Shelley and vitality

About this book

"Shelley and Vitality reassesses Percy Shelley's engagement with late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century science and medicine, specifically his knowledge and use of theories on the nature of life presented in the debate between surgeons John Abernathy and William Lawrence. Sharon Ruston presents new biographical information to link Shelley to a medical circle and St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London. In poems such as Prometheus Unbound, Adonais and the Defence of Poetry, Shelley employs the vocabulary and ideas of this new science to express social, political and poetic questions and ideals."--Jacket.