The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness

by Meghan O'Rourke

My life as a patient changed the day I reread a letter by the nineteenth-century poet John Keats in which he offers a theory of what makes an artist great. At the time of its writing, Keats had witnessed his mother die from tuberculosis, then a poorly understood disease with an unclear cause. Soon his brother Tom and later he himself would die of the infection. In the letter, Keats—in his early twenties—tried to explain to his brothers the special quality that differentiated a great artist from a merely good one. “Negative Capability,” as he termed it, is the quality “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” I couldn’t escape the sense that Keats’s words about the necessity of “being in uncertainties” derived from his own experience of living with consumption’s impact on his family. In fact, his formulation of negative capability seemed to be a key to living well in the face of pain.