BIB_ID
416111
Accession number
MA 1856.24
Creator
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834.
Display Date
London, England, 1828 May 5.
Credit line
Purchased from Joanna Langlais, 1957.
Description
1 item (4 pages, with address) ; 22.7 x 18.6 cm
Notes
Place of writing taken from the postmark. See the published edition of the correspondence, cited below, for additional information.
This collection, MA 1856, is comprised of 48 letters from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Joseph Henry Green and 2 autograph manuscripts, written between 1817 and 1834. See the collection-level record for more information (MA 1856.1-50).
This letter is from the Joanna Langlais Collection, a large collection of letters written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to various recipients. The collection has been divided into subsets, based primarily on Coleridge's addressees, and these sub-collections have been cataloged as MA 1848-1857.
Address panel with seal and postmarks: "J.H. Green, Esqre / &c &c / Lincoln's Inn Fields."
This collection, MA 1856, is comprised of 48 letters from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Joseph Henry Green and 2 autograph manuscripts, written between 1817 and 1834. See the collection-level record for more information (MA 1856.1-50).
This letter is from the Joanna Langlais Collection, a large collection of letters written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to various recipients. The collection has been divided into subsets, based primarily on Coleridge's addressees, and these sub-collections have been cataloged as MA 1848-1857.
Address panel with seal and postmarks: "J.H. Green, Esqre / &c &c / Lincoln's Inn Fields."
Provenance
Purchased from Joanna Langlais in 1957 as a gift of the Fellows, with the special assistance of Mrs. W. Murray Crane, Mr. Homer D. Crotty, Mr. and Mrs. Donald F. Hyde, Mr. Robert H. Taylor and Mrs. Landon K. Thorne. Formerly in the possession of Ernest Hartley Coleridge and Thomas Burdett Money-Coutts, Baron Latymer.
Summary
Praising Green and saying "alas! in my own little way, few and unimportant as my experiences have been compared with your's, they have sufficed to convince me that the utmost, that can be carved out of a Block is -- a Blockhead"; saying that Green's friend the sculptor Francis Chantrey may be more successful "[b]ut then Chantrey operates on Marbles: and 'out of these stones' children may be raised to Abraham"; including a satirical verse about the surgeons Astley Cooper, Anthony Carlisle and William Blizard; using the metaphor of childbirth and referring to the obstetricians Robert Gooch and James Blundell; referring jokingly to various "Poes" and saying "if we must have an exotic, let it be the glorification of our Scholarship"; referring to an account in the Medical Gazette of the response at a "Students' Tavern Dinner" to the surgeon William Lawrence and saying that he hopes it hasn't shaken Green's faith in his decision "to decline all concern procreative, obstetric or sponsorial in this Babe of Grace"; discussing the medical students: "If their studies in defunct Anatomy are carried on with the same keen interest with which they attend to the viva sectio of any one of their Superiors & Instructors, what a house of Vesaliuses and Morgagnis will not England have to boast of!"; saying that he thinks the Medical Gazette will do some good, though it ought to be re-named "Alexipharmacos Hebdomadalis Wakleicida" after the medical and social reformer Thomas Wakely, but he is glad that Green has nothing to do with it; saying that he has been thinking about the letter Green is proposing to send to the president and council of the Royal College, "and it strikes me, that one argument might be grounded on the disgrace, that the Royal College of Surgeons will incur if they surrender to a knot of private Individuals uncountenanced by the Public Authorities & under strong suspicion of party purposes, the honor of instituting a School of scientific Anatomy & comparative Physiology, such as the present condition of the Sciences and of the Country require" (a reference to King's College, London); asking about the appointment offered to Green at King's College and how he will be renumerated for abandoning his private practice and the income from his lectures at the hospital; saying that he wishes he could talk with Green in person about this before he sends in his letter, "tho' the Letter, indeed, would not bind you to any thing. Is the entire abandonment of your private Practice an indispensable Proviso?"
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