What did Coleridge know about medicine and how did it influence the development of his critical thought? Neil Vickers sets out to answer this question in this radical reinterpretation of Coleridge's career between 1795 and 1806. Coleridge and the Doctors changes the way we look at Coleridge's intellectual development and reveals the richness of his involvement in the eighteenth-century tradition of 'philosophical medicine' and its determining influence on his critical and philosophic stance. The book also contains a revisionary analysis of Coleridge's dealings with opiates and offers a comprehensive account of British early Romantic medicine.