The Poet and the Prince: John Keats and Astley Cooper

John Keats was one of the great Romantic poets. For 17 months, he was also a medical student at Guy’s Hospital before deciding to devote all of his time to poetry. His most influential teacher was Astley Cooper, one of the greatest surgeons of the 19th century. Cooper was a pioneer in general and vascular surgery, a renowned teacher, and the author of one of the boldest operations in the history of surgery. Despite the fact that Keats eventually left medicine to be a full-time poet, Cooper’s lectures and tutelage had a significant effect on Keats’s poetry.