"O that I were young again": Yeats and the Steinach operation
secondary literature · 1983
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SUMMARY
Historical article in the British Medical Journal documenting W. B. Yeats's 1934 Steinach operation performed by Norman Haire, with attention to the literary and biographical context. The article takes its title from a Yeats poem. PMID 6418285 resolves on PubMed; PMCID PMC1550205 confirms open-access availability via PubMed Central. DOI 10.1136/bmj.287.6409.1964 resolves. This is the principal peer-reviewed reference for the Yeats case specifically.
NOTES
Lock’s 1983 BMJ article is the most-cited peer-reviewed source for Yeats’s vasoligation. It situates the April 1934 procedure within Yeats’s late biography and addresses the question of whether the perceived creative renewal that followed was physiological or psychological. The article does not have access to Haire’s surgical records and relies on Yeats’s letters and contemporaneous accounts. PMID 6418285 and PMCID PMC1550205 confirmed on PubMed/PubMed Central.