Valerie

John Keats was 25 and dying of tuberculosis in Rome in the winter of 1820 when his doctor put him on a diet of one anchovy and a piece of bread a day, bled him after he coughed up blood, and went on to become physician to Queen Victoria. Keats had trained as a surgeon and apothecary himself. In February 1820, coughing in bed in Hampstead, he looked at the blood on the sheet, recognised it as arterial, and told his friend it was his death warrant. His mother and his brother Tom had both died of consumption. He was told to escape the English winter, and in September he sailed for Italy with the young painter Joseph Severn. In Rome they were met by James Clark, a young Scottish doctor building a practice among the English. Clark decided the trouble lay in Keats's stomach, brought on by too much mental exertion, and prescribed riding and fresh air. When the bleeding came in December he took more blood, to relieve the inflammation, and then cut the food. To slow the flow of blood to the stomach, the most gifted young poet in England was to live on a single anchovy and a morsel of bread a day. Keats was starving and begged Severn for food. The laudanum he had brought to end it if the pain became too much was taken off him. He died on 23 February 1821, in the room above the Spanish Steps, wasted to almost nothing, and asked that his gravestone carry no name, only that here lies one whose name was writ in water. Clark went home and flourished. In 1837 he became physician to the young Queen Victoria and was made a baronet. Two years later a lady-in-waiting, Flora Hastings, developed a swollen belly, and Clark told the court she was pregnant. She was unmarried and a virgin, and the scandal badly damaged the new Queen. When Lady Flora died that summer, the post-mortem found a tumour on her liver. Within a few decades the sanatoriums of Europe were treating consumption with the opposite of Clark's diet: rest, mountain air, and as much milk, eggs and meat as the patients could get down. The doctor who starved a dying poet was given the most prestigious practice in the kingdom. Being wrong at the top of medicine has never once disqualified anybody. It has only ever cost the patient.