This chapter focuses on the literary influences of Beckett’s interest in illness and disability. Poems by John Keats, himself a medically trained poet, had a deep and lasting influence on Beckett’s writing, and the chapter considers the ways in which breathing and breath are figured in the poetry and letters of a poet who in 1821, at the age of twenty-five, died in Rome from tuberculosis. The chapter charts the evolving references Beckett makes to Keats in his writing and correspondence and addresses his own interest in breathing and breath. The second section of the chapter is dedicated to Beckett’s lasting and, for a period, all-absorbing interest in Samuel Johnson’s life and work, including his chronic medical conditions and neurodivergence. It examines Beckett’s reading notes, for a prospective play on Samuel Johnson, entitled ‘Human Wishes’, after the lexicographer’s major poem. While Beckett never finished the play, the influence of Johnson can be observed everywhere in his work, which repeatedly dramatises the ageing, ailing, and often declining body and shares Johnson’s emphasis on failure.