Keats Memorial Lecture 2025: Consumption & Creativity

Last Updated on 13/08/2025

Keats Memorial lecture 2025 in association with King’s College London

Speaker: Dr Noel Snell

The talk will review changing attitudes to TB in the 18th/19thC, with the rise in belief that infection could stimulate creativity in artists, composers, writers, and poets; examples of creative subjects who suffered from TB include Keats, Shelley, Chopin, the Brontë sisters, Chekhov, Kafka, George Orwell, Aubrey Beardsley, and Modigliani. Some physicians considered that ‘toxins’ from the disease could affect the behaviour and creativity of TB patients; could there be any truth in the idea that infection could modify a patient’s behaviour? ). There is evidence in man that the parasite Toxoplasma gondii can cause increased risk-taking, and is associated with a higher likelihood of developing schizophrenia, which has been associated with creativity and artistic achievement. Mice infected with Mycobacterium vaccae (a relative of the bacillus causing TB) show increased levels of serotonin in the brain, a reduction in anxiety, and improved learning ability. Keats was a genius; but was this innate, or contributed to by his TB infection (or perhaps the drugs he may have taken for it)?

The Keats Lecture was established in 1968 and has been given every other year, bar one, since 1969 on a day as close as possible to the anniversary of the death of John Keats, which was on February 23rd, 1821. It is organised and hosted in rotation by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, the Royal College of Surgeons, and what was Guy’s Hospital Medical School, which is now King’s College London. The link between these organisations was that Keats trained at Guy’s and subsequently qualified at the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries and the Royal College of Surgeons.