Tag: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
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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…
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Airs and graces: Humphry Davy and science as performance
Alan BleakleySennen, West Cornwall, United Kingdom The setting is 1799 in Clifton, Bristol, in the southwest of England; and there is something important in the air. A “Pneumatic Institute” has been set up to investigate the potential uses of newly isolated gases such as nitrous oxide in medicine. Humphry Davy, a young, ambitious scientist from…
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Coleridge and the albatross syndrome
Nicolás Roberto Robles Badajoz, Spain Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the tenth and last child of the vicar of Ottery Saint Mary near Devonshire, England, was born on October 21, 1772. In vivid letters recounting his early years he describes himself as “a genuine Sans culotte, my veins uncontaminated with one drop of Gentility.” He had an amazing…