The influence of medical poets on English poetry / ... by Sir Arthur Salusbury MacNalty.

  • MacNalty, Arthur Salusbury, Sir, 1880-1969.
Date:
1946
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: The influence of medical poets on English poetry / ... by Sir Arthur Salusbury MacNalty. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and natural science on English poetry is a much wider subject and here only incidental reference has been possible, as in the founding of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century and the friendship of poets with medical men. We may be justly proud of the contribution that our profession has made to English poetry. Not alone has it given exquisite lyricists like Campion, Cowley and Henry Vaughan, humane and realistic poets as were Goldsmith and Crabbe, but also two immortals, John Keats and Robert Bridges. The study of the children of Apollo enables one important conclusion to be drawn, namely, that the Muse of Poetry tolerates no divided allegiance in the perfection of her art. This was fortunately realised by Keats when he put down his lancet to take up his wonderful lyre, and by Bridges in retiring from practice. Others have not been so perspicacious. Campion, it is true, combined the two vocations with good success. Goldsmith might have endowed the world with more poetry if the success of The Traveller had not led him to don the handsome roquelaure, the purple silk small-clothes, the sword, the gold-headed cane and the full-dress doctor’s wig in a vain attempt to achieve success as a physician. Henry Vaughan was a country practitioner and for the remaining forty years of his life his muse was silent. Mark Akenside had a large and fashionable practice and became physician to Queen Charlotte, but thenceforward he wrote no more of those odes which Hazlitt pronounced to be superior to those of Wordsworth. Sir Richard Biackmore tried to combine the arts of medicine and poetry. He scribbled verse incessantly in coffee-houses in the intervals between consultations and in his chariot when visiting patients, and for his reward earned the derision of Pope and Swift and was bidden by his colleague, Garth, “to learn to rise in sense and sink in sound”. The twin allegiance to medicine and poetry, as we have seen, perplexed Beddoes to the end of his life. Hence, if the student of medicine receives the divine afflatus, he should decide forthwith which altar of Apollo he should serve if he desires to be pre-eminent in either vocation. Many “mute inglorious Miltons” have adorned the profession of medicine and have been aided and solaced in their art by their hidden poetic gifts. Others, like Sir Henry Halford (a descendant of Henry Vaughan) who prided himself on his Latin verses, Sir Ronald Ross, Sir Henry Head and Sir Charles Sherrington, have written poems of no inconsiderable merit in the intervals of an active professional life or in relaxation from the pursuit of important researches. To scale the supreme heights of Parnassus the medical poet must relinquish the practice of medicine, while he enriches his poetry by the knowledge of humanity, of philosophy and the love of nature and mankind which he has acquired in his profession. It is good for English poetry that it has received so much from British medicine. It is good for British medicine that it has produced poets. Their influence is needed in these troublous and war-like times, for as Shelley wrote in A Defence of Poetry, “Poets are the hierophants of an