Coleridge and the Doctors 1795-1806 [Hardcover]

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 Doctorschanges 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.

Introduction
1. Medicine in the 1790s: A Very Brief Introduction
2. Coleridge and Thomas Beddoes
3. Coleridge's Illnesses
4. Coleridge and Opium
5. Coleridge's 'Abtrusive Researches' and the Dejection Crisis
6. Hysteria, Epilepsy, and 'The Pains of Sleep'
Conclusion

[Vickers'] scrupulous study, will make a nuanced difference to future readings of Coleridge's poetry. --Times Literary Supplement

[The] refusal to simplify Colerdige's belief systems to package them prettily for students of literary criticism (for example) is one of the many strengths of this splendid book. I doubt that anyone could have compressed more matter into such a short book. --George Rousseau,Nuncius

One need not be a devotee of Coleridge to appreciate the excellent integration Vickers has accomplished in synthesizing the particularities of a celebrated medical case with its guiding theories. By carefully summarizing the various disputes and contextualizing them within the larger philosophical milieu, he offers a multilayered analysis of Romantic notions of psychology and physiology and their relationship to medical practice (and psychiatric history, more specifically)....Coleridge and the Doctorswill appeal to a wide variety of readl#