The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration

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The other lines vary somewhat from this base form. The stresses, more often than not, shift places in the lines. For example, the first two syllables of the poem are stressed, creating a spondee. While in the second line, the first two syllables form an iamb. The first is unstressed and the second is stressed. Another interesting example is the fourth line. The line begins with two unstressed syllables and is then followed by one stressed, one unstressed, and one final stressed syllable. William Blake (1757-1827) is one of the key English poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He is sometimes grouped with the Romantics, such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, although much of his work stands apart from them and he worked separately from the Lake Poets. The earliest years of what would become modern medicine were remarkable in the lengths these 'Resurrectionists' went to in obtaining corpses for study. Doctors functioning under the influence of dangerously obsessive desires, be they purely for intellectual enlightenment and eventual renown, or something far more perverse, created a dark and ugly industry... and in 18th and 19th century Europe, that's really saying something. When I was a graduate student, I walked into the library compound to find the following words spray-painted on the tarmac:

For a time, condemned criminals were routinely sentenced to death and public dissection, their bodies donated to the Medical Institutes*. This practice was ended in the early 19th Century, but parliament allowed that any person found dead without identification and/or someone willing to claim their body would be fair game for anatomical research. This amounted to depriving the poorest classes of any guarantee that they would be given a decent burial, and many were outraged that poverty alone meant they might be dissected publicly like criminals. 'Burial Insurance' became a popular method of avoiding the indignities that might have been inflicted on their bodies. As test subjects became scarce, members of the nascent medical community were complicit in murder, paying money to the 'Ghouls' that stalked the harbors for departing ships, where they would kill drunken sailors not likely to be missed and deliver them to the Anatomists.

The Rose Book establishes the concept of managing knowledge assets in government and the public sector. It focuses on how to identify, protect and support their exploitation to help maximise the social, economic and financial value they generate. Blake’s key themes are religion (verses from his poem Milton furnished the lyrics for the patriotic English hymn ‘ Jerusalem’), poverty and the poor, and the plight of the most downtrodden or oppressed within society. He is not a ‘nature’ poet in the same way that his fellow Romantics are: he seldom writes with the countryside in mind as his principal theme, but draws on, for instance, the rich symbolism of the rose and the worm to create a poem that is symbolically suggestive and clearly about other things (sin, religion, shame, cruelty, evil). Bizarre and captivating images, including close-up details and revealing cross-sections, make all too clear the fascinations of both doctors and artists of the time

This might explain the ‘howling storm’ in which the worm ‘flies’: the turbulent emotions and turmoil generated by resenting and hating that which one loves, conflicted desire and disgust. A squirm-inducing illustrated tour through a kaleidoscope of 19th-century diseases.... over 350 strangely fascinating images from the world’s rarest medical books. If you think you’re squeamish and medical drawings aren’t for you don’t be put off. This incredible book transcends that. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.

The strange, symbiotic relationship between medicine and social oppression is here given full-colour form: not only by anatomical illustrations of paupers' and criminals' corpses, but also by what - were they not so disfigured - would be regarded as straightforward portraits of the leprous and the syphilitic, the tubercular and the cancerous ... Richard Barnett's superbly erudite and lucid accompanying text would really suffice in itself as an introduction to the history of western medical science. This would tally with the fact that the worm harbours a ‘dark secret love’ for the rose: is the worm guilty of jealous love for the rose, whose beauty and ‘joy’ it envies? Is this a version of Nietzschean ressentiment, or Oscar Wilde’s statement that ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’? Or perhaps the sort of thing we encounter in another William Blake poem, ‘A Poison Tree’? If you're able to detach yourself from the knee-jerk reaction of: 'what's wrong with that dude's face?', these illustrations are really neat to look at.

develop a strategy for managing their knowledge assets, as part of their wider asset management strategy (a requirement of MPM) The howling storm is an interesting image at this point in the piece. By adding this tidbit about the setting, it is clear Blake wants the reader to know that the worm is able to make it through dangerous conditions. It can find the rose whenever it wants to. Perhaps this has something to do with its invisibility. A feature that is also be linked to its ability to get close to the worm. It might not seem like such danger at first.

The writing is informative and impeccably researched, delving into the gruesome history of anatomical study in a professional manner that walks the tightrope between sensationalistic indulgence of morbid fascination on the one side, and overly clinical jargon designed to emotionally distance the reader on the other. This guidance is to advise and support organisations in scope with their knowledge asset management and, in turn, fulfil their responsibilities as set out in Managing Public Money ( MPM). Organisations in scope are those headed by an Accounting Officer who is responsible for upholding MPM. These organisations are mainly those classified as central government by the Office for National Statistics, but others will be in scope. The poem might be read, slightly differently, as a take on Christian doctrine: ‘worm’ can also be a poetic word for ‘snake’ or ‘serpent’, and this conjures up the Garden of Eden (that bed of roses again?). The Satanic serpent which persuaded Eve to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge is motivated by a desire for revenge against God, and the pure earthly paradise God has established with Adam and Eve. Blake chose to make use of a complicated metrical pattern that is most closely associated with anapaestic dimeter. This means that, if the meter is perfect, each line should have five beats. The first two syllables are unstressed and the third is stressed. Although the poem can be categorized with this meter in mind, there is only one line, the seventh, which is perfectly structured as anapaestic dimeter.

It’s hard, maybe impossible at this great remove to truly appreciate a pre-photography world. It’s like trying to imagine a world where the only way to experience music was to hear it live.While the guidance clarifies best practice and provides recommendations, these should not be interpreted as additional rules. Continue to explore the world of Blake’s poetry with our analysis of ‘The Lamb’, our overview of his poem known as ‘Jerusalem’, and his scathing indictment of poverty and misery in London. If you’re looking for a good edition of Blake’s work, we recommend Selected Poetry (Oxford World’s Classics) . We’ve offered some tips for writing a brilliant English Literature essay here. The fact that the worm chooses to fly in the night suggests something seeking to travel and do its work under cover of darkness, perhaps because of shame; night also suggests the world of sleep and dreams, when our unconscious comes to the surface in the form of symbols (symbols not unlike those presence in this poem). Everything rendered here from cholera—depicted in eerie teals—to gout—with massive orblike tumors throbbing beneath the skin—is as aesthetically arresting as it is off-putting. If you’re the kind of person who guiltily sneaks off to watch a zit popping or a deworming video on YouTube, wondering what’s wrong with you, this is the book for you.