John Keats was a licensed apothecary and general practitioner of medicine. This book addresses the four fundamental intellectual issues of Romantic medicine - the physician's task, the meaning of life, the constituents of health and prescriptions of disease, and evolution of matter and mind - as they find focus and expression in poetry and aesthetic theory. The book traces the genesis of these issues and shows the reason for their immediate relevance to the Romantic period as a whole. It identifies them as the primary philosophical counters of the artistic and scientific debates of the revolutionary period and discusses them and their ideologies in the context of the era's belief in the art of healing as the foremost humanistic discipline.