A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys is Nathaniel Hawthorne's first book of Greek myths retold for children. Six stories are set inside a frame: Eustace Bright, an eighteen-year-old Williams College student on vacation, tells them to a crowd of children staying at Tanglewood, a country house in the Berkshires, whom Hawthorne gives flower and plant names such as Primrose, Periwinkle, Sweet Fern, Dandelion, Squash-Blossom and Buttercup.
Medical tag
Ancient Medicine
Hippocratic, Galenic, Ayurvedic or other pre-modern medical systems and their practitioners (non-humoral specifics).
Works
Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge was published in London in 1975 by New Left Books. It began as a long essay of 1970 and was meant to be one half of a joint book with Feyerabend's friend Imre Lakatos, For and Against Method, in which Lakatos would defend scientific rationality and Feyerabend attack it; Lakatos died in 1974, and Feyerabend dedicated the book to him.
Ceremony follows Tayo, a young man of mixed Laguna and white ancestry, who returns to the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico after the Second World War deeply ill in body and mind. In the Philippines he fought alongside his cousin Rocky, the family's favoured son, and endured the Bataan Death March; Rocky died of his wounds during the march, and Tayo could not save him.
The Chronographia of Michael Psellos is a history of the Byzantine court across roughly a century, from the accession of Basil II in 976 to the reign of Michael VII Doukas in the 1070s. It is arranged by reign rather than by year and covers fourteen emperors and empresses.
Cuchulain of Muirthemne is Lady Gregory's arrangement of the Ulster Cycle, the oldest group of Irish heroic tales, told in the English of the Kiltartan countryside in County Galway, with its Irish turns of phrase such as 'it is what he said'. Working from medieval Irish texts and the editions and translations of nineteenth-century scholars, she joined the separate tales into a single life of the hero Cuchulain, leaving out what she thought her readers would not care for and adding little of her own.
De Anima asks what soul is by beginning with the observable powers of living things. Aristotle reviews earlier accounts from thinkers such as Democritus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Plato, then rejects explanations that make soul either a wandering body, a harmony, or a separate passenger inside the organism.
De Materia Medica is an ancient pharmacopoeia: a systematic guide to plants, animals, minerals, wines, oils and manufactured preparations used as medicines. Dioscorides does not write a narrative.
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.
The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is a short essay asking one question with unusual persistence: how can so many men, cities and nations put up with a single tyrant, who has no power except what they give him? La Boétie, writing as a young law student around 1548 (some scholars date it to about 1552-53), addresses the question to a friend named Longa and answers it in stages.
The Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius are Niccolò Machiavelli's long commentary on the first ten books of Livy's history of Rome, which run from the founding of the city to the Samnite wars of the early third century BC. Machiavelli wrote them in the years after 1513, when he had been dismissed from the service of the Florentine Republic, and discussed them with young friends in the Rucellai gardens in Florence; he dedicated them to two of those friends, Zanobi Buondelmonti and Cosimo Rucellai, explaining that he had chosen men who deserved to be princes rather than men who were.
The Essays volume is a selection from the Moralia, the miscellaneous body of some seventy-eight surviving treatises attributed to Plutarch, alongside his famous Lives. Where the Lives teach ethics through the example of great men, the Moralia address readers directly, offering practical moral philosophy in the form of lectures, letters, dialogues and consolations.
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.
Heraclitus's book does not survive; what remains are roughly 130 short sayings preserved as quotations by later authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus and Diogenes Laertius. Modern editions number them according to Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (DK), and the reference edition presents them in a fresh translation with commentary.
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.
The Heroides (Heroines) is a collection of twenty-one verse letters in elegiac couplets, written as if by women of myth and legend to the men who have left, betrayed or endangered them, together with three pairs of letters exchanged between lovers. Ovid claimed to have invented the form.
Hippocratic Writings is not a single book but a library of early Greek medicine: case histories, ethical rules, theoretical essays, surgical manuals, dietetic advice, aphorisms and polemics against rival healers. Its strongest works begin from the sickbed.
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.
Jewish Antiquities is Josephus' twenty-book retelling of Jewish history from creation to the outbreak of revolt against Rome in 66 CE. It is not simply a paraphrase of the Bible, though its first half follows Genesis through the monarchy, exile and restoration.
Journey to the West is the great Ming-dynasty comic and religious novel about the monk Xuanzang's pilgrimage from Tang China to India to bring back Buddhist scriptures, guarded by a band of supernatural disciples. The library text is not a full translation.
The Laws is Plato's last and longest dialogue, twelve books of conversation in which three elderly men design the constitution and legal code of a new city. On a midsummer day an unnamed Athenian Stranger walks from Knossos toward the cave and shrine of Zeus with Cleinias, a Cretan, and Megillus, a Spartan.
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives set the life of a famous Greek beside that of a famous Roman, so that each could be measured by the other. Twenty-three pairs survive, most closed by a short Comparison in which Plutarch weighs the two men, together with four single Lives: Aratus, Artaxerxes, Galba, and Otho.
Macbeth opens on a Scottish heath where three witches plan to meet Macbeth. Returning from victory over rebels and Norwegian invaders, Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo meet the witches, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and future king, and tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings.
The Meditations, which Marcus Aurelius may have titled simply 'To Himself', is a private notebook of philosophical reflections written in Greek, probably during his military campaigns on the Danube in the 170s CE. It was not intended for publication and consists of twelve books of entries ranging from single sentences to short essays, often repeated and varied as exercises to fix principles in the mind.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin poem in fifteen books of dactylic hexameter, about 12,000 lines, that strings together some 250 myths of transformation from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus. Its unifying thread is change of form: gods, humans and nymphs become animals, plants, stones, stars and springs, usually at moments of extreme passion, violence or divine punishment.
Natural History: A Selection introduces one of antiquity’s great encyclopedic minds. Pliny wants to collect nature and human use together: stars, lands, peoples, animals, plants, metals, pigments, stones, medicines, marvels and technologies all belong to one vast inventory.
Jefferson's selected writings show the range and tensions of the revolutionary Enlightenment in America. Notes on the State of Virginia began as answers to questions from a French diplomat, but it became Jefferson's most sustained book: a survey of Virginia's geography, natural history, laws, economy, population, slavery, Indigenous peoples, education, religion, and politics.
The Novum Organum ('new instrument') is the second and only substantially completed part of Bacon's projected Instauratio Magna, a six-part plan to rebuild human knowledge from its foundations. Its title throws down a challenge to the Organon, the collection of Aristotle's logical works that had governed university teaching for centuries.
On Duties is Cicero's last philosophical work, written in the autumn of 44 BC, in the months after the murder of Julius Caesar, and addressed as a letter in three books to his son Marcus, then studying philosophy at Athens under the Peripatetic Cratippus. Cicero follows, with freedom, the Stoic Panaetius of Rhodes, whose treatise on duty (kathēkon, Latin officium) he adapts for a Roman reader, adding examples from Roman history and from his own career.
On Medicine, or De Medicina, is the most important surviving Latin medical work before late antiquity. Celsus organizes medicine into diet, drugs and surgery, giving Roman readers a lucid account of Greek medical learning without the dense polemic of specialist schools.
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.
On the Origin of Species argues that species are not fixed, separately created kinds but populations changed over time by variation, inheritance, struggle, natural selection, and descent with modification. Darwin begins with variation under domestication, using pigeons, livestock, and cultivated plants to show how small differences can be preserved and accumulated.
This volume pairs one of Plato's most literary dialogues with two letters attributed to him. The Phaedrus takes place outside the walls of Athens, where Socrates, who rarely leaves the city, walks with the young Phaedrus along the river Ilissus and sits under a plane tree on a hot summer day.
The Poetics is Aristotle's short treatise on the art of poetry, chiefly tragedy and epic, and the oldest surviving work of literary theory in the West. It opens by defining all poetry, together with music and dance, as imitation (mimesis), and by distinguishing the arts according to the medium of imitation (rhythm, language, melody), the objects imitated (people better than us, worse, or like us), and the manner (narration or enactment).
This volume joins two treatises by Aristotle that together set out what scientific knowledge is and how the natural world is to be understood. The Posterior Analytics, in two books, belongs to the logical works later grouped as the Organon.
Principles of Geology is Charles Lyell's argument that the earth's past can be explained by the same causes that are acting on it now, working at their present intensity over immense periods of time. The first edition appeared in three volumes in 1830, 1832 and 1833, under a subtitle describing it as an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth's surface by reference to causes now in operation.
The Statesman (Politikos) is one of Plato's late dialogues, usually dated to the 360s or 350s BC. It continues the conversation of the Sophist, held the day before: a visitor from Elea, a follower of Parmenides, has defined the sophist, and now, at Socrates' request, he undertakes to define the statesman or king.
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.
The Summa Theologiae, traditionally called the Summa Theologica, is Aquinas's unfinished synthesis of Christian theology, written, as its prologue says, for beginners who were confused by the disorder and repetition of existing textbooks. It contains some 512 questions divided into about 2,600 articles, each built on the same disciplined form inherited from university disputation.
Tanglewood Tales is Nathaniel Hawthorne's second book of Greek myths retold for children, a sequel to A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. In a short introduction called The Wayside, Hawthorne pretends that the stories were written by his young friend Eustace Bright, a Williams College student who had told the first set to a group of children at Tanglewood in the Berkshires; Eustace visits Hawthorne's snowy Concord hillside with six new stories, and Hawthorne agrees to act as editor.
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 Age of Alexander is a collection of nine of Plutarch's Lives covering the Greek world in the fourth and early third centuries BCE, from the decline of Sparta and Thebes through the rise of Macedon and the conquests of Alexander to the struggles of his successors. Removed from their original Roman pairings, they read as a sequence of Greek history told through character.
The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes, is Thomas Bulfinch's prose retelling of Greek and Roman mythology, with shorter chapters on Egyptian, Eastern, Norse and Celtic belief, first published in Boston in 1855. Bulfinch, a bank clerk with a Harvard classical education, wrote it so that ordinary readers could understand the mythological allusions in English poetry and speech.
The Arthashastra, the 'science of material gain' or of statecraft, is a vast Sanskrit treatise on how a king should acquire, protect and govern territory. Written mostly in prose with occasional verses, it is divided into fifteen books and some 150 chapters, and covers almost every aspect of administration with remarkable detail and an unsentimental realism that has led to comparisons with Machiavelli.
The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, forming part of the sixth book of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic of the war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra at the moment before battle begins.
The Bible is the sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity, and the reference edition presents the King James Version of 1611, the most influential translation in English. It is a library rather than a single book.
The Book of Enoch, usually called 1 Enoch, is a collection of five Jewish apocalyptic books gathered under the name of Enoch, the patriarch of Genesis 5 who walked with God and was not, for God took him. Written in stages during the Second Temple period, it presents Enoch as a righteous scribe who is shown the secrets of heaven, earth and the coming judgment and writes them down for his son Methuselah and for a remote generation.
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 Conquest of Gaul is a common English title for Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, seven books narrating his campaigns of 58 to 52 BCE, completed by an eighth book written after his death by his officer Aulus Hirtius. Each book covers one campaigning year, and Caesar speaks of himself throughout in the third person, a device that makes political self-advertisement read like a dispatch.
Around AD 117 the Ninth Legion, the Hispana, marched north from Eboracum into Caledonia to put down a rising of the tribes and was never seen again; its bronze eagle standard was lost with it. Some years later Marcus Flavius Aquila, whose father commanded the legion's First Cohort and vanished with it, arrives as a young centurion to command a cohort of auxiliaries at the frontier fort of Isca Dumnoniorum in the far southwest of Britain.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the great poem of ancient Mesopotamia, known in its fullest form from the standard Babylonian version on clay tablets, many of them from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. The library holds no text of it: the public-domain English versions, by Stephen Langdon (1917), Morris Jastrow and Albert T. Clay (1920) and R. Campbell Thompson (1928), are fragmentary scholarly editions of a poem still being recovered, so this record describes the epic without quoting it.
Book I of The Faerie Queene, the Legend of the Knight of the Red Cross, or of Holiness, tells how a young, untried knight wins his spurs by freeing a kingdom from a dragon and, on the way, learns how easily a Christian soul is deceived. Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, has sent the Redcrosse Knight, who bears a bloody cross on breast and shield, to help the lady Una, whose royal parents are besieged in their brazen castle by a monstrous dragon.
The Fate of Rome is a history of the Roman Empire from its height in the second century AD to the crises of the seventh, written by the classicist Kyle Harper and published by Princeton University Press in 2017 in its series on the history of the ancient world. Its argument is that the empire's long story cannot be told only through emperors, armies and barbarian peoples: changes in climate and the arrival of new infectious diseases were active forces that repeatedly struck a society whose own success had made it vulnerable.
The Golden Bough sets out to explain one strange rule. In the sacred grove of Diana at Nemi, in the Alban Hills near Rome, the priest, called the King of the Wood, held office until a runaway slave broke a bough from a certain tree and killed him in single combat, becoming priest in turn.
The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children is Charles Kingsley's retelling of three Greek hero legends, Perseus, the Argonauts and Theseus, written for his children Rose, Maurice and Mary. The preface is signed from Farley Court in Advent 1855, and the book was published by Macmillan in 1856.
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 Histories is Tacitus's narrative of the Roman Empire from 1 January AD 69 onward. It originally ran to Domitian's death in 96, but only Books I-IV and the first part of Book V survive, covering about eighteen months.
Books I-V are the first pentad of Livy's vast history of Rome from its foundation, carrying the story from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy to the recovery of the city after the Gallic sack of about 390 BC. Livy opens with a preface that admits the earliest traditions are closer to poetry than to record, and then states his purpose: history sets before the reader examples of every kind of conduct, to be imitated or avoided, and Rome, he believes, was richer in good examples than any other state until luxury and avarice came late.
The Homeric Hymns are a collection of thirty-three anonymous Greek poems addressed to the gods, composed in the same dactylic hexameter and formulaic language as the Iliad and Odyssey. Ancient audiences treated many of them as Homer's own; most scholars now see them as the work of different singers over a long period, with the four great narrative hymns usually dated to the archaic age and some short pieces much later.
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 Institutes of Justinian is a short official textbook of Roman law, issued at Constantinople on 21 November 533 and given the force of law, together with the Digest, from 30 December of that year. It was written for first-year law students: the preface, addressed to the youth desirous of studying the law, explains that the emperor, having reconquered Africa and set in order both the imperial constitutions and the writings of the old jurists, has commissioned Tribonian, Theophilus and Dorotheus to compose an elementary book so that beginners may learn the law as it is actually in force.
The Jewish War is Josephus' account of the revolt against Rome from its Hasmonean and Herodian prehistory to the destruction of Jerusalem and the last pockets of resistance. Written after Josephus had defected to the Romans, the work tries to explain a catastrophe to several audiences at once: Jews who had survived it, Romans who had conquered, and Greek-speaking readers who needed Judean politics translated into the language of civil war, faction and providence.
The Koran, or Quran ('recitation'), is the central scripture of Islam. It consists of 114 chapters called suras, of very unequal length, each made up of verses (ayat).
The Lais of Marie de France are twelve short narrative poems in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, preserved together in one manuscript (British Library, Harley 978) with a general prologue in which Marie dedicates them to a 'noble king', probably Henry II. She says she has heard Breton lais, songs commemorating adventures, and has put them into verse so they will not be forgotten.
The Last Days of Socrates gathers four dialogues by Plato that together tell the story of Socrates' trial and death in Athens in 399 BCE: the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. In the Euthyphro, Socrates meets Euthyphro outside the court where Socrates must answer an indictment for impiety and corrupting the young.
The Library is the only complete handbook of Greek mythology to survive from antiquity. In plain, compressed prose it tells the traditional stories of the gods and heroes in order, from the beginning of the world to the death of Odysseus, organized chiefly by family lines.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's long return from Troy to Ithaca and of the household that must survive his absence. The poem opens not with Odysseus but with disorder: his son Telemachus is growing up under the pressure of suitors who consume the estate and demand that Penelope choose a new husband.
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 Poetic Edda is the collection of anonymous Old Norse poems about the gods and heroes of the North, preserved chiefly in the Icelandic manuscript known as the Codex Regius, written about 1270. The library text is the complete translation by Henry Adams Bellows, published in 1923 by the American-Scandinavian Foundation, which renders thirty-five poems in alliterative verse and adds a general introduction, an introductory note to each poem and extensive notes.
The Prose Edda is a handbook of Norse myth and of the art of skaldic poetry, written in Iceland around 1220 by the chieftain and historian Snorri Sturluson. It was meant to teach young poets the old stories and the poetic names (kennings) that the court verse of Scandinavia depended on, at a time when Iceland had been Christian for more than two centuries.
The Ramayana, the story of Rama's journey, is one of the two great Sanskrit epics of India, attributed to the sage Valmiki and composed in the sloka couplet. It opens with a frame: Valmiki asks the sage Narada whether any man on earth is perfectly virtuous, hears the life of Rama, and, moved to pity when a fowler shoots one of a pair of curlews, utters the first sloka; the god Brahma then bids him tell the whole tale.
Ammianus Marcellinus wrote his history in thirty-one books, beginning with the accession of Nerva in AD 96, where Tacitus had stopped, and ending with the Gothic victory at Adrianople in 378. The first thirteen books are lost.
The Satires of Horace and Persius brings together two Roman satiric voices separated by style, temperament and political world. Horace's Sermones, written after the civil wars and during the rise of Augustus, are conversational poems about greed, ambition, social climbing, sexual folly, legacy-hunting, literary quarrels, dinner parties and the art of living within limits.
The Story of the Volsungs is a thirteenth-century Icelandic prose saga that tells, from beginning to end, the legend of the Volsung kindred, the dragon-slayer Sigurd and the fall of the Niflungs. The library text is the translation by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris, first published in 1870, in the 1888 edition, with an introduction, the translators' preface, notes, and an appendix of Morris and Magnússon's versions of related Eddic lays, from the Second Lay of Helgi Hundings-bane to the Lament of Oddrun.
The book, known in Italy as Il Milione and in early French manuscripts as the Devisement du Monde (Description of the World), is less a diary than a geography of Asia as the Polos knew it, organized by route and region and told in the voice of Rustichello, who often addresses the reader directly. The Prologue tells how the Venetian brothers Niccolò and Maffeo Polo, trading in the Crimea and on the Volga in the 1260s, were carried by war farther and farther east until envoys brought them to Kublai, the Great Kaan of the Tartars, who questioned them about the Pope and the Christian faith and sent them back to Rome asking for a hundred learned Christians and oil from the lamp of the Holy Sepulchre.
Olivia Coolidge's The Trojan War retells the whole legend of Troy, from its cause in heaven to the homecomings of the Greek kings, in 33 short chapters that can each be read as a story on its own. It begins with the golden apple thrown among the goddesses, the judgment of Paris, and the beauty of Helen, whom Paris carries off from her husband Menelaus of Sparta.
The Twelve Caesars offers biographies of Julius Caesar and the first eleven Roman emperors from Augustus through Domitian. Suetonius does not write history as Tacitus does, with sustained analysis of institutions and causation.
Hesiod's two complete poems are the oldest Greek attempts to explain, in verse, where the gods came from and how a man ought to live under them. Both are in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer, and both begin with the Muses.
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.
Two Lives of Charlemagne pairs Einhard's Life of Charlemagne with Notker the Stammerer's later anecdotes about the emperor. Einhard writes as a court insider shaped by classical biography, especially Suetonius.
Utopia is a dialogue in two books, written in Latin and presented as a true report. In Book I More, writing in his own person, recalls his embassy to Flanders in 1515 with Cuthbert Tunstall.
Hugh Kennedy's When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World is a narrative history of the Abbasid caliphate at the height of its power, from the revolution that brought the dynasty to the throne in 750 to the anarchy of the later ninth century at Samarra, after which effective power slipped away from the caliphs. It was first published in Britain in 2004 as The Court of the Caliphs and in the United States in 2005 under its present title.
Passages
- Against Method, Closing chapters (science in a free society)
The state-sponsored revival of traditional Chinese medicine offered as an example of a non-scientific tradition with valuable results.
- Ceremony, Ku'oosh's visit
The elder's traditional ceremony and his recognition that some war sicknesses are beyond it.
- Ceremony, Betonie's hogan, Gallup
Betonie's ceremony, sand painting and teaching that ceremonies must change.
- Chronographia, Reign of Isaac I Komnenos
Psellos at the bedside of the ailing emperor, judging his condition by the pulse before his abdication.
- Cuchulain of Muirthemne, The War for the Bull of Cuailgne (Lugh's watch at the Lerga)
Exhausted after fighting since Samhain with only brief rests on his spear, Cuchulain sleeps three days and nights while Lugh heals his wounds with Druid herbs.
- De Anima, Powers of life
De Anima gives this tag concrete force through the work matters to medicine because perception, touch, appetite, and bodily organization become the basis for thinking about life and mind
- De Materia Medica, Books 1–5, wine and oils
Medicated wines, oils and resins show drug delivery through everyday substances.
- 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.
- Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, Of Voluntary Servitude, on cowardice; translator's endnotes 5 and 7
Hippocrates is cited on the cowardice of peoples under despots and praised for refusing to treat the army of Artaxerxes.
- Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, Of Voluntary Servitude, the chain of dependents
The ambitious flock to a new tyrant as, physicians say, matter flows toward a gangrenous part of the body.
- Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, Book I, Preface
The healing art described as the recorded experience of the old physicians, set as a model for imitating ancient political practice.
- Essays, Advice about Keeping Well (Moralia; may not be in this selection)
A dialogue of health advice on diet, exercise and moderation, especially for intellectual workers.
- Fathers and Sons, Ch. 20–21
Vassily Ivanovich's old-fashioned country practice and his pride in his son's modern medical training.
- Fragments, DK 117–118
The drunk man with a moist soul led by a boy; the dry soul as wisest.
- Fragments, DK 58
Physicians who cut and burn the sick and demand a fee, given as an example of good and ill being one.
- Fragments, Diogenes Laertius, Lives IX.3–4 (ancient testimony)
Account of Heraclitus's dropsy, his riddle to the physicians and his attempt to cure himself with dung.
- Galen: Selected Works, On the Natural Faculties, Book 1
Galen argues that organs possess faculties such as attraction, retention and expulsion, grounding physiology in active powers.
- Galen: Selected Works, On the Natural Faculties, Books 2–3
Digestion, nutrition and bodily transformation are explained as ordered natural processes rather than chance.
- 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.
- Heroides, Letter V (Oenone to Paris)
Oenone recalls that Apollo taught her healing and every useful herb, yet she cannot cure her own love.
- Hippocratic Writings, On the Sacred Disease 1–2
The writer rejects divine special status for epilepsy and argues that it has a natural cause like other diseases.
- Hippocratic Writings, Epidemics, Books 1 and 3
Case notes track fever, delirium, sleep, stools, urine, crisis days and death or recovery across seasons.
- Hippocratic Writings, On Fractures and On Joints
Manuals give practical instructions for traction, splints and bandages in injuries and dislocations.
- 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.
- Jewish Antiquities, Books 3-4, Mosaic legislation
Josephus summarizes laws about purity, childbirth, skin disease, bodily emissions and priestly inspection, translating ritual categories for Greek readers.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 17, Herod's final illness
Herod's last disease includes severe pain, feverish decline, abdominal and genital symptoms, physicians and desperate therapies before death.
- Journey to the West (A Mission to Heaven), Chapters V–VII
The immortal peaches, the elixir pills in Laozi's gourds, and the forty-nine days in the eight-trigram crucible, from which the Monkey emerges with smoke-reddened eyes.
- Journey to the West (A Mission to Heaven), Chapter LXIX
Sun diagnoses a king's illness at a distance by a string attached to his wrist; the illness proves to be grief for an abducted wife.
- Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Life of Pericles
Pericles, sick in the plague years, shows a friend an amulet the women had hung on him, as a sign of how far illness had worn him down.
- Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Life of Marcus Cato
Cato keeps a book of household remedies for his family and expresses his suspicion of Greek physicians.
- Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3
An English doctor describes King Edward curing 'the evil' (scrofula) by touch.
- Meditations, Book 1.17
Marcus thanks the gods for remedies given in dreams, including for spitting of blood and giddiness.
- Metamorphoses, Book VII
Aeacus describes the plague at Aegina: fever, thirst, corpses and the failure of medicine.
- Metamorphoses, Book XV
Aesculapius comes from Epidaurus to Rome as a serpent to end a pestilence.
- Natural History: A Selection, Books 20–27
Medicinal plants are cataloged with uses for pain, sleep, wounds, digestion and mental disturbance.
- Natural History: A Selection, Books 28–32
Animal-derived remedies and charms blur medicine, magic and credulity.
- Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism LXVI
Bacon criticises the doctrines of elementary qualities and occult specific powers while commending physicians' attention to attraction, astringency, maturation and other secondary qualities of medicines.
- Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism LXXIII
Citing Celsus, Bacon observes that medical experiments came first and philosophical causes were assigned afterward, using medicine as evidence against speculative systems.
- On Duties (De Officiis), Book I, ch. XLII
Medicine, architecture and the liberal arts listed as honourable professions for those whose station they suit.
- On Duties (De Officiis), Book II, end
Antipater of Tyre's addition of the care of health: self-knowledge of the body, temperance, and the help of the medical art.
- On Medicine, Book 1, Preface
The history of medical schools frames medicine as a debate between reason, experience and practical method.
- On Medicine, Book 2
Fever, crisis, prognosis and evacuations structure the management of acute illness.
- On Medicine, Book 8
Fractures, dislocations and bone injuries require traction, setting, splints and careful aftercare.
- 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 Making of Man, Body, senses, and mind
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), Introduction
Harvey sets out and examines the Galenic teaching on arteries, spirits, pores in the septum and the uses of the pulse.
- On the Origin of Species, Difficulties and consequences
On the Origin of Species gives this tag concrete force through darwin matters to medicine through heredity, variation, adaptation, population thinking, and later debates over degeneration, eugenics, and disease ecology
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 268a–c
Socrates imagines a man claiming to be a physician because he knows how to induce vomiting and purging, without knowing when or for whom.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 270c–d
Appeal to Hippocrates: understanding the body, like the soul, requires understanding the nature of the whole.
- Posterior Analytics and Physics, Posterior Analytics I.13 (79a)
The physician knows that circular wounds heal more slowly; the geometer knows the reason why, an example of one science taking its reasons from another.
- Posterior Analytics and Physics, Physics II.3 (194b–195a)
Health as the final cause of walking; reducing flesh, purging, drugs and surgical instruments as means for the sake of health.
- Principles of Geology, Book II, Ch. XXIX
The Serapis cult's healing role and the practice of sleeping in the temple to receive cures in dreams.
- Statesman, 295b–296c
A physician or trainer going into a far country leaves written notes for his patients, and on his return should be free to change them if circumstances have changed.
- Sts. Cosmas and Damian: Physician Saints, Byzantine shrine incubation
Patients sleep at or near shrines, receive dream instructions, and report cures, blending ritual, expectation, and therapeutic authority.
- Summa Theologica, I, Q. 91, Art. 3
The fitness of the human body: equable temperament, the largest brain relative to body size, upright posture, and the trade-off with smell and speed.
- Tanglewood Tales, The Golden Fleece
Chiron teaches harp, war and the curing of diseases; at the end Medea drugs the dragon with a sleeping potion.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 6
Tom and Huck discuss folk cures for warts, including spunk-water and swinging a dead cat in a graveyard.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 8
Aristotle's teaching gives Alexander a taste for medicine; he treats his friends when they are ill.
- The Age of Fable, Chapter III, Apollo and Daphne
Bulfinch explains why medicine belongs to Apollo's province, quoting the physician-poet Armstrong on music that allays grief and expels disease.
- The Age of Fable, Chapter XVI, Monsters (Centaurs); Chapter XXIII, Admetus and Alcestis
Chiron the centaur, skilled in medicine, raises the infant Aesculapius; Aesculapius later restores the dead to life and is killed by Jupiter's thunderbolt.
- The Age of Fable, Chapter XXXIV, Oracle of Aesculapius
The sick sleep in the temple at Epidaurus to receive healing responses; Bulfinch compares the cure to mesmerism and tells how the god's serpent came to Rome in a time of pestilence.
- The Arthashastra, Book 4 (examination of sudden death)
Procedures for inspecting a corpse to determine whether death resulted from hanging, drowning, poison or violence.
- The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 17.7–17.10
Foods classified as sattvic, rajasic and tamasic, with their effects on health, mood and vitality.
- The Bible, 2 Kings 20:1–7 / Isaiah 38
Hezekiah's mortal illness and the lump of figs laid on his boil.
- The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch), Chapters VII–VIII
The Watchers teach charms, enchantments, root-cutting and the knowledge of plants, alongside weapons, cosmetics and astrology.
- The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch), Chapter XV
The spirits that come forth from the giants are described as evil spirits that afflict and oppress on the earth.
- The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch), Chapter XL.9
Raphael named as the presence set over all diseases and wounds.
- The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch), Chapters LXVII and LXIX
The waters that heal the body of the kings while punishing the spirit, and the Watcher Kasdeja's teaching of smitings of spirits and of the embryo in the womb.
- The Conquest of Gaul, Book VI.13–16
Druid teaching on memory and the soul's survival; those suffering severe diseases vow human sacrifices to win back the gods' favour.
- The Eagle of the Ninth, Chapters XI–XVII
Marcus works his way north as the oculist Demetrius of Alexandria, treating eye ailments with salves among the tribes.
- The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI, close
The plant from the bottom of the waters, whose name means that the old man becomes young, is carried off by a snake, which sheds its skin as it goes.
- The Faerie Queene, Book I, Book I, Canto V, stanzas 17 and 36-44
Leeches wash Sansjoy's wounds with wine and oil; Night carries him to Aesculapius in hell, whose story of healing Hippolytus is told.
- The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Chapter 3, Apollo's Revenge
The Antonine Plague, Galen's observations, and the case for smallpox.
- The Golden Bough (abridged edition), Chapter III, section 2
Homoeopathic cures for jaundice and other illnesses from Vedic India, Pliny and Marcellus of Bordeaux.
- The Golden Bough (abridged edition), Chapters LV-LVI
The transference of illness to objects and animals, and public expulsions of evils, including measures against epidemics.
- The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children, The Argonauts, Part I
Cheiron teaches the virtues of all healing herbs; Asclepius carries herbs and a snake; Jason learns to cure wounds and is called the healer.
- The Histories, Book 1.197
The Babylonians, having no physicians, carry the sick into the market so passers-by can advise them.
- The Histories, Book 2.84–88
Egyptian medical specialization and the three grades of embalming, with removal of brain and viscera.
- The Histories, Book IV, ch. 81
Vespasian consults doctors about a blind man and a man with a maimed hand before attempting their cure at Alexandria.
- The History of Rome, Books I-V, Book II, ch. 32
Menenius Agrippa's fable of the limbs that starve the belly, with its account of food made into blood for the veins.
- The History of Rome, Books I-V, Book IV, ch. 25; Book V, ch. 13
A temple vowed to Apollo for the health of the people, and the first lectisternium held to end an intractable pestilence.
- The Homeric Hymns, Hymn II, To Demeter, ll. 224-230
Demeter, disguised as an old nurse, promises Metaneira to guard the baby from the Undercutter and from witchcraft.
- The Homeric Hymns, Hymn XVI, To Asclepius
Five-line hymn to Asclepius, born of Coronis, as healer and soother of pain.
- The Iliad, Book 5
Diomedes' rampage: detailed anatomical wounds, and the healing of the wounded gods by the divine physician Paieon.
- The Jewish War, Book 1, late Herod narrative
Herod the Great's final illness is described through bodily pain, feverish symptoms, ulceration and futile attempts at relief before his death.
- The Koran, Sura 3:49; 5:110
Jesus heals the blind and the leper and raises the dead by God's permission.
- The Koran, Sura 16:68–69
Bees produce a drink of varying colours in which there is healing for people.
- The Koran, Sura 38:41–44
Job, afflicted by Satan with distress and suffering, is told to strike the ground and finds cool water to wash and drink.
- The Lais of Marie de France, 'Les Deus Amanz'
A strengthening potion from a relative at Salerno; the lover refuses it and dies of exhaustion at the summit.
- The Last Days of Socrates, Crito 47a–48a
Analogy of the trainer and physician: one should heed the expert, not the many, about health of body and soul.
- The Library (Bibliotheca), Book II.2.2
The daughters of Proetus go mad and roam the land; Melampus demands a share of the kingdom, then cures them by a pursuit and purification, though the eldest dies.
- The Library (Bibliotheca), Book III.10.3-4
Asclepius learns healing from Chiron, raises the dead with the Gorgon's blood, and is struck down by Zeus.
- The Odyssey, Book 4
Helen mixes a drug into wine that suppresses grief and anger, a striking ancient fantasy of pharmacological emotional control.
- The Odyssey, Book 10
Circe's potion transforms men into swine; Hermes provides moly as protective antidote before Odysseus confronts her.
- 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 Poetic Edda, Hovamol, stanzas 147-148
Othin's first charms: one that helps in sorrow, pain and sickness, and one needed by those who practise leechcraft (the second stanza survives only in part).
- The Poetic Edda, Sigrdrifumol, stanza 8
Sigrdrifa teaches birth-runes, written on the palms and around the joints, to help bring a child from its mother.
- The Poetic Edda, Svipdagsmol (Fjolsvinnsmol), stanza 52
Lyfjaberg, the Hill of Healing, is said to cure any woman who climbs it, however long she has been sick.
- The Prose Edda, Skáldskaparmál, Thor and Hrungnir
Fragments of Hrungnir's hone stick in Thor's head; the wise woman Groa chants spells over him until it loosens, and he distracts her with news of her husband so that the spell is left unfinished.
- The Ramayana, Book VI, Canto LXXIV (The Medicinal Herbs)
Jambavan describes four healing plants on a Himalayan peak; Hanuman carries the whole mountaintop back and the wounded army revives.
- The Roman History, Book XIX, ch. 4
Unburied dead at Amida breed pestilence; Ammianus explains the causes and three kinds of plague and the garrison's recovery after rain.
- The Satires of Horace and Persius, Horace, Satire 1.5
The journey to Brundisium includes bodily discomforts, travel ailments and comic attention to digestion and irritation.
- The Satires of Horace and Persius, Persius, Satire 3
The poem frames moral laziness and bad education through imagery of illness, treatment and the need for philosophical discipline.
- The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga), Chapter VIII
Sigmund can eat venom without harm, while Sinfjotli can bear it only on his skin; later, after the wolf-skin fight, Sigmund sees a weasel heal its fellow with a leaf and uses the same herb on Sinfjotli's throat.
- The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga), Chapters XX-XXI
Brynhild teaches help-runes for childbirth and bough-runes for leech-lore and wound-searching, and counsels careful washing and burial of the dead.
- The Travels of Marco Polo, Book I, Chapter XLIII; Book II, Chapter LXXV
Rhubarb in the mountains of Tangut and rhubarb and ginger near Suju, gathered for trade all over the world.
- The Travels of Marco Polo, Book II, Chapters XLIX-L
Crocodile gall used against rabies and in childbirth; in Carajan no physicians, and the sick consult spirit-conjurors.
- The Trojan War, Chapters 23–24, The bow of Heracles; Oenone
The wounded Philoctetes and his bow are brought to Troy; the wounded Paris turns to the healer Oenone.
- The Twelve Caesars, Julius Caesar
Reports of Caesar's falling sickness and bodily habits show illness incorporated into political biography.
- The Twelve Caesars, Claudius
Descriptions of Claudius's gait, speech and bodily difference connect disability, mockery and political underestimation.
- Theogony and Works and Days, Works and Days, ll. 90-105
Before Pandora men lived free from heavy sickness; after the jar is opened, silent diseases roam by day and night.
- Theogony and Works and Days, Works and Days, ll. 582-596
High summer, when Sirius parches head and knees and Hesiod prescribes shade, food and diluted wine.
- Timaeus, The civic frame
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
- Two Lives of Charlemagne, Einhard, personal habits section
Charlemagne's clothing, diet, moderation, exercise and swimming present health as part of royal discipline.
- Utopia, Book II, Of the Travelling of the Utopians
Health as the foundation of bodily pleasure, and the Utopians' esteem for Hippocrates, Galen and the study of medicine.
- When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise and Fall of Islam's Greatest Dynasty, Chapter 9, Abbasid court culture
The patronage of learning and translation at the caliphal court, the context for the Arabic reception of Greek medicine.
Quotes
“A man, when he gets drunk, is led by a beardless lad, tripping, knowing not where he steps, having his soul moist.”
“The dry soul is the wisest and best”
Frequently cited
“Alas, wretched me, that love may not be healed by herbs!”
“To pacify a nation, first attend to the King's illness.”
“Hippocrates after curing many diseases himself fell sick and died.”
“Now mistakes come to pass even in the operations of art : the grammarian makes a mistake in writing and the doctor pours out the wrong dose.”
“just as the physician, whether he cures us against our will or with our will, and whatever be his mode of treatment,--incision, burning, or the infliction of some other pain,--whether he practises out of a book or not out of a book”
“thus of all animals he has the least sense of smell. For man needs the largest brain as compared to the body”
“The good Chiron taught his pupils how to play upon the harp, and how to cure diseases, and how to use the sword and shield”
“Here the sick sought responses and the recovery of their health by sleeping in the temple.”
“Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities”
“This first is Michael, the merciful and long-suffering: and the second, who is set over all the diseases and all the wounds of the children of men, is Raphael:”
“they who are troubled with unusually severe diseases and they who are engaged in battles and dangers, either sacrifice men as victims, or vow that they will sacrifice them, and employ the Druids as the performers of those sacrifices”
“Another beneficent use of homoeopathic magic is to heal or prevent sickness.”
“Thence it became apparent that the service of the belly was by no means a slothful one; that it did not so much receive nourishment as supply it”
“I begin to sing of Asclepius, son of Apollo and healer of sicknesses.”
Frequently cited
“Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt”
“being a seer and the first to devise the cure by means of drugs and purifications”
“having become a surgeon, and carried the art to a great pitch, he not only prevented some from dying, but even raised up the dead”
“Zeus, fearing that men might acquire the healing art from him and so come to the rescue of each other, smote him with a thunderbolt.”
“Four plants, of sovereign powers possessed, Spring from the soil, and flashing there Shed radiance through the neighbouring air. One draws the shaft: one brings again The breath of life to warm the slain; One heals each wound; one gives anew To faded cheeks their wonted hue.”
“Both philosophers and skilful physicians agree that excess of cold, or of heat, or of moisture, or of drought, all cause pestilences;”
“Of themselves diseases come upon men continually by day and by night, bringing mischief to mortals silently; for wise Zeus took away speech from them.”