When telling the story of John Keats's final year, writers often include the same two anecdotes, juxtaposed in nearly the same way. Keats's friend Charles Brown recalls that in February 1820 the young poet had a coughing fit and spat quantities of bright arterial blood. After examining the color, Keats pronounced it a death warrant, a sure sign of the consumption that had already claimed his mother and brother Tom. Keats's six years of medical training—five as an apprentice under surgeon Thomas Hammond and one as a student at Guy's Hospital—lent authority to his self-diagnosis. Yet the poet's medical intuition sharply contrasted the uncertainty of his physicians. ‘Although he is a pulmonary specialist’, writes Stanley Plumly, Keats's ‘[Dr.] Bree dismisses the possibility of anything pulmonary let alone consumptive. This, of course, is stunning news, considering Keats's own diagnosis to Brown the night he coughs up the arterial blood’. Keats's critics disagree about why his doctors initially misdiagnosed his condition. ‘Keats's doctors in fact had no reasonable grounds for doubting what was the matter with him’, admits Andrew Motion. ‘They kept him in the dark either because they were colluding with his deception, or because they were incompetent’. Less charitably, Donald Goellnicht writes that Keats endured ‘obtuse insistence by his physicians and friends that his disease was entirely mental’. Whatever the case, these accounts seem to imply that Keats had a surer sense of his condition than his physicians.

Motion's suggestion that Keats's doctors attempted ‘deception’ to hide his illness from him reveals another possibility, however. Many Romantic physicians in fact recommended concealing patients’ fatal illnesses from them, worrying that fear might worsen their condition. In Keats's case, what sounds like bad medicine may simply have been good bedside manner. This possibility fits with the dictates of British medical ethics, which was codified during the Romantic period. For the first time, professional ethics tracts were published that offered guidelines for medical behavior, most notably Dr. John Gregory's Lectures on the Duties and Qualifications of a Physician (1770) and Dr. Thomas Percival's Medical Ethics (1803). Among these writers, support for hiding the truth from patients out of therapeutic necessity was widespread. As Percival explained, ‘falsehood may lose the essence of lying, and even become praiseworthy, when the adherence to truth is incompatible’ with the doctor's primary obligation to act as ‘minister of hope and comfort to the sick’.