Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie
Flat on this bed.

These lines come from John Donne’s “Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness,” written when he was seriously ill and contemplating death (often dated to 1623, during a grave fever, though the poem circulated posthumously). Donne—then Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral—imagines himself confined to bed while physicians attend him. He turns the clinical scene into a metaphysical meditation: the doctors’ attentive “love” makes them like cosmographers (mapmakers), and his own body becomes the “map” spread flat before them. The poem blends contemporary medical experience with Donne’s characteristic theological and cosmological imagery.

Donne fuses the sickbed with the early modern world of exploration and cartography. As he lies “flat,” he becomes both a literal patient examined by doctors and a symbolic “map” to be read—his body charting the approach of death and the passage toward eternity. The conceit also hints at the limits of medicine: physicians can measure and interpret, but the ultimate “geography” is spiritual, culminating in Donne’s hope of salvation. The lines exemplify Donne’s metaphysical method: startling analogy, intellectual wit, and a movement from physical circumstance to eschatological reflection.