SOURCE: “T. L. Beddoes, Romantic Medicine, and the Advent of Therapeutic Theater,” in Studia Neophilologica, Vol. 63, No. 2, 1991, 181-88.

In the following essay, Moylan investigates the relationship between Beddoes's career as a physician and his development as a writer and places his work within a medical context.

Harold Bloom designated Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) “a poet of death.”¹ In Death's Jest Book, Beddoes' magnum opus, Gothic drama found a work worthy of the Elizabethan and Jacobean authors he studied so devotedly. His writings also show influences of an entirely different order. References in his plays and letters to psychology, medicine, and the life sciences point to his long fascination with the idea of reuniting the healing arts with poetry. The relationship between Beddoes' development as a physician and his development as a writer is critical to understanding his work. An anatomist, Beddoes was trained in the German states, where...