'The Busy Time': Keats's Duties at Guy's Hospital from Autumn 1816 to March 1817

interpretations of how Keats dealt with the strain between his poetic ambitions and the demands of his medical profession in the six months between September 1816 and March 1817, the second half of his time as a dresser at Guy’s Hospital. One is that he managed both at the same time; the other that he progressively cut down his medical duties at Guy’s in favour of poetry. Andrew Motion believes Keats did both: ‘Throughout the autumn and early winter he continued to attend lectures and to function as a dresser [taking his turn in attending his surgeon’s patients, helping at operations, and acting as resident assistant surgeon], but he did so knowing that it was only a matter of time before he would reach a final decision about his future.’ Aileen Ward had earlier come to the same conclusion. Motion’s account draws on Donald C. Goellnicht’s careful reconstruction of Keats’s medical training at Guy’s published in 1984, which supplements Gittings’s earlier description. Like Motion and Ward, Goellnicht believes that Keats fulfilled his duties at Guy’s. However, both Robert Gittings and W.J. Bate think that Keats increasingly put aside his medical duties in favour of poetry. Gittings’s reasoning is based on the extremely busy social and creative life which immediately followed Keats’s introduction to Leigh Hunt by Charles Cowden Clarke in October 1816: ‘The interview [with Hunt]’, said Clarke, ‘stretched into three morning calls’, and, he added, Keats ‘was suddenly made a familiar of the household’. This could not possibly be combined with regular attendance at the lectures and the exacting duties as a dresser at Guy’s Hospital, five or six miles away. Clarke probably exaggerated, since Keats certainly attended lectures [in the autumn term of 1816] and fulfilled some duties of his dressership after being absorbed into Hunt’s circle; but the real crisis of decision between the claims of medicine and poetry came at this moment.