John Keats and the Temporal Artery

ABSTRACT John Keats trained as a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital from 1815 to 1817. However, despite being qualified, he never practised medicine. His close friend Charles Brown recounted Keats’s account of his ‘last operation’, which involved ‘opening a man’s temporal artery’. The account raises certain questions: why was Keats opening a man’s temporal artery; why did this operation – which presumably Keats did not know would be his ‘last’ when it took place – stick so clearly in his mind; and did this medical decision have any impact on the personal decision he took to leave medicine? Using records from the London Metropolitan Archives, medical notes from manuscripts maintained by Keats and other surgical students at Guy’s Hospital, and published works by eminent surgeons of the day including Astley Cooper and John Bell, we show that Keats was treating a patient with head injuries for his ‘last operation’. The essay further explores the significance this operation had for Keats, taking account of his father’s unexpected death from a head wound, and suggests that this particular procedure, with its emotional resonances, brought into focus for him an aspect of his temperament that left him uniquely unsuited to practise medicine, and strengthened his conviction to leave the medical profession.