What were our great poets before they were great? Long-time NHS doctor Mellany Ambrose has penned a historical novel about the time John Keats spent training in medicine before he chose to follow poetry. She discovered Keats had been apprenticed to an apothecary surgeon a few miles away from where she was working as a GP and it sparked her curiosity.
“Why hadn’t he become a doctor? How would such a supposedly sensitive individual react to the horrors of medicine in an era with no anaesthesia, antibiotics or antisepsis?” Mellany asks, explaining, “I’d struggled in our modern era; his was far worse. In my first week as a nineteen-year-old medical student, I had to dissect a body. I felt unable to process the shock and enormity of it and wrote a poem to help me cope. Did he write poems to express his emotions as I had? And what would it have been like to have the young Keats as your apprentice?”
The story is set in 1814. Thomas Hammond is an apothecary surgeon whose apprentice is eighteen-year-old local orphan, John Keats. Thomas sees John as a daydreamer who wastes time reading. Thomas failed to save John’s mother four years earlier, and when John criticises Thomas’s methods tempers flare on both sides. Despite their differences, Thomas and John begin to develop a grudging respect for each other with Thomas seeing a humanity in the way John relates to patients. Their relationship deepens into one more resembling father and son while Thomas’s true son, Edward, disappoints his father. Thomas realises John is gifted and would make a skilled surgeon, but to help John succeed Thomas must confront his own past mistakes. On the verge of qualifying as a surgeon, John unexpectedly abandons medicine for poetry, ending all Thomas’s hopes. Thomas is devastated and struggles to find meaning in his life and work. As he faces one final challenge, can the master learn some valuable lessons about life from his poetic apprentice before it’s too late?
Out now from Troubadour Publishing
Meet the Author
I worked as a hospital doctor and general practitioner in the NHS for nearly 30 years. My interest in Keats’s medical career arose when I discovered he’d trained as an apprentice close to where I was working as a GP. I spent many happy hours researching in the British and Wellcome Libraries and visiting sites related to Keats’s life and Georgian era medicine.
See my website mellanyambrose.com for more on Keats and the history of medicine
Instagram @mellanyambrose
Twitter @mellanyambrose
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