Richard Wild Month
6. Gridlock
This month, we commemorate the work of a young Scottish journalist and broadcaster, Richard Wild, originally from Melrose, who was murdered by a lone gunman in Baghdad on 5 July 2003. He was 24. From a portfolio of Richard’s photographs from around the world, Islay McLeod has selected 12 – one for each edition of SR in February. No record of the locations has been
left, but the photographs speak for themselves.
Person of the Week
Did he kill Keats?
Barbara Millar on James Clark
His dying was wretched. He was put on a starvation diet of a single anchovy and a piece of bread a day. His frail, weak body was regularly bled. And his only release – his supply of laudanum – was taken away from him for fear he would take a deliberate overdose.
In agony, in February 1821, the young Romantic poet John Keats died in his room at the Spanish Steps in Rome. He was just 25 years old. And recently, much of the blame for his death has been attributed to his Scottish doctor, James Clark.
Clark was born in Cullen, Banffshire, in 1788 and took an arts degree, with the intention of studying law. He graduated with an MA but discovered a preference for medicine, so went on to study at Edinburgh University and became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. He entered the medical service of the Royal Navy and was appointed to the post of assistant surgeon on HMS Thistle.
The Thistle was wrecked off the coast of New Jersey and Clark returned to Britain and a promotion to the post of surgeon on HMS Colobree, which was also wrecked. He then served on two more ships until the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 when he was put on half pay. He returned to Edinburgh to continue his studies and was awarded his MD in 1817.
The following year, Clark took a patient suffering from tuberculosis to the south of France and to Switzerland, making observations about the effects of the climate on the disease, and collecting meteorological and other data in order to study their influences on consumption and other conditions.
He settled in Rome – then frequented by wealthy members of English society – and built up a practice and a steadily increasing reputation. But he also continued to tour various other European cities, particularly the mineral spas of Germany. In Carlsbad, he met Prince Leopold, later to become the king of the Belgians, who was greatly interested in Clark’s examination of the waters, appointing him to be his personal physician.
Returning to London in 1826, Clark was admitted to the Royal College of Physicians and appointed physician to St George’s Infirmary, his practice gradually building up while he continued his research into the climate and consumption, culminating in his ‘best and most important work’. ‘The Influence of Climate in the Prevention and Cure of Chronic Diseases, more particularly of the Chest and Digestive Organs’, was published in 1829.
‘It is difficult to criticise doctors in the general backward state of medical knowledge then, but even in the absence of a stethoscope, it is difficult to condone such a rubbishy assessment.’
This work, in which he gave unequivocal praise to the powers of climate and mineral waters in the treatment of disease, established his reputation with the public and within his profession. He used mineral waters in his own practice in the treatment of disease and was extremely popular with patients for successfully masking the nauseous taste of the drugs he prescribed. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1832.
The king of the Belgians recommended Clark for the post of physician to the Duchess of Kent and her daughter, Princess Victoria – an appointment which led to a large increase in his business and reputation. When Victoria became queen in 1837, Clark was appointed the queen’s physician-in-ordinary and created a baronet. He then became physician to her husband, Prince Albert, and was a trusted adviser to the royal family on all medical matters.
He served on several royal commissions and was credited with developing the medical department of London University. Clark played an important role in establishing the Royal College of Chemistry and served on the General Medical Council.
Clark was also influential in persuading the royal family to buy their Highland retreat at Balmoral. Victoria had been holidaying at Loch Laggan, where the weather had been persistently awful. At the same time, Clark’s son had been spending a relaxing time at Balmoral, then owned by Sir Robert Gordon, enjoying day after day of sunshine while recuperating from illness.
When Clark heard of this, he strongly recommended that Victoria and Albert consider the Deeside area for their Scottish home. By chance, later the same year, Sir Robert Gordon choked on a fishbone and died, without heirs, giving the queen and prince the opportunity to lease, and then buy, Balmoral.
Clark retired in 1860, giving up his practice in Brook Street, London, where he had lived for 20 years, and his duties as physician to the monarch. He and his wife, Minnie, moved to Bagshot Park in Surrey, to a house lent to him by Queen Victoria for his lifetime, and he died there in 1870, aged 81.
But the events of almost 200 years ago resurfaced recently in a biography of Keats’ friend, Joseph Severn, an artist who nursed the poet through the despairing months leading up to his death. Severn’s biographer, Sue Brown, claimed James Clark’s method of treating Keats made his last weeks significantly more arduous than they needed to be.
Instead of treating the poet for advanced consumption, from which Keats had been suffering for over a year, Clark spent a month treating him for anxiety and a routine stomach ailment. His initial assessment notes: ‘The chief part of his disease so far as I can see seems to be seated in his stomach. I have some suspicion of the disease of the heart and it may be of the lungs…if I can put his mind at rest I think he’ll do well.’ When Clark – who had a special interest in the disease – finally did diagnose TB, he made the further errors of forcing Keats onto starvation rations and bleeding him.
In his Keats-Shelley memorial lecture in 1973, pioneer cardiac surgeon Lord Brock of Wimbledon commented: ‘Even for the 1820s this was a very poor assessment of Keats’ illness and, however able Clark was later, it is clear that he was medically poor just then. It is difficult to criticise doctors in the general backward state of medical knowledge then, but even in the absence of a stethoscope, it is difficult to condone such a rubbishy assessment.’
By the time Keats died in 1821 he had already given the world ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Bright Star’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. Perhaps he might have lived longer, and produced still more masterpieces, had it not been for the fateful intervention of James Clark.