19th century intellectuals believed a bad review gave John Keats tuberculosis

Scott Alexander is such an entertaining and politely provocative thinker. And you can't read him without learning something. From Book Review: Black Swan by Scott Alexander. He starts out with a riff on how potentially dangerous it might be to do a review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Black Swan, given how famously cognitively pugilistic Taleb can be. This leads Alexander down this trail:

I notice this BBC article about an author who hunted down a bad reviewer of his book and knocked her unconscious with a wine bottle. And Lord Byron wrote such a scathing meta-review of book reviewers that multiple reviewers challenged him to a duel, but the duel seems to have never taken place, plus I’m not sure Lord Byron is a good person to generalize from.

19th century intellectuals believed a bad review gave John Keats tuberculosis; they were so upset about this that they used his gravestone to complain:

Click to enlarge.

Keats’ friend Shelley wrote the poem Adonais to memorialize the event, in which he said of the reviewer:

Our Adonais has drunk poison—oh!
What deaf and viperous murderer could crown
Life’s early cup with such a draught of woe?
The nameless worm would now itself disown:
It felt, yet could escape, the magic tone
Whose prelude held all envy, hate and wrong,
But what was howling in one breast alone,
Silent with expectation of the song,
Whose master’s hand is cold, whose silver lyre unstrung.

So are book reviews in Mediocristan or Extremistan? Well, every so often your review causes one of history’s greatest poets to die of tuberculosis, plus another great poet writes a five-hundred-line poem condemning you and calling you a “nameless worm”, and it becomes a classic that gets read by millions of schoolchildren each year for centuries after your death. And that’s just the worst thing that’s happened because of a book review so far. The next one could be even worse!