John Keats: The Doctors’ Poet?

ABSTRACT

In 1896 William Osler wrote in his pamphlet, John Keats, The Apothecary Poet, ‘All lovers of poetry cherish Keats’ memory for the splendour of the verse with which he has enriched our literature’. Later T. Wilson Parry stated, ‘To me Keats is and ever will be the doctors’ poet’. The abiding question underlying this paper is why Keats appeals to so many members of the medical profession and why so few now read the other medical poets. The paper sets out to address this question. It concludes that the reason why Keats is particularly admired by the medical profession is not just because of his early tragic death nor his training in medicine but because his poetry embodies negative capability and an ability to bear the knowledge that pain and pleasure, love and hate, loveliness and ugliness are intertwined. The entwining of Keats’s whole life experience (including his medical knowledge) in his emotionally truthful poetry makes his work directly accessible and recognizable to those engaged in a profession which binds them close to the painful, insistent and contradictory realities of human life.

KEYWORDS:

• John Keats
• Erasmus Darwin
• Robert Bridges
• William Osler
• beauty
• truth
• negative capability

Medical practitioners appear always to have had a special regard for John Keats. Wilson T Parry (1866–1945), general practitioner and antiquarian, wrote in 1933, ‘To me Keats is and ever will be the doctors’ poet’.¹ William Osler (1849–1919), renowned physician, wrote a pamphlet entitled Life of John Keats the Apothecary Poet where he stated, ‘all lovers of poetry cherish Keats memory for the splendour of the verse with which he has enriched our literature’.² Osler also noted that there was a ‘deep pathos in a life cut off in the promise of such rich fruit’. He wrote medical textbooks but also composed doggerel under the name of EYD (Egerton Yorick Davis).³ His The Marsh Market (1895) is based on Keats’s ‘On First looking into Chapman’s Homer’ in which Osler described the corruption of the local Baltimore politician, Gorman, a notorious Democratic boss whose gangs would invade Republican-held territory, intimidating the population:

The Marsh Market November 5th (With Apologies to the Late Mr. Keats)

Much have I travelled in the realms of toughs,

And many dirty towns and precincts seen;

Round many a ward industrious have I been,

Which bears in fealty to the bosses hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That wide-os’d Gorman ruled as his demesne;

Yet I did never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Abel speak out loud and bold;

Then felt I like some watcher of the polls

When a repeater swims into his ken,

Or like stout Kelly when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Marsh market - and all his men

Looked at each other with a wild surmise

And said – Let us, too, vote again!⁴

There have been many medical poets and several really outstanding ones. The first part of this paper recalls some of those, including Erasmus Darwin, John Keats, Robert Bridges, and Dannie Abse.

Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), who wrote Zoonomia, The Temple of Nature and The Botanic Garden and was the grandfather of Charles Darwin, wrote poetry in rhyming couplets. Here is an extract from ‘Death of Eliza at The Battle of Minden’ from The Loves of the Plants in The Botanic Garden:

‘Great GOD!’ she cried, ‘He’s safe! – the battle’s won!’

A ball now hisses through the airy tides,

(Some Fury wing’d it, and some Demon guides!)

Parts the fine locks, her graceful head that deck,

Wounds her fair ear, and sinks into her neck;

The red stream, issuing from her azure veins,

Dyes her white veil, her ivory bosom stains.

‘Ah me!’ she cried, and, sinking on the ground,

Kiss’d her dear babes, regardless of the wound;

‘Oh, cease not yet to beat, thou Vital Urn!

‘Wait, gushing Life, oh, wait my Love’s return!–

‘Hoarse barks the wolf, the vulture screams from far!

‘The angel, Pity, shuns the walks of war! –

‘Oh, spare, ye War-hounds, spare their tender age! –

‘On me, on me,’ she cried, ‘exhaust your rage!’–

Then with weak arms her weeping babes caress’d,

And sighing, bid them in her blood-stained vest.⁵

Desmond King Hele (1927–2019), Erasmus Darwin’s biographer and a physicist and poet, noted that Darwin influenced the English Romantic poets, particularly Keats and Shelley. He suggested that in The Botanic Garden Darwin supplied a model for the Romantic poets when he ‘commented obliquely on the world via the behaviour of Greek Gods and Goddesses’. King-Hele observed that Keats’s Hyperion could be seen as the last poem of this genre and, interestingly, that ‘Keats was very good at hiding his debts to others, and there are not many echoes of Darwin to be heard, but there are thirty “possibilities” chiefly in the Odes and the Eve of St Agnes’.⁶

Robert Bridges (1844–1930), Poet Laureate from 1913 to 1930 and in London a physician at the Royal Northern Hospital and at Great Ormond Street, the Children’s Hospital, until he left medicine in 1881 to write poetry full time, is probably best known for The Testament of Beauty, a philosophical poem reflecting Bridges’ spiritual and aesthetic views.⁷ Bridges discusses beauty as the overwhelming force of inspiration and guidance in life (and refers to the nightingale’s song as provoking ‘poetic eloquence alike in Sophocles and the sick heart of Keats’). The Testament of Beauty is ranked highly among English philosophical poems and is considered to be a good example of modern lyrical poetry. He also wrote a critical essay on Keats in which he analysed Keats’s Hyperion, Isabella and Lamia and reflected upon the Odes.⁸ He discussed Keats’s devotion to natural beauty, although he felt that he did not clearly delineate human passion. Bridges considered that the only passion defined by Keats was the imaginative love of nature, with human love as part of this. Keats’s lover, according to Bridges, is happy through his communion with new forms of natural beauty. He feels that this is borne out in ‘Ode to Melancholy’, Endymion and ‘Lamia’.⁹ In 1945 Arthur MacNalty (1880– 1969), Chief Medical Officer for England, wrote in a paper discussing medical poets that only two medical poets stand out – Keats and Bridges – and that each had a lasting influence on English poetry.¹⁰ Another well-regarded medical poet, Dannie Abse (1923–2014), was a Welsh chest physician. One of the poems for which he is best remembered is his Song for Pythagoras:

White coat and purple coat

a sleeve from both he sews

That white is always stained with blood,

that purple by the rose

And phantom rose and blood most real

compose a hybrid style;

white coat and purple coat

few men can reconcile.

White coat and purple coat

can each be worn in turn

but in the white a man will freeze

and in the purple burn¹¹

The abiding question is why John Keats appeals to so many members of the medical profession and why so few read the other medical poets, especially Robert Bridges. The following considerations set out to address this question.

Keats’s short life was, of course, devastated by consumption (tuberculosis). His complicated, erratic and abandoning mother Frances (1775–1810) died of it, as did his much-loved brother, Tom (1799–1818), whom he nursed until he died – and he himself was to die of this condition in Rome on 23 February 1821 at the age of 25, treated at the end by Sir James Clark (1788–1870).¹² Martha Shackleford (1941–2022) noted that Keats never suggested that his illness was the wilful act of a deity: he knew that he had not attended to his health. Indeed, Keats had come to understand that suffering is a necessary and indeed a valuable part of existence.¹³ His views, experience and understanding may well have resonated, and continue to resonate, with members of the medical profession.

On 3 February 1820 Keats was confined to bed after coughing blood. Keats’s friend Charles Brown recorded what happened:

I went towards him; he was examining a single drop of blood upon the sheet. ‘Bring me the candle, Brown; and let me see this blood’. After regarding it steadfastly, he looked up in my face, with a calmness of countenance that I can never forget, and said, – ‘I know the colour of that blood; – it is arterial blood; – I cannot be deceived in that colour; – that drop of blood is my death-warrant; – I must die’.¹⁴

It is possible that Keats’s early death attracted the particular interest of the medical profession but this seems unlikely. Others died early, including artists like Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) who also had consumption and went overseas to die at the age of 26 and is remembered for his artwork and not for dying early from tuberculosis.¹⁵

It is certainly the case that Keats’s medical training influenced and informed his poetry. He had qualified as an apothecary, passing the new, rigorous examinations with flying colours, and carried on with his surgical training as a dresser at Guy’s Hospital under the leading surgeon of the time, Sir Astley Cooper (1768–1841), who motivated Keats particularly in the management of head injuries.¹⁶ But he did not sit for membership of the Royal College of Surgeons of London because in October 1816 he had decided to turn absolutely to poetry (he would be dismissed in a heavily political atmosphere as one of the ‘Cockney poets’ – ‘Pestleman Jack’, an ‘apothecary-poet’ – and Byron was indescribably rude). His closeness to the physicality of life is reflected in the living quality of his poetry. It is imbued with physical and natural life, the ‘pulse’ that he often referred to, open to the sensations of living, the relationship, identity even, of thought and sensation.¹⁷ Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) recalled in his lecture on The Riddle of Poetry the impact of first reading ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’: ‘I felt that something was happening to me. It was happening not to my mere intelligence but to my whole being, to my flesh and blood’.¹⁸ This may be part of the genesis of Keats’s idea of ‘Negative Capability’ which, above all else, involves an openness in feeling, a capacity for growth, a poetic ‘pulse’ which evokes the exquisite response to and test for life of a newborn baby, the pain, fear and love and the gradual recognition involved in the sensations of living. Nicholas Roe has noted that Keats’s poetry has the freshness of actual observation, a sense of real things seen as a child when strange effects are noticed most strongly.¹⁹

Richard Marggraf Turley has commented on the impact of Keats’s medical experience and the development of the empathy evident in his poems in a short paper reflecting on life under the Covid lockdown:

His experiences at Guy’s … and the empathy he developed there, found their way into his writing. For instance, in Hyperion, his medical knowledge helps him to inhabit the catatonic state of ‘gray-hair’d Saturn’, who sits in solitude, ‘deep in the shady sadness of a vale’, despairing after being deposed by the Olympian gods. The vignette is a moving image of isolation and enervation that speaks to us today.²⁰

Nicholas Roe comments further that Keats was, ‘capable of imagining the aching physical life of the human body.²¹ For instance, in Hyperion, his ambitious epic poem, phrases including ‘palsied tongue’, ‘clenched teeth’, ‘limbs / Lock’d up’, and ‘sanguine feverous boiling gurge of pulse’ vividly embody the defeat and distress of the Titans after their battle with the Olympian gods. In Keats’s narrative poem ‘Isabella’, Lorenzo’s ‘loamed ears’ and the soil-stained ‘miry channel’ of his tears call to mind the resurrected bodies Keats had recently dissected. After Lorenzo’s murder, Isabella wraps his head ‘in a silken scarf, – sweet with the dews / of precious flowers pluck’d in Araby’, to conceal the stink of rotting flesh. In his medical notebook, Keats mentions that in hands and fingers the blood’s colour in veins and capillaries ‘undergoes a change from its florid’.²² In late 1819 when tuberculosis was already ravaging his lungs, his short lyric ‘This Living Hand’ breathed a bitter and poignant rejoinder: ‘thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood, / So in my veins red life might steam again’.²³

What we can take from the foregoing is that the entwining of Keats’s whole life experience (including, crucially, his medical knowledge) in his emotionally truthful poetry makes his work directly accessible and recognizable to those engaged in a profession which binds them close to the painful and insistent realities of human life. Keats chose poetry as a whole and insistent preoccupation and occupation, not something ‘added on’, and this seriousness and openness is something that sets him apart.

Cora MacGregor writes of how in the early Romantic period science and medicine had assumed a claim to the truth and that Keats’s poetry resided in his truthfulness derived from physical reality. She noted that for Keats poetry is the meeting place of truth and beauty and that the poet who creates an experience which is both beautiful and true, becomes the ‘physician to all men’.²⁴ This deserves further exploration. The hard-arrived-at core of Keats’s experience as a man and as a poet was to understand – and to feel – that pain and pleasure, love and hate, life and death were indivisible and that the true contemplation of Beauty meant a deep acceptance of this – not an intellectual acceptance alone but, from infancy, the developing and developed capacity within the self to bear the experience of contradiction and, also in medical practice, to accept uncertainty. For Keats, men of ‘genius’ possessed in abundance the capacity to bear contradiction and he struggled to develop it himself, to hold the tension between opposing poles, to remain open – fully – to the other.²⁵ He thought about Leigh Hunt’s theatre reviews where he wrote about ‘passive capacity’ and, later, the work of William Hazlitt on Shakespeare and his emphasis on ‘gusto’ – intensity – Keats’s version of which he described in a letter to his friend, Benjamin Bailey: ‘every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer – being in itself a nothing’.²⁶ His poetry is the intensity of this pursuit and he understood with Hazlitt that Shakespeare’s poetic insight arose from his ability to enter the being of the other in an enlarged empathy. He wanted to ‘think into the human heart’.²⁷

This is what George Eliot is able to do in her approach to her closely conceived doctor, Tertius Lydgate, in Middlemarch. Lydgate’s great talent and research ambition are painfully diverted and consumed by his own focus on the social and material ambitions of his wife, Rosamond. In the ‘Finale’ of Middlemarch we are told that Lydgate ‘once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains’.²⁸ This reference to Keats’s Isabella or the Pot of Basil takes us to the heart of Keats’s concern with the consequences of not being able to ‘think into the human heart’.

In a letter to Richard Woodhouse, Keats coined the term ‘camelion poet’, recalling Hazlitt’s concern with ‘identity’ and the capacity of human beings to achieve an imaginative identification with the minds and feelings of others, letting the mind be, in Keats’s phrase, ‘a thoroughfare for all thoughts’.²⁹ Keats made an interesting note on his own copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost at the point where Satan translates himself into a snake: ‘One of the most mysterious of semi-speculations is … that of one Mind’s imagining into another’.³⁰

The thoughtful psychoanalyst, John Steiner, has recently reflected on ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in the context of his own experience of patients in his consulting room.³¹ He notes that the heart ache, the dull opiate, the need to forget of the opening is followed by an immediate denial of envy of the bird, but that Keats is able to escape transiently from his depression without losing contact with reality and is able freely to admit that his identification and idealization are driven by a wish to escape from pain and depression. There is both the painful state of heart ache and the blissful state he is trying to reach. Escape proves not so easy and there is very quickly the reminder of the ‘weariness, the fever and the fret’. We, the readers, understand what Keats was trying to escape from. We identify with Keats and are reminded of our own mortality and perhaps our dubious ability to face it. Indeed, it is perhaps with relief that we join Keats in the fairy-tale world of tenderness and moonlight – although again we are brought swiftly back to reality: ‘here there is no light’. And again we are brought back to the prospect of dying – ‘half in love with easeful death’ – the sting of which is lessened by the phantasy that the nightingale will live on. Steiner goes on to wonder whether Keats is giving the nightingale illusions of immortality based on the idea that successive individual nightingales are all represented in the present one – he points out that one way of evading death is to believe that our children and our work will survive and support an illusion of immortality.

If Keats is momentarily seduced by this theme, writes Steiner, he is brought firmly back to earth by the word ‘forlorn’ and Keats shows that his belief that one could escape was a cheat. His farewell to the nightingale is thus in a real, ordinary landscape over which the bird flies. Its plaintive anthem is buried deep as he, and we, too will fade away and be buried. Keats is in silence and for a time unsure what he is feeling. Steiner comments on this remarkable Ode that the reader is buoyed up by the beauty of the verse, perhaps aware both that it acts like an opiate or a deceiving elf and yet that we emerge stronger, better able to face the reality of mortality. Steiner finds common ground in his consulting room in the more general conflict between facing and evading reality that Keats was exploring. He sees that Keats was able to move in and out of identifications so effectively because he could claim one thing and at the same time imply another. In the Ode, we see Keats’s wish for immortality alongside the inevitability of death, a capacity to be in touch with both reality and illusion, to recognize our need for illusion but also to face the inevitability of loss. This is what gives the Ode its nuance of irony – or Negative Capability. This complex development of Keats as man and poet is bound up in the well-known ending of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’: ‘Beauty is truth; truth Beauty’.

‘Beauty is truth; truth Beauty’, even though and because it encompasses both pleasure and pain, loveliness and ugliness. The challenge, Keats recognized, is to ‘bear’ beauty.³² Before Keats died, he wrote in a letter to Charles Brown: ‘It surprises me that the human heart is capable of containing and bearing so much misery’.³³ John Middleton Murry (1889–1957) realized that ‘Beauty means for [Keats] something utterly different from what is generally understood by the name. A Beauty which includes Ugliness is ultimate and metaphysical’.³⁴ Facing the implications of his last illness, Keats’s thought was ‘I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things’.³⁵ Thus, the growth of the imagination from fancy to knowledge, taught by experience, makes the distinction between the true poet and the dreamer, as we see in The Fall of Hyperion. It is at least arguable that what speaks to doctors in Keats’s poetry is that understanding that the contemplation of beauty is not escapism – it is recognition. And recognition of the entwined pleasure and pain, love and hate, of human life.

The point is also made in a different way by reference to Raphael’s portrait of the martyrdom of Catherine of Alexandria, the fourth century princess who, aged 18 years, converted to Christianity (Figure 1).³⁶ The painting is suffused in its gaze, colour and atmosphere with knowledge and apprehension of both love and violence. In this landscape, Raphael’s Catherine turns to the sky, hand on heart, with rapture expressed through the tension that enfolds her.³⁷ Knowledge of violence is contained in the wheel on which she rests.

Figure 1. Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Raphael c. 1507, oil on poplar. ©National Gallery, London.

John Keats continues to be read and admired by doctors. The burden of this paper is that this is so not just because of his early tragic death nor his training in medicine but because his poetry embodies the truth of experience, the object or call of physicians to all men.

Acknowledgments

We should like to thank Dr Christopher Gardner-Thorpe for his helpful comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Toni Griffiths

Toni Griffiths has been Dean and Pro-Director (International) at the Institute of Education (now part of UCL), Director of Education and Professional Development at UCL and Hon Senior Lecturer (Comparative Literature), UCL Centre for Intercultural Studies. Now retired from UCL she continues her research interests in the field of ‘Literature and Psychoanalysis’ and Victorian literature. She is also a Trustee of the UCL Friends Trust and was for some years a Trustee of the Keats Foundation.

Sean P. Hughes

Sean P. Hughes is Emeritus Professor Orthopaedic Surgery, Imperial College London, where his research programme was in the microcirculation of bone and his clinical practice in spinal surgery. Since retirement he has pursued his interest in John Keats and medical history, obtaining an MA in history from King’s College London.

Notes

¹ Wilson T. Parry, ‘John Keats: Medical Student, Qualified Surgeon and Poet’, read at the Section of History of Medicine at Annual Meeting of British Medical Association, Dublin,1933.

² William Osler, ‘John Keats, The Apothecary Poet,’ Johns Hopkins Historical Club (October, 1896): 3–18.

³ Davis was a retired United States Army officer from Québec who knew and had a physical resemblance to Osler, was known sometimes to attend conferences in the company of the wife of William Osler and sometimes signed hotel registers on William Osler’s behalf. Davis drowned in the Lachine Rapids in 1884.

⁴ ‘The Marsh Market,’ in Harvey Cushing, The Life of Sir William Osler (Hamburg: Severus Verlag, 2010), first published Nachdruck der Originalausgabe (Oxford, 1940), II.2, XVII, 424.

⁵ Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Loves of the Plants (London: Jones and Co, 1825), Canto III, 78.

⁶ Desmond King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement (London: Giles de la Mare, 1999), 354, 360–1.

⁷ Robert Bridges, The Testament of Beauty (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1941).

⁸ Robert Bridges, John Keats, A Critical Essay (privately printed, 1895), Wellcome Collection.

⁹ Bridges, Keats, 88.

¹⁰ Arthur MacNalty, ‘Medical Poets,’ presidential address, History of Medicine Society, Royal Society of Medicine, British Medical Journal (17 November 1945): 698–9.

¹¹ Dannie Abse, ‘Song for Pythagoras,’ in White Coat, Purple Coat, Collected Poems, 1948–1988 (London: Century Hutchinson, 1989), 273–4.

¹² Sean P. Hughes and Noel Snell, ‘Is the Criticism of John Keats’s Doctors Justified?’ Keats-Shelley Review 35.1 (2021): 41–55.

¹³ Martha Shackleford, ‘Keats and Adversity,’ The Swanee Review, 32.4 (1924): 474–87.

¹⁴ Charles Brown, ‘Life of Keats,’ The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers 1816–1878 and More Letters and Poems 1814–1879, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), II, 73.

¹⁵ Donald S. Olson, The Confessions of Aubrey Beardsley (London: Transworld Publishers,1993), 417–20.

¹⁶ Hileena Ghosh and Sean P. Hughes, ‘John Keats and the Temporal Artery,’ Keats-Shelley Review 34.2 (2020): 107–18.

¹⁷ ‘Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.’ Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 May 1818, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 139–45. In a letter to his friend, Benjamin Bailey, on 22 November 1817, Keats wrote that he was unable to see ‘how any thing can be known for truth by consequitive [sic] reasoning … can it be that even the greatest Philosopher ever arrived at his goal without putting aside numerous objections – However it may be, O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!’. Letters, ed. Buxton Forman, 66–70.

¹⁸ Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). From Lecture 1, ‘The Riddle of Poetry’.

¹⁹ Nicholas Roe, John Keats, A New Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 119.

²⁰ Richard Marggraf Turley, ‘John Keats: How his Poems of Death and Lost Youth are Resonating During COVID-19,’ The Conversation (February 22, 2021).

²¹ Nicholas Roe, ‘The Art of Medicine: John Keats, Medicine, and Poetry,’ The Lancet (online) (February 22, 2021).

²² Hrileena Ghosh, John Keats’ Medical Notebook: Text, Context, & Poems (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020).

²³ John Keats, This Living Hand: The Poems of John Keats, ed. G. F. Maine (London: Collins, 1970), 364.

²⁴ Cora MacGregor, ‘“Physician to All Men”: Keats and the Poet’s Claim to Truth,’ Keats-Shelley Review 43.1 (2020): 56–61.

²⁵ Keats to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817, in Letters, ed. Buxton Forman, 59–63.

²⁶ Roe, John Keats, 32; William Hazlitt, ‘On Gusto,’ in Selected Writings, ed. Jon Cook (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2009); and Keats to Benjamin Bailey, 13 March 1818, in Letters, ed. Buxton Forman, 109–13.

²⁷ Keats to John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 May 1818, in Letters, ed. Buxton Forman, 139–45.

²⁸ George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Penguin, 2003), 361.

²⁹ Keats to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818, in Letters, ed. Buxton Forman, 227–9; William Hazlitt, An Essay on The Principles of Human Action (London: J. Johnson, 1805); and Keats to George and Georgiana Keats, 24 September 1819, in Letters, ed. Buxton Forman, 397–440.

³⁰ ‘Keats’s Paradise Lost, a Digital Edition,’ ed. Daniel Johnson, Greg Kucich and Beth Lau https://keatslibrary.org/paradise-lost/plviewer.php?pid=37 (accessed May 23, 2024).

³¹ John Steiner, Illusion, Disillusion, and Irony in Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 2020).

³² H. Segal, ‘A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetics [1952],’ in Reading Melanie Klein, ed. J. Phillips and L. Stonebridge (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).

³³ Keats to Charles Armitage Brown, 1 November 1820, in Letters, ed. Buxton Forman, 523–4.

³⁴ John Middleton Murry, Studies in Keats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), 60.

³⁵ Keats to Fanny Brawne, February 1820, in Letters, ed. Buxton Forman, 468.

³⁶ Catherine in a vision underwent a mystic marriage to Christ. The Emperor Maxentius ordered her to be tortured on a wheel, but a heavenly thunderbolt destroyed the wheel, although later she was beheaded.

³⁷ Raphael, ed. David Ekserdjjian and Tom Henry (London: National Gallery, 2022), 162.