The (pre-/post-)romantic bedlam

ABSTRACT. Autobiographical, biographical and medical records for three eminent English poets (Samuel Johnson, Lord Byron, Edgar Allan Poe), born within a hundred-year period (between 1705 and 1805) and included in a threefold system of thought (preromanticism, romanticism and late romanticism) were examined for symptoms of various diseases, pathological and psychopathological. The overall tableau, perhaps unsurprisingly, is quite gloomy, their symptomatology making up nothing less than a dictionary of medical terms. pp. 134–152

Keywords: Samuel Johnson; Lord Byron; Edgar Allan Poe; pathology; psychopathology; death