Note 3 — Chapter II

Biographers have been reticent on this subject. Keats’s statement however speaks for itself, and a high medical authority, Dr. Richardson, writing in The Asclepiad for April 1884, and reviewing the whole subject of the poet’s constitutional and other ailments, says that Keats in Oxford “runs loose, and pays a forfeit for his indiscretion which ever afterwards physically and morally embarrasses him.” He pronounces that Keats’s early death was “expedited, perhaps excited, by his own imprudence,” but was substantially due to hereditary disease. His mother, as we have already seen, had died of the malady which killed the poet, consumption. It is not clear to me what Keats meant by saying that “from his employment” his health would be insecure. One might suppose that he was thinking of the long and haphazard working hours of a young surgeon or medical man; in which case, this seems to be the latest instance in which he spoke of himself as still belonging to that profession.