Donne, disease and doctors. Medical allusions in the works of the seventeenth-century poet and divine.

IN his poem 'Whispers of Immortality' Mr. T. S. Eliot places John Donne in the same category as the dramatist John Webster as a man who was 'much possessed by death and saw the skull beneath the skin'. Superficially, the preoccupation with death ofboth authors suggests a common depressive disposition. Nevertheless, Donne wears his rue with a difference, and the melancholy he exhibits is as characteristic of the seventeenth century as Webster's is of the Elizabethan age. Webster's melancholy perpetually points the contrast between a violent, vivid and lustful life and the inevitable putrefaction and decay of the body in the tomb. Although equally committed by his temperament to an obsession with the fragility of life and the brutal permanence of death, Donne is concerned generally not with the fate of the body after death, but with the slow process of decay leading to death, and to the moment of death itself. Webster we might expect to encounter in the cemetery or charnelhouse, Donne's spiritual home is the sick-room, the hospital and the place ofexecution. Consider these lines ... those two red seas, which freely ran, One from the trunk, another from the head, His soul be sailed to her eternal bed, His eyes will twinkle and his tongue will roll, As though he beckoned, and called back his soul. He grasps his hands, and he pulls tip his feet, And seems to reach, and to step forth to meet His soul!