom—that ensured Keats’s death sentence from pulmonary tuberculosis.
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