A Tale of Two Cities moves between London and Paris from 1775 to the Reign of Terror in 1793-94. In Book the First, Recalled to Life, Jarvis Lorry, a clerk of Tellson's Bank, travels by the Dover mail and sends back the cryptic message Recalled to life by the porter Jerry Cruncher.
Medical tag
Anatomy Dissection
Anatomy, dissection, body-snatching, the anatomical theatre.
Works
Claude Bernard published this book in Paris in 1865 as the opening of a larger treatise on experimental medicine that he never completed. It sets out, for physicians, the method by which he had made his own discoveries, and argues that medicine must become a science grounded in physiology and the laboratory.
The Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences was published anonymously in Leiden in 1637 as a preface to three scientific essays, the Dioptrics, the Meteors and the Geometry. Descartes wrote it in French rather than Latin so that readers using their natural reason, including women, could judge it without scholastic training, and he presented it not as a treatise but as a history or fable of his own mind.
Fathers and Sons is set in the Russian countryside in the spring and summer of 1859, two years before the emancipation of the serfs. Arkady Kirsanov, a newly graduated student, returns to his father's modest, poorly run estate, Maryino, bringing his friend and mentor Yevgeny Bazarov, a brusque, brilliant medical student of humble origins who calls himself a nihilist: he accepts no principle on authority and values only what is useful, especially natural science.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a frame narrative told through the letters of Robert Walton, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice. Walton rescues a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing a gigantic figure across the frozen sea, and who tells his story as a warning to a man whose ambition resembles his own.
Galen: Selected Works introduces a physician whose ambition was encyclopedic. The surviving Galenic corpus ranges from technical anatomy and pulse lore to philosophical defenses of method, from therapeutics and compound drugs to autobiography and polemic against rivals.
Gargantua and Pantagruel is the collective title of five comic books about a dynasty of giants, written by François Rabelais and published between 1532 and 1564. Pantagruel appeared first, at Lyon in 1532, under the anagram pen-name Alcofribas Nasier; Gargantua, about the father, followed in 1534 or 1535 and is now printed as Book I. The Third Book (1546) and the Fourth Book (complete 1552) bore Rabelais's own name, and a Fifth Book was published in 1564, eleven years after his death; how much of it he wrote is disputed.
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver, presents itself as the sober memoir of a ship's surgeon. In Part I, shipwrecked, Gulliver wakes on the shore of Lilliput tied down by people six inches tall.
The first two books of Procopius's History of the Wars tell the long contest between the Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople, and Sasanian Persia, from the early fifth century to 549. Procopius opens by declaring that he writes so that great deeds will not be lost, that he was an eyewitness as adviser to Belisarius, and that truth alone suits history.
Institutes of the Christian Religion is John Calvin's ordered account of Christian doctrine, written to train readers in godliness and to show the King of France what his persecuted evangelical subjects actually believed. The library text opens with the Prefatory Address to Francis I, which pleads that the Reformers teach nothing new but the faith of Scripture and the early fathers, and with Calvin's Epistle to the Reader, dated Geneva, 1 August 1559, in which he says he was never satisfied until the work was set in its present order.
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil was published in London in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, and its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny subjects, holding a sword and a bishop's crozier above a peaceful town. The Introduction states the governing analogy: as art can make automata with springs for hearts and strings for nerves, so human art creates the commonwealth, an artificial man whose soul is sovereignty.
Meditationes de prima philosophia, published in Paris in 1641, compresses Descartes's metaphysics into six meditations, each imagined as a day's reflection by a solitary thinker seated by the fire in a dressing gown. The book was issued with six sets of Objections from learned readers (Caterus, Mersenne's circle, Hobbes, Arnauld, Gassendi and others) and Descartes's Replies, which are longer than the Meditations themselves; a second edition (Amsterdam, 1642) added the Jesuit Bourdin's Seventh Objections.
Middlemarch, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, follows several households in and around a Midlands market town from 1829 to 1832, the years leading to the first Reform Act. Its Prelude recalls Saint Teresa of Ávila and asks what becomes of women with a similar longing for a great life who are born into an age that gives it no outlet.
De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Seven Books on the Fabric of the Human Body) was printed at Basel by Johannes Oporinus in 1543, when its author, Andreas Vesalius, professor at Padua, was twenty-eight. Its seven books describe the bones and cartilages, the ligaments and muscles, the veins and arteries, the nerves, the organs of nutrition and generation, the heart and the organs of the chest, and the brain and the senses.
On the Making of Man is Gregory of Nyssa's theological anthropology, written as an extended reflection on Genesis and the claim that human beings are made in the image of God. Gregory combines scriptural exegesis, Platonizing philosophy, and late antique physiology to ask why humanity is embodied, rational, sexual, mortal, and capable of divine likeness.
On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals is the short Latin treatise, printed at Frankfurt in 1628, in which William Harvey argued that the blood moves continuously in a circuit, driven out by the heart through the arteries and returned to it by the veins. The library text is Robert Willis's English translation of 1847, as revised by Alexander Bowie and reprinted in 1910 in the Harvard Classics, with that series' introductory note on Harvey's life.
Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, is Isaac Newton's experimental account of light and colour, written in English and published in London in 1704. Newton opens by announcing that his design is not to explain the properties of light by hypotheses but to propose and prove them by reason and experiments, and the three books carry out that plan.
Philosophy of Natural Science is a short introductory textbook by the German-American philosopher Carl G. Hempel, published in 1966 by Prentice-Hall in its Foundations of Philosophy series. It is still under copyright, so the library holds no text; this record describes the book in its own words and quotes only two short sentences.
Popular Scientific Lectures gathers fifteen lectures and addresses that the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach gave between the 1860s and 1897 to general audiences, learned societies and university gatherings. They were first collected in English, translated by Thomas J. McCormack for the Open Court Publishing Company of Chicago in 1894–95; the library text is the enlarged third edition of 1898, whose proofs Mach read himself.
Sts. Cosmas and Damian are the physician saints par excellence: twin or paired martyrs, healers without payment, patrons of doctors and surgeons, and subjects of one of medieval art's strangest surgical miracles. The historical core is modest.
That Hideous Strength, subtitled A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups, completes the trilogy that began with Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, though it moves the action from other planets to an English university town. Mark Studdock, a young sociologist and fellow of Bracton College in Edgestow, longs to belong to the inner circle of the college's Progressive Element.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a comic and nostalgic novel of boyhood set in the 1840s in St. Petersburg, a small Missouri town on the Mississippi modelled on Twain's Hannibal. Tom is an orphan living with his kind, anxious Aunt Polly, his priggish half-brother Sid and his cousin Mary.
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is a selection of Lovecraft's tales, edited with notes by the Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, tracing his development from early Poe-influenced pieces to the 'cosmic horror' for which he is known. Lovecraft's central idea is that humanity is an insignificant accident in a vast, indifferent universe, and that knowledge of this truth is enough to destroy sanity.
The Canon of Medicine (al-Qanun fi al-Tibb) is Ibn Sina's encyclopedia of medicine in five books, and Book I, the subject of this record, sets out the general principles on which the rest depends. It opens with a definition: medicine is the science of the states of the human body in health and when not in health, and of how health is lost and restored, with a theoretical part that gives knowledge and a practical part that guides the physician's judgment.
The Commonwealth of Oceana, published in London in 1656 during Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, is a model constitution for a republic set in an island called Oceana, which is England under a thin disguise. Scotland is Marpesia, Ireland Panopea, London Emporium, and Cromwell himself appears as Olphaus Megaletor, the Lord Archon or sole legislator who founds the commonwealth and then gives up his power.
The Histories is the first great work of prose history in the Western tradition, an inquiry (historia) into the causes and course of the wars between the Greeks and the Persian Empire. Herodotus states his purpose in the opening: to preserve the memory of great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and barbarians, and especially the reason why they fought one another.
The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate is the name later given to an unscheduled exchange on Saturday, 30 June 1860, at the Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, seven months after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. It was not a formal debate with set speeches and a motion, and no transcript was taken.
The Iliad tells of a few weeks in the tenth year of the Greek siege of Troy, and its subject, announced in the first line, is the wrath of Achilles. A plague sent by Apollo ravages the Greek camp because Agamemnon, commander of the Achaeans, has refused to return the captive daughter of Apollo's priest Chryses.
The Merchant of Venice joins two stories, a bond for a pound of flesh and a lottery of caskets, and moves between the commercial city of Venice and Belmont, the country estate of the heiress Portia. Antonio, a wealthy merchant, opens the play sad without knowing why.
The Metaphysical Poets is Helen Gardner's anthology of English poets of the seventeenth century who wrote in the style that Samuel Johnson, borrowing a phrase from Dryden, called 'metaphysical'. Johnson complained that in their verse the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked by violence together; T. S. Eliot, in his 1921 review of Herbert Grierson's earlier anthology, praised them for a unified sensibility in which thought and feeling were fused.
Les Passions de l'âme, published in Amsterdam and Paris in November 1649, was Descartes's last book and his fullest account of how mind and body interact in emotional life. It grew out of his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, who in 1643 had asked him how an immaterial thinking soul could move a body, and who later pressed him on the regulation of grief and the good life.
The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is John Muir's account of his first twenty-five years, from a Scottish seaside town to the edge of what he calls the University of the Wilderness. In the first chapter he remembers Dunbar on the stormy North Sea coast: rambles with his grandfather David Gilrye, who taught him his letters from shop signs, scrambles over the ruins of Dunbar Castle, fights and dares with schoolmates, the servant girls' terrifying tales of the Dandy Doctors who were said to steal children for the Edinburgh dissecting rooms, and a school where Mr. Lyon and his father together drilled grammar and Bible verses into him by memory and the rod.
The Subjection of Women is John Stuart Mill's extended argument that the legal subordination of women to men in mid-Victorian Britain was wrong in principle and an obstacle to human improvement, and that it should give way to perfect equality before the law. Mill drafted it in 1860–1861, after the death of his wife Harriet Taylor Mill, and published it with Longmans in 1869.
The War of the Worlds is told by an unnamed writer on philosophical subjects who lives on Maybury Hill near Woking in Surrey, looking back some years after the events. Book One, The Coming of the Martians, opens with astronomers seeing jets of gas leap from the surface of Mars.
Timaeus offers Plato's most elaborate cosmological account, framed by Socrates' wish to see the ideal city in motion and Critias's story of ancient Athens and Atlantis. Timaeus then delivers a likely story about the cosmos, not a demonstration with mathematical certainty.
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands is the lively autobiography of a Jamaican doctress, nurse and businesswoman. Mary Seacole begins in Kingston, where she was born to a Scottish soldier and a Creole mother who kept a boarding house and was famous for her cures; she declines to give the year, saying only that she and the century were young together.
Passages
- A Tale of Two Cities, Book II, Chapter 14
Jerry Cruncher goes fishing by night in a churchyard; his son learns that he is a resurrection-man.
- An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, Part Two, Chapter II
Bernard sets out which experiments on human beings are forbidden, permitted or obligatory, and defends vivisection while discussing the pain of animals and the objections of its critics.
- An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, Part Three, Chapter I
Bernard narrates how an unexpected finding of sugar in the blood led to his discovery of the glycogenic function of the liver.
- Discourse on Method, Part V
Detailed mechanical account of cardiac motion, valves and auricles, explained by heat rarefying the blood, with an invitation to dissect the heart of a large animal.
- Fathers and Sons, Ch. 3–5
Bazarov collects and dissects frogs at Maryino to study physiology.
- Fathers and Sons, Ch. 27
Bazarov cuts himself during a post-mortem on a typhus victim; he describes his symptoms clinically, accepts his death and sends for Odintsova.
- Frankenstein, Vol. I, Ch. III (1818) / Ch. 4 (1831)
Studies in anatomy and decay; gathering materials from charnel houses, dissecting rooms and slaughterhouses; secretive, sleepless labour that damages his health.
- Galen: Selected Works, Anatomical Procedure traditions
Animal dissection and vivisection traditions support claims about nerves, organs and bodily function.
- Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book II, Chapter VIII
Gargantua's letter recommends the ancient physicians and frequent anatomies as part of a complete education.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part II, Ch. 1 and 4
Magnified bodies: the nurse's breast, and beggars with a breast cancer, a monstrous wen and lice.
- History of the Wars, Books I-II (The Persian War), Book II, ch. 22
Physicians open the swellings of the dead; failed prognoses; mixed results of bathing and treatment; death of pregnant women; suppuration as a sign of recovery; sequelae in survivors.
- Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book I, ch. 5, secs. 2-3
Medicine and astronomy as sciences that disclose God's wisdom; Galen's anatomy of the human body; man called a microcosm.
- Leviathan, Introduction
The body as clockwork (heart as spring, nerves as strings, joints as wheels) and the state as an artificial man.
- Leviathan, Part II, Ch. XXIV, 'Of the Nutrition, and Procreation of a Common-wealth'
Money compared to blood circulating through the veins and arteries of the commonwealth, an explicit use of Harvey's discovery.
- Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation VI
Nerves compared to a cord whose pull at any point produces the same motion in the brain; the dropsical patient's thirst as a natural signal that harms the sick body.
- Middlemarch, Book II, Chapter XV
Lydgate's history: his first reading of anatomy as a boy, his studies in London, Edinburgh and Paris, and his ambition to continue Bichat's work on tissues.
- On the Fabric of the Human Body (Preface), Preface to Charles V
Satire of lecture-room anatomy, with the professor reading Galen from a chair while an unlearned barber dissects.
- On the Fabric of the Human Body (Preface), Preface to Charles V
Argument that Galen dissected apes and other animals, so that many of his anatomical claims do not hold for humans.
- On the Fabric of the Human Body (Preface), Fabrica, Book VI
Description of the heart and doubt that blood sweats through the septum between the ventricles, sharpened in the 1555 edition.
- On the Fabric of the Human Body (Preface), Fabrica, Book VII
The brain, its ventricles and the sense organs, including the absence in humans of the rete mirabile described by Galen.
- On the Making of Man, Sex, death, and resurrection
On the Making of Man gives this tag concrete force through its medical lens includes anatomy, generation, bodily organs, sex difference, mortality, resurrection, and the porous border between medicine and theology
- On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (De Motu Cordis), Chs. II–V
Observations from vivisection of cold-blooded and warm-blooded animals establish that the heart's active phase is contraction.
- On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (De Motu Cordis), Ch. IX
The calculation of blood expelled per beat and per half hour, which makes a circulation necessary.
- On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (De Motu Cordis), Ch. XIII
The valves of the veins, figured by Fabricius, are shown to permit flow only toward the heart.
- Opticks, Book I, Part I, Axiom VII
The eye as an optical instrument; images on the retina conveyed by the optic nerves; presbyopia and convex spectacles; myopia; jaundice tinting vision.
- Opticks, Book III, Query 15
Proposal that fibres of the optic nerves partly cross where the nerves meet, so that half of each eye's picture goes to each side of the brain.
- Philosophy of Natural Science, Ch. 2
Kolletschka's fatal scalpel wound during an autopsy suggests that students coming from dissections carry cadaveric matter; handwashing in chlorinated lime follows.
- Popular Scientific Lectures, The Fibres of Corti
Helmholtz's account of the cochlea as a set of resonators analysing sound, with the illustration of a deaf person 'hearing' through a piano.
- Popular Scientific Lectures, On Sensations of Orientation
Self-experiments on a rotating apparatus, a disc model of the semicircular canals, and credit to Goltz, Breuer and Crum Brown for the theory of the sense of balance.
- Sts. Cosmas and Damian: Physician Saints, Miracle of the black leg
The saints perform a miraculous limb replacement, making medieval viewers imagine diseased tissue, surgical instruments, donor bodies, and postoperative identity.
- That Hideous Strength, Chapter 8, Moonlight at Belbury, and Chapter 9
Mark is brought before the Head of Alcasan, sustained by pumps and tubes in Filostrato's laboratory.
- That Hideous Strength, Chapter 16, Banquet at Belbury
The animals kept for experiment break out of the laboratory and attack the banquet guests.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 9
Dr. Robinson, Muff Potter and Injun Joe dig up a fresh grave to obtain a body; Injun Joe murders the doctor.
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'Herbert West—Reanimator', Parts I–II
Medical students steal fresh corpses for reanimation trials; a typhoid epidemic in Arkham supplies bodies and kills the medical dean.
- The Canon of Medicine, Book I, Part 1, paras. 138-141
The seats of the faculties in brain, liver and heart, and the disagreement between Aristotle and the Galenic physicians.
- The Commonwealth of Oceana, Part I, The Preliminaries (reply to Leviathan)
Political principles compared with Harvey's circulation of the blood, discovered from nature and not from the anatomy of a single body.
- The Commonwealth of Oceana, Part III, The Model (discourse on the Parliament)
The Parliament likened to a heart with two ventricles circulating the vital blood of Oceana.
- The Histories, Book 2.84–88
Egyptian medical specialization and the three grades of embalming, with removal of brain and viscera.
- The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate, Thursday 28 June 1860 (Section D)
Owen and Huxley dispute the comparative anatomy of the gorilla and human brain, a question Huxley later pursued in print and in Man's Place in Nature (1863).
- The Iliad, Book 5
Diomedes' rampage: detailed anatomical wounds, and the healing of the wounded gods by the divine physician Paieon.
- The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1
Antonio bares his breast as a tainted wether; Portia asks for a surgeon to stop his wounds and rules on flesh without blood.
- The Metaphysical Poets, Andrew Marvell, 'A Dialogue between the Soul and Body'
Soul and Body each complain of imprisonment by the other, with images of bones, nerves and diseases.
- The Passions of the Soul, Part One, opening articles (c. Art. 7–16)
Brief description of the body's parts: the heat in the heart, circulation of the blood, the animal spirits formed in the brain and travelling through the nerves to move the muscles.
- The Passions of the Soul, Part One (c. Art. 30–34)
The soul joined to the whole body but exercising its functions chiefly in a small gland in the middle of the brain, which the spirits move and which in turn moves the spirits.
- The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, Chapter I
Servant girls' tales of the Dandy Doctors who prowl with sticking-plaster and carry children off to be dissected in Edinburgh.
- The Subjection of Women, Chapter III
The anatomical argument from the size of women's brains, and Mill's reply on proportion, quality and the circulation of blood through the brain.
- The War of the Worlds, Book Two, Chapter II (What We Saw from the Ruined House)
The narrator's account of Martian anatomy: a body that is mostly brain, no digestion, feeding by injecting living blood, absence of sleep and fatigue, and the absence of bacteria and disease on Mars.
- Timaeus, Embodiment and disorder
Timaeus gives this tag concrete force through timaeus is unusually rich for medical history because it links soul, body, marrow, organs, disease, diet, and psychic disorder inside a single cosmic anatomy
- Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Chapter IV
Cholera at Cruces: her treatments, the deaths, the examination of an infant's body to learn about the disease, and her own attack of cholera.
Quotes
“If a comparison were required to express my idea of the science of life, I should say that it is a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen.”
“Have we the right to make experiments on animals and vivisect them? As for me, I think we have this right, wholly and absolutely.”
“I could not read the description of any malady without thinking it mine, and, had I not been already indisposed, I am certain I should have become so from this study”
“I need only mention in reply what has been written by a physician of England, who has the honor of having broken the ice on this subject”
“Such persons will look upon this body as a machine made by the hands of God, which is incomparably better arranged, and adequate to movements more admirable than is any machine of human invention”
“To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death”
“The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials”
“For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the begining whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life”
“For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body”
“Was the Eye contrived without Skill in Opticks, and the Ear without Knowledge of Sounds?”
“But physicians still keep to the opinion that the brain is the chief seat of sentient life, and that each sense has its own distinct member whereby it manifests function.”
“Which is as if a man should tell famous Harvey that he transcribed his circulation of the blood, not out of the principles of nature, but out of the anatomy of this or that body.”
Frequently cited
“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?”
“Teeth, throat, and bowels are objectified hunger; the organs of generation are objectified sexual desire”
“How long have I investigated this one thing, the brain of the leech, so that here the slippery truth might no longer slip from me”