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John Keats statue

Keats as a medical student, sitting in an alcove from old London Bridge in the courtyard of the hospital that trained him.

Statues & memorialsFree

Photo by Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Also in Monuments & Ruins.

Keats walked into Guy's in October 1815 as a surgeon's dresser, sat his apothecary's exams the next summer and passed, and then gave it up for poetry; the Endymion years, Fanny Brawne and the odes were all ahead, and so was the consumption that killed him at twenty-five. Stuart Williamson's bronze of 2007 has him in the year of the decision, coat open, book on his knee, in one of the stone alcoves that stood on the eighteenth-century London Bridge and came to the hospital courtyard in 1861. Andrew Motion, his biographer, unveiled it, and the medical students still eat their lunch beside him.

Where
Guy's Hospital courtyard, St Thomas Street, SE1 9RT
Nearest station
London Bridge · 2 min walk

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