Coleridge and the Doctors: 1795-1806

ISBN-13: 9780199271177 / Angielski / Twarda / 2004 / 206 str.

Neil Vickers

Opis

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.

Recenzje

Vickers's scrupulous reading of the medical theory ...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. Beddoes, too, alerted Coleridge to the possibility that a patient's journal could function as both case history and therapy, an insight that dovetails nicely with Caldwell's account of medical narrative.