John Keats’ Medical Notebook An Overview

The first chapter offers an overview of Keats’ medical Notebook, discussing its provenance and bibliographic features. It explores Keats’ engagement with his medical studies at the time he took the lecture notes, as evinced by this surviving Notebook, and finds him an attentive and successful student: he took care to keep legible notes and frequently annotated and cross-referenced them, revealing a degree of interest in his medical studies that counters traditional accounts of his indifference or disinterest. The distinctive layout of Keats’s notes is discussed, as well as the likely sources for the notes themselves. Keats’ medical Notebook was a dynamic repository of evolving knowledge to which he returned again and again: the chapter considers the only previous publication of it, as well as its treatment in popular publications including the major Keats biographies.