This paper aims to revisit the image of “romantic desease” to develop the plurality of its meanings, at the crossroads between literary criticism, literary creation and philosophy. The point here is to highlight how the association between Romanticism and ill-health is based on a frequently polemical appropriation— by medical, social and critical discourses—of a reflection on how art affects lives. To evoke the “pharmacy of the Romantics” amounts to showing how literary representations respond to the growing pathologizing of the work of art as effected from outside the aesthetic field while emphasizing the diversity of its possible effects, harmful or therapeutic. It also enables this paper to emphasize how this differentiating gesture as enacted in the texts resonates with the romantic philosophy of art and to underline the way it contributes to the establishment of a specific romantic aesthetic.