Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Lyrical Ballads

  • Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy”: Disability and maternal love

    Elizabeth Lovett ColledgeJacksonville, Florida, United States In William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798), the poem “The Idiot Boy” reveals a compassionate insight into the mental disabilities of young Johnny Foy, presenting him not as a horror to be confined to Bedlam or a similar institution, but as a child to be embraced, cared for, and loved.…

  • Tales of the psychosomatic in the Lyrical Ballads

    Stewart JustmanMissoula, Montana, United States The year 1800 saw the publication of John Haygarth’s historic pamphlet Of the Imagination as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body, an inquiry into what we now know as the nocebo and placebo effects. The same year saw the second edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s…

  • Under the lime tree: Medicine, poetry, and the education of the senses

    Alan BleakleySennen, West Cornwall, United Kingdom When in the summer of 1797 Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s wife Sara accidentally spilled hot milk over his foot, causing serious burns such that Coleridge could not walk, he sat in the garden of his friend Thomas Poole’s house under a lime tree, immobilized. A party of friends, meanwhile, had…