Coleridge and the Doctors

What did Coleridge know about medicine and how did it influence the development of his critical thought? Neil Vickers sets out to answer this question in this radical reinterpretation of Coleridge's career between 1795 and 1806. Coleridge and the Doctors changes the way we look at Coleridge's intellectual development and reveals the richness of his involvement in the eighteenth-century tradition of 'philosophical medicine' and its determining influence on his critical and philosophic stance. It supplies a comprehensive account of his activities in eighteenth century 'philosophic medicine' showing how these paved the way for his subsequent conversion to German idealist philosophy. It also offers a startling reconstruction of his application of medical theory to his own case including a revisionary analysis of his dealings with opiates.