Coleridge and the Doctors
Price:
$125.00 (06)See more from the series
Description
What did Coleridge know about medicine and how did it influence the development of his critical thought? Neil Vickers sets out to answer this question in this radical reinterpretation of Coleridge's career between 1795 and 1806. Coleridge and the Doctors changes the way we look at Coleridge's intellectual development and reveals the richness of his involvement in the eighteenth-century tradition of "philosophical medicine" and its determining influence on his critical and philosophic stance. The book also contains a revisionary analysis of Coleridge's dealings with opiates and offers a comprehensive account of British early Romantic medicine.Features
- The first ever book-length study of Coleridge's medical pursuits, including his dealings with opiates.
- The first work to attempt to reconstruct Coleridge's application of contemporary medical theory to his own case.
- It puts forward novel readings of major works and major critical excursions in Coleridge's life, arguing that his work was heavily influenced by his knowledge of medicine.
Reviews
"[Vickers'] scrupulous study, will make a nuanced difference to future readings of Coleridge's poetry."--Times Literary Supplement
"[The] refusal to simplify Colerdige's belief systems to package them prettily for students of literary criticism (for example) is one of the many strengths of this splendid book. I doubt that anyone could have compressed more matter into such a short book."--George Rousseau, Nuncius
"One need not be a devotee of Coleridge to appreciate the excellent integration Vickers has accomplished in synthesizing the particularities of a celebrated medical case with its guiding theories. By carefully summarizing the various disputes and contextualizing them within the larger philosophical milieu, he offers a multilayered analysis of Romantic notions of psychology and physiology and their relationship to medical practice (and psychiatric history, more specifically).... Coleridge and the Doctors will appeal to a wide variety of readers, but for me it cogently illustrates philosophy in action and, more particularly, how an imaginative genius was tethered to his belief system.... Here, critical history joins skeptical philosophy, and in that synthesis Vickers has offered us a small jewel."--Alfred I. Taubner, Journal of the History of Medicine
"Innovative.... Vickers's scrupulous reading of the medical theory [of John Brown]...illuminates the professional imperatives behind the increasingly scientific and philosophical tendencies of medicine and also establishes the role of Brunonian medicine in directing Coleridge's attention to German Idealism. Vickers's analysis successfully balances recent accounts of Coleridge as a 'secret materialist' with an emphasis on the 'mentalist' influence of Beddoes beginning in 1803."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
"Coleridge's understanding of medical diagnosis, and of his own pattern of illness, was, according to Neil Vickers's impressive book, both complex and, in terms of Coleridge's characteristic modes of thought, typical.... Not only is a wealth of medical and contemporary interpretive detail gathered here into a coherent account, but the potential of the material is fully evident and capable of rich expansion."--Bulletin of the History of Medicine
About the Author(s)
Neil Vickers, Lecturer in English Language and Literature, King's College, London
