Keats at Guy's Hospital: The Poet Who Trained as a Surgeon
Why is it significant?
Walk through into the old courtyard of Guy's Hospital and find the stone alcove where a bronze young man sits on a bench, chin in hand, looking as though he has just heard something he would rather not have. There is room beside him; sit down.
Key Facts
| Place | Keats at Guy's Hospital: The Poet Who Trained as a Surgeon |
|---|---|
| Address | Great Maze Pond, London SE1 9RT, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.50400, -0.08770 |
| Part of Walk | Shakespeare's Southwark: Bankside, the Globe and Tate Modern in London |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk through into the old courtyard of Guy's Hospital and find the stone alcove where a bronze young man sits on a bench, chin in hand, looking as though he has just heard something he would rather not have. There is room beside him; sit down. This is John Keats, and before he was a poet, he was a medical student here.
Keats enrolled at Guy's in October 1815, aged nineteen, and lodged around the corner in St Thomas Street. He became a dresser, assisting the surgeons on the wards and in the operating theatre, and in July 1816 he passed the examination that licensed him as an apothecary. On paper, he was on his way to a respectable career.
Think of what that career meant. Surgery in 1815 had no anaesthetic: patients were held down, and surgeons were admired for how fast they could take off a leg. Keats, sensitive and already scribbling verses, found it harder and harder. A friend later remembered him saying that during one lecture a sunbeam came through the window, full of floating specks, and his mind drifted away with them to fairyland.
By 1817 he had abandoned medicine for poetry. Within three years he had written the great odes, to a Nightingale, on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, which are still learned by heart all over the world. And in February 1821 he died of tuberculosis in Rome, just twenty-five years old. His training never left him: when he first coughed blood, he recognised its colour, and is said to have called that drop his death warrant.
The alcove he sits in is a survivor too. It is one of the stone shelters from old London Bridge, added in the eighteenth century and saved when the bridge was demolished in the 1830s. Now head south through the hospital grounds to Long Lane and follow it west. Where it meets Borough High Street, a church with a slender white spire is waiting, and with it a twelve-year-old boy named Charles Dickens.