A Burnt-Out Case follows Querry, a celebrated European architect of churches who has lost all feeling: for his work, for women, for God and for himself. Travelling as far as the river boats will take him, he arrives at a leproserie deep in the Belgian Congo run by a community of missionary fathers and by Dr Colin, an atheist physician devoted to his patients.
Medical tag
Disability Deformity
Disability, deformity, bodily difference and its social treatment.
Works
A Christmas Carol. In Prose.
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories gathers Flannery O'Connor's early fiction around Southern households where manners, piety, resentment, and violence collide. In the title story, a grandmother's nostalgia and manipulations help divert a family trip toward the Misfit, whose murders expose both her shallow goodness and her final reach toward kinship.
Paul Bäumer, a young German infantryman not yet twenty, tells in the present tense of his last two years in the Great War. He and his classmates Albert Kropp, Müller and Leer enlisted together, urged on by their schoolmaster Kantorek, and now serve in a company that has just come out of the line with eighty men left of a hundred and fifty.
Anne of Green Gables opens in Avonlea, a farming village on Prince Edward Island, where the elderly brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert have arranged to adopt a boy from a Nova Scotia orphan asylum to help on their farm. Through a mistake the child sent is Anne Shirley, an eleven-year-old red-haired girl who talks without stopping, renames everything she loves and has survived a hard childhood by imagination.
This collection pairs Melville's posthumous novella Billy Budd, Sailor with the best of the short fiction he published in magazines in the 1850s, usually including Bartleby, the Scrivener, Benito Cereno and The Encantadas (contents vary by edition). Bartleby (1853) is narrated by a comfortable Wall Street lawyer who hires a pale, quiet copyist.
Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, subtitled 'The Autobiography of a Horse', is narrated by a handsome black horse with a white star and one white foot. He grows up in a pleasant meadow under a kind master, Farmer Grey, and his mother Duchess teaches him to be gentle and good and to work willingly.
Bleak House is built around Jarndyce and Jarndyce, an endless lawsuit over a disputed will in the Court of Chancery, and around a secret that links a great lady to an orphan girl. Dickens tells it in two voices: an unnamed narrator in the present tense who surveys London's fog, the lawcourts, fashionable society and the slum called Tom-all-Alone's, and Esther Summerson, who writes her own story modestly in the past tense.
Judith Herrin's Byzantium is a portrait of the Eastern Roman Empire from the founding of Constantinople in 330 to its fall to the Ottomans in 1453, written for readers who know little about it. In the introduction she explains that the book began when two builders who passed her office every day asked her what Byzantium actually was; rather than answer with a continuous chronicle, she wrote twenty-eight short chapters, each built around a theme, monument, event or person, that can be read in sequence or on their own.
Candide, ou l'Optimisme follows a guileless young man raised in the castle of the Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh in Westphalia, where the tutor Pangloss teaches that this is the best of all possible worlds and that everything is for the best. Candide is kicked out of the castle for kissing the Baron's daughter Cunégonde behind a screen, and the rest of the tale tests Pangloss's doctrine against an avalanche of catastrophe.
Cannery Row is a loosely plotted, affectionate portrait of the sardine-cannery district of Monterey, California, during the Depression, built from short narrative chapters alternating with self-contained vignettes or 'inter-chapters'. Its centre is Doc, a gentle, learned marine biologist who runs the Western Biological Laboratory, collects specimens from the tide pools, listens to Gregorian chant and Bach, reads poetry, and is trusted by everyone on the Row.
Villehardouin's chronicle is the eyewitness account of the Fourth Crusade by one of its leaders. It opens in 1198-99 with the preaching of Fulk of Neuilly and the indulgence proclaimed by Pope Innocent III, and with a tournament at Écry in Champagne where Count Thibaut of Champagne and Count Louis of Blois take the cross, soon joined by Count Baldwin of Flanders.
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.
City of God is Augustine’s monumental argument that Rome’s disaster does not discredit Christianity and that human history must be understood through two loves. The immediate occasion is the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, after which critics blamed Christians for weakening the old gods.
Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, published at Oxford by the Clarendon Press in four volumes between 1765 and 1769, grew out of the lectures he gave at Oxford from 1753 and as first Vinerian Professor from 1758. It was the first full account of English law written for educated readers rather than for practising lawyers, arranged as a reasoned system instead of a collection of cases.
Cyrano de Bergerac is Edmond Rostand's five-act verse play about a seventeenth-century Gascon soldier, poet and swordsman whose enormous nose convinces him that no woman could love him. Act I opens in 1640 at the Hôtel de Bourgogne theatre in Paris.
Modelled on Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, Hume's Dialogues are narrated by Pamphilus, a young man, to his friend Hermippus, and report a conversation at the house of Pamphilus's tutor, Cleanthes. Three speakers debate not whether God exists, which all profess to accept, but what can be known of God's nature by reason.
The Discourses and the Encheiridion preserve the teaching of Epictetus, a lame former slave who ran a school of Stoic philosophy at Nicopolis in western Greece in the early second century. Epictetus wrote nothing.
Francis of Assisi reaches modern popular culture through birds, wolves, poverty, brown robes, garden statues, animal blessings, Christmas cribs, and an almost ecological tenderness. The early sources are more demanding.
Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished in 731 at the monastery of Jarrow, tells how the peoples of Britain received the Christian faith. A dedication to King Ceolwulf of Northumbria explains that history offers good examples to imitate and bad ones to shun, and names his informants, chief among them Abbot Albinus of Canterbury and the priest Nothelm, who searched the papal archives in Rome.
Effi Briest opens at Hohen-Cremmen, the Brandenburg estate of the Briest family, where seventeen-year-old Effi, playful and still half a child, is suddenly engaged to Baron Geert von Innstetten, a thirty-eight-year-old district administrator who long ago courted her mother. Effi accepts, partly from ambition and partly from a wish for excitement, and the couple marry and move to Kessin, a small Baltic resort town in Pomerania.
Bacon's Essays, or Counsels, Civil and Moral, grew over almost thirty years from a slim volume of ten pieces in 1597 to fifty-eight in the final edition of 1625, the text used here. Bacon borrowed the name essay from Montaigne, but where Montaigne explored himself at leisure, Bacon compressed observation into dense, balanced sentences meant for men of business and government.
Evangelium Vitae is John Paul II's 1995 encyclical on the dignity and inviolability of human life. It opens with biblical meditation, especially the story of Cain and Abel, and then develops a moral analysis of what the pope calls threats to life in modern law, medicine, family life, and political culture.
Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry is an anthology of Irish fairy lore, ghost stories, legends and comic tales chosen and introduced by the young W. B. Yeats. Rather than collecting stories himself, Yeats gathered the best versions already printed by nineteenth-century Irish writers and folklorists: Thomas Crofton Croker, William Carleton, Samuel Lover, Patrick Kennedy, Lady Wilde, Letitia Maclintock, Douglas Hyde and others, along with poems by William Allingham, Samuel Ferguson, Edward Walsh and Yeats himself.
This selection gathers fourteen of Hans Christian Andersen's most loved fairy tales, written between 1835 and 1845, in the English versions revised and partly newly translated by the Scottish scholar W. A. Craigie for Oxford University Press in 1914. In The Tinder-Box a returning soldier fetches a magic tinder-box from a hollow tree for a witch, keeps it, and with the help of three dogs with enormous eyes wins a princess and a kingdom.
Lou Gehrig's farewell speech was delivered at Yankee Stadium on 4 July 1939, Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day, between the games of a doubleheader against the Washington Senators. Two months earlier Gehrig, whose strength had been failing for a season, had taken himself out of the lineup in Detroit, ending his streak of 2,130 consecutive games.
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners is John Bunyan's account of his own conversion, written in the Bedford county jail and first published in 1666. It is told in 339 numbered paragraphs, opened by a preface addressed to the members of his congregation, whom he calls his children in the faith, and to whom he sends what he calls honey taken from the carcase of a lion.
Great Expectations is the first-person story of Philip Pirrip, called Pip, an orphan brought up by hand by his harsh elder sister and her gentle husband Joe Gargery, the village blacksmith on the Kent marshes. On Christmas Eve, in the churchyard where his parents lie, an escaped convict seizes Pip and makes him bring a file and food; Pip steals both from his sister's house, and the convict is later recaptured struggling with another fugitive.
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.
Household Stories is Lucy Crane's English translation of fifty-two tales chosen from the Brothers Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmärchen, first published in London by Macmillan in 1882 with pictures by her brother Walter Crane; the library text follows a later reprint and omits the illustrations. The selection mixes the most famous wonder tales with comic stories, animal fables and short nursery pieces.
Jane Eyre is the life story, told by Jane herself, of an orphan girl who grows into a governess and finally a wife, keeping her conscience and her self-respect through poverty, temptation and grief. At ten Jane lives at Gateshead Hall with her aunt by marriage, Mrs. Reed, who resents her, and her bullying cousin John.
Johnny Tremain follows a Boston apprentice from the summer of 1773 to the first day of the American Revolution in April 1775. Johnny, fourteen, is the most gifted of the three apprentices in the silversmith shop of old Ephraim Lapham, a pious man who warns him about pride by having him read Leviticus 26:19; the next two chapters take their titles from that verse.
Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's tragedy of the assassination of 44 BC, begins as Rome celebrates Caesar's triumph over the sons of Pompey. The tribunes rebuke the fickle crowd, a soothsayer warns Caesar to beware the Ides of March, and Caesar is offered a crown three times by Mark Antony and refuses it, then falls in a fit of the falling sickness.
Charcot's lectures show clinical neurology becoming a public method: observe signs, localize lesions, correlate symptoms with anatomy, and teach by cases. The English volumes gather Salpetriere lectures on spinal cord disease, paralysis, tremor, sclerosis, locomotor ataxia, hysteria, epilepsy, and related nervous disorders.
Cedric Errol is a curly-haired American boy of seven, living with his widowed mother in a modest side street of New York. He calls her Dearest, as his father did, and his best friends are Mr. Hobbs, the corner grocer who rails against earls as grasping tyrants, and Dick Tipton, a bootblack.
Lord of the Flies follows a party of British schoolboys, aged roughly six to twelve, whose aeroplane is shot down over a tropical island during an unnamed atomic war. No adult survives.
Moby-Dick is Herman Melville's novel of the whaling voyage of the Pequod and of her captain's pursuit of a great white sperm whale. School Launch points readers to parent-chosen selections, while the library provides the complete text of the Etymology, Extracts, one hundred thirty-five chapters and Epilogue for those who want the whole voyage.
Mother Courage and Her Children follows Anna Fierling, a canteen woman nicknamed Mother Courage, who hauls her covered wagon behind the armies of the Thirty Years' War selling food, drink, boots and belts to soldiers. The play covers twelve years, from 1624 to 1636, in twelve scenes, each introduced by a written caption that tells the audience in advance what will happen.
My Ántonia is presented as a memoir written by Jim Burden, a successful New York railroad lawyer, about a Bohemian girl he knew in his Nebraska childhood; a brief introduction by an unnamed friend frames his manuscript. Orphaned at ten, Jim travels from Virginia to live with his grandparents on the prairie near the town of Black Hawk.
Of Mice and Men takes place over a few days on a ranch near Soledad in California's Salinas Valley during the Depression. George Milton, small and sharp, and Lennie Small, a huge, immensely strong man with an intellectual disability and the mind of a child, are itinerant ranch hands who travel together, unusual among solitary migrant workers.
This paired entry brings together Alan Turing's 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem and his 1950 essay Computing Machinery and Intelligence. The first paper attacks a precise mathematical problem: what does it mean for a number or function to be computable?
Milton's sonnet on his blindness is a fourteen-line argument between a complaining heart and a corrective voice. It was written in the early 1650s, after Milton, then in his forties and serving the Commonwealth government, had lost his sight entirely.
Paradise Lost is John Milton's epic in twelve books of blank verse on the fall of man, written, as the opening invocation says, to assert Eternal Providence and justify the ways of God to men. It begins in the middle of things.
Persian Letters is an epistolary novel made up of letters exchanged between two Persian noblemen travelling in Europe, Usbek and his younger companion Rica, and their friends, servants and wives back home in Isfahan. The letters run from 1711 to 1720, covering the last years of Louis XIV, the Regency and the collapse of John Law's financial system.
Persuasion is Austen's last completed novel, a story of second chances. Anne Elliot is the overlooked middle daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, a vain and extravagant baronet of Kellynch Hall in Somerset.
Pollyanna Whittier, eleven years old, is the orphaned daughter of a poor missionary minister in the American West. Her mother, Jennie, had long ago disappointed her proud New England family by marrying the young minister instead of a wealthy suitor.
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.
Richard III follows Richard, Duke of Gloucester, youngest brother of the Yorkist King Edward IV, from his first soliloquy to his death at Bosworth Field in 1485. The Wars of the Roses are over and peace has come, but Richard, born misshapen and unfit for courtship, tells the audience he has determined to prove a villain and win the crown.
Ruth is Gaskell's novel about a 'fallen woman', written to challenge the Victorian assumption that an unmarried mother and her child were beyond redemption. Ruth Hilton is a beautiful, innocent orphan of fifteen, apprenticed to a dressmaker, Mrs Mason, in a country town, where she works long hours in a cold workroom.
The Second Treatise, subtitled 'An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government', is the constructive half of Locke's Two Treatises. The First Treatise demolishes Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, which derived the absolute power of kings from Adam's fatherly dominion.
St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles traces a murder into a medical archive. Becket's political story is familiar: the brilliant royal chancellor becomes archbishop of Canterbury, clashes with Henry II over ecclesiastical liberty and royal jurisdiction, goes into exile, returns under tense compromise, and is killed in the cathedral on 29 December 1170 by knights acting in the atmosphere of the king's fury.
Testament of Youth is Vera Brittain's memoir of the years 1900 to 1925, centred on the First World War, written to show what the war meant to a generation of women. It begins with her provincial girlhood in Buxton, where she chafes against the expectations placed on a middle-class daughter, educates herself, and fights to be allowed to sit the entrance examination for Oxford.
In a Tuscan village the carpenter Mastro Cherry finds a log that cries out when he strikes it, and gladly hands it to his poor friend Geppetto, who carves it into a marionette and names him Pinocchio. The puppet runs off before his feet are finished, gets Geppetto taken to jail, and kills the Talking Cricket with a hammer when it warns him that disobedient boys come to grief.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collects the first twelve short stories about the consulting detective of 221B Baker Street, each narrated by his friend Dr. John Watson. In A Scandal in Bohemia the King of Bohemia hires Holmes to recover a compromising photograph from the singer Irene Adler; Holmes, disguised first as a groom and then as a clergyman, tricks her into revealing its hiding place, but she sees through him and escapes with her new husband, leaving Holmes the admiring loser.
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 Alexiad is the life and reign of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos (ruled 1081–1118), written by his daughter Anna in fifteen books. In her preface Anna introduces herself as born in the purple and trained in Aristotle and Plato, explains that her husband, the Caesar Nikephoros Bryennios, had begun a history of her father but died of an illness brought home from campaign, and promises to praise or blame as the facts require.
The Arabian Nights Entertainments is Andrew Lang's 1898 selection of the Thousand and One Nights for children, retold in English from Antoine Galland's early eighteenth-century French version. The frame story comes first.
The Argonautica is the one full Greek epic of the voyage of the Argo that survives from antiquity, composed in four books of dactylic hexameter by the Alexandrian scholar-poet Apollonius of Rhodes in the third century BC. King Pelias of Iolcus, warned by an oracle to beware a man wearing one sandal, sees Jason arrive having lost a sandal in the river Anaurus, and sends him to fetch the golden fleece from Colchis at the far end of the Black Sea.
The Athenian Constitution (Athenaion Politeia) is a short treatise in two parts on the government of Athens, written in the 330s or 320s BC by Aristotle or by a member of his school as one of the 158 constitutions the Lyceum is said to have collected. It was known only from quotations until a papyrus roll, copied on the back of farm accounts from Roman Egypt, was acquired by the British Museum and identified by Frederic G. Kenyon, who published the text and his translation in 1891.
The Black Arrow is set in England during the Wars of the Roses, when York and Lancaster fought for the crown and lesser lords changed sides as fortune moved. Richard Shelton, called Dick, is the young ward of Sir Daniel Brackley, a grasping knight who holds the Moat House at Tunstall and has grown rich by seizing other men's lands.
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.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a vast novel of injustice and revenge. In 1815 Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseilles, returns from a voyage on which he carried a letter from Napoleon's island of Elba as a dying captain requested.
The Door in the Wall is set in England in the fourteenth century, in the reign of Edward III, during the years of the Black Death. Robin, the ten-year-old son of the knight Sir John de Bureford and his wife Lady Maud, has been raised to expect the life of a nobleman's son: he is to go as a page to the household of Sir Peter de Lindsay, learn the arts of chivalry and one day become a knight like his father.
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 Founding Documents gathers the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights as one civic anthology. The Declaration, adopted by the Continental Congress in July 1776, announces separation from Britain by appealing to the laws of nature and of nature’s God, to the self-evident truths that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, and to government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed.
The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles is Padraic Colum's retelling for young readers of the voyage of the Argo, with many other Greek myths woven into it as stories told by the heroes on the way. It was published in New York by Macmillan in 1921, with illustrations by Willy Pogány, and was named a Newbery Honor book in 1922.
This entry gathers the Golden Legend chapters and adjacent medieval traditions behind saints whose images still move through calendars, holidays, icons, hospitals, medals, advertising, and folklore. Jacobus de Voragine did not write critical biography in the modern sense.
The Hiding Place is Corrie ten Boom's memoir, written with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, of her family's life in Haarlem, their work hiding Jews during the German occupation of the Netherlands, and her imprisonment with her sister Betsie in Nazi prisons and camps. It opens in January 1937 with the hundredth anniversary of the watch shop in the narrow old house called the Beje, where Corrie, then in her forties and unmarried, lives with her father Casper and her older sister Betsie.
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.
The History of the Church tells the story of Christianity from the apostles to Eusebius’ own fourth-century world, where persecution gives way to imperial favor. Eusebius organizes the past through succession: bishops, teachers, heresies, writings, persecutions and martyrs.
The Innocence of Father Brown collects the first twelve stories about Father Brown, a short, round-faced Roman Catholic priest from Essex with a shabby umbrella and an armful of brown-paper parcels, who solves crimes by understanding the sinners who commit them. In "The Blue Cross" Aristide Valentin, head of the Paris police, lands at Harwich hunting the giant French thief Flambeau and follows a trail of absurdities across London: salt in a sugar bowl, soup thrown at a wall, a window broken and paid for in advance, price labels swapped on a fruit stall.
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 Life of Samuel Johnson is James Boswell's account of the poet, essayist, critic and lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), arranged year by year and built largely from conversations Boswell wrote down over twenty-one years of friendship. It opens with Johnson's birth in Lichfield, the son of a bookseller, his childhood scrofula, for which his mother took him to London to be touched by Queen Anne, and his schooling.
The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus is the spiritual autobiography that the Carmelite nun Teresa of Avila wrote at the command of her confessors, so that they could judge whether the extraordinary graces she reported came from God. It follows her from childhood in Avila to the founding of the convent of St. Joseph in 1562, and in its middle chapters becomes a treatise on prayer.
The Metamorphosis is a novella in three parts about Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman in cloth who supports his parents and his seventeen-year-old sister Grete, and who wakes one morning in his room to find that he has been changed into a monstrous insect. Kafka tells the story plainly, in the third person and almost entirely from Gregor's point of view, never explaining the transformation and never letting it become a dream.
The Natural History of Selborne is a book of letters about one Hampshire parish, written by its curate over about twenty years to two learned correspondents: the zoologist Thomas Pennant and the lawyer and antiquary Daines Barrington. White opens with the place itself: its position among the chalk downs and sandy heaths of east Hampshire, its soils, springs and beech hanger, the deep hollow lanes worn into the rock, the forest of Wolmer and its decayed deer.
The Nibelungenlied is a medieval German epic of courtship, deception, insult and catastrophic revenge. Its first half centers on Siegfried, prince of Xanten, who comes to Worms hoping to win Kriemhild, sister of the Burgundian kings Gunther, Gernot and Giselher.
The Old Man and the Sea follows Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without taking a fish, as he sails far into the Gulf Stream and hooks a marlin larger than his skiff. Hemingway narrows the plot until skill, endurance, hunger, memory, prayer, and pain are concentrated in one body at sea.
The Persian Expedition, known in Greek as the Anabasis or 'march up-country', is Xenophon's account of the campaign of 401–399 BCE in which about ten thousand Greek mercenaries followed Cyrus the Younger into Mesopotamia and then fought their way home. Cyrus, younger son of Darius II, gathers an army in Sardis on the pretext of a war against Pisidian raiders, while his real aim is to unseat his brother, King Artaxerxes II.
The narrator, presenting himself as a researcher, announces that the Opera ghost really existed and that he has proved it from archives, the memories of old employees and the papers of a mysterious Persian. In the 1880s the ballet girls of the Paris Opera whisper about a ghost in evening dress with a death's head; the scene-shifter Joseph Buquet, who claims to have seen him, is found hanged in the third cellar.
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 Portable Faulkner is not a single work in the usual sense but an edited map of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction. Malcolm Cowley arranged stories, novel excerpts, genealogical material and commentary so that readers could see Faulkner's invented county as one continuous historical field.
The Practice of the Presence of God gathers four conversations with, and fifteen letters by, Brother Lawrence, a lay brother of the Discalced Carmelites in Paris who spent his days in the friary kitchen. The conversations were written down by a visitor, traditionally identified as Joseph de Beaufort, who first met him on 3 August 1666.
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 Prussian Officer and Other Stories, published by Duckworth in London in late 1914, is D. H. Lawrence's first collection of short fiction: twelve stories, most of them revised from magazine versions written between about 1907 and 1914. Two are set among German soldiers, the rest in the colliery villages and farms of the English Midlands where Lawrence grew up.
The Real Mother Goose (1916) gathers the nursery rhymes English-speaking children have sung for centuries—Humpty Dumpty, Jack and Jill, Old Mother Goose, Little Bo-Peep, and scores of others—into one illustrated volume by Blanche Fisher Wright. The rhymes themselves are traditional: short, strongly metered verses that stick in the ear and the memory.
The Secret Garden begins in imperial India, where Mary Lennox is a sickly, spoiled and emotionally neglected child. A cholera outbreak kills her parents and household, and Mary is sent to Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire to live with her reclusive uncle Archibald Craven.
The Story of My Life is Helen Keller's account of her first twenty-two years, written while she was a student at Radcliffe College. She begins at Ivy Green, the family home in Tuscumbia, Alabama, where she was born on June 27, 1880.
The Theban Plays collects Sophocles’ tragedies about Oedipus and his children: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. They were not written as a trilogy, but together they form the most influential family disaster in Western drama.
The Theory of the Leisure Class, published by Macmillan in New York in 1899, is Thorstein Veblen's study of how wealth, status and consumption shape economic life and taste. Written while he taught at the University of Chicago, during the Gilded Age of American fortunes, it treats the habits of the rich not as personal vices but as institutions with a long evolutionary history, and it describes them in a dry, ironic scientific vocabulary that made the book famous.
The Travels of Ibn Battuta is the account of a Moroccan legal scholar who left Tangier in June 1325, aged twenty-one, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and did not settle at home again until 1349. Its Arabic title, given by its editor Ibn Juzayy, means A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling; it is usually called simply the Rihla, the Journey.
The Trial follows Josef K., a respected chief clerk at a large bank in an unnamed city, from the morning of his thirtieth birthday, when two warders appear in his lodgings and tell him he is under arrest, to the eve of his thirty-first, when two men in frock coats lead him to a quarry and kill him. Neither K. nor the reader ever learns what he is accused of or what law he has broken.
This volume gathers three Euripides plays about what the Trojan War left behind: The Trojan Women and Iphigenia in Tauris in Gilbert Murray's rhyming verse, and Hecuba in Michael Wodhull's blank verse of 1782. The Trojan Women opens on the smoking ruins of Troy.
On a camping trip in the Canadian woods, eleven-year-old Sam Beaver, a Montana rancher's son who loves wild things and keeps a journal that ends each night with a question, discovers a pair of trumpeter swans nesting on a hidden pond. He keeps their secret, and when a fox creeps up on the sitting pen he drives it off with a stick.
The Witch of Blackbird Pond is a historical novel in twenty-one chapters set in Connecticut Colony in 1687 and 1688. Katherine Tyler, called Kit, is sixteen and has grown up in freedom and comfort on her grandfather's plantation in Barbados.
Dorothy lives on the grey Kansas prairie with her Uncle Henry, her Aunt Em and her little black dog Toto. When a cyclone strikes, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry reach the cellar, but Dorothy runs back for Toto, and the house is carried away with the two of them inside.
Theodore Roosevelt's Autobiography, written at Sagamore Hill in 1913, is less a full life than a series of chapters on the work and convictions of a public man. A foreword dated 1 October 1913 calls for joining practical efficiency with lofty idealism.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a philosophical prose-poem in four parts, written in the cadences of Luther's Bible. Its hero borrows the name of the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, whom Nietzsche chose because the first moralist should be the one to overturn morality.
To Kill a Mockingbird is narrated by Jean Louise Finch, called Scout, looking back as an adult on three years of her childhood, from the summer she was nearly six, in Maycomb, a small, poor county seat in Alabama during the Depression of the 1930s. She lives with her older brother Jem, their widowed father Atticus, a lawyer and state legislator, and Calpurnia, the Black cook who helps raise them.
Treasure Island is narrated mainly by Jim Hawkins, the son of an innkeeper whose ordinary life is transformed when the old pirate Billy Bones comes to the Admiral Benbow inn. Bones brings a sea chest, a map and danger in the form of former shipmates, including Black Dog and the blind beggar Pew.
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.
Lucy Snowe tells her own story, years after the events, in a reserved voice that often withholds what she feels and sometimes what she knows. As a girl she stays with her godmother Mrs. Bretton in the old town of Bretton, where she watches the tiny, intense Paulina Home attach herself to Mrs. Bretton's teenage son Graham.
Waiting for Godot is a play in two acts by Samuel Beckett, written in French as En attendant Godot between late 1948 and early 1949, published by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1952, and first staged at the small Théâtre de Babylone in Paris on 5 January 1953, directed by Roger Blin. Beckett's own English translation, subtitled a tragicomedy in two acts, was published by Grove Press in New York in 1954.
Passages
- A Burnt-Out Case, Early chapters (Part 1)
Dr Colin explains to Querry the meaning of a burnt-out case and describes the mutilations left after the disease has run its course.
- A Christmas Carol, Stave III
The Cratchit dinner and Tiny Tim's crutch and frail health; the spirit foresees his death if things remain unaltered.
- A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Grotesque households
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes disability, chronic illness, trauma, violence, family care, and the charged symbolism of bodily affliction
- All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapters I-II
Kemmerich in the field hospital after the amputation of his leg; the orderly refuses morphia; Kemmerich's death and the passing on of his boots.
- Anne of Green Gables, Chapter XXXVIII
Marilla's headaches and failing eyes lead an oculist to warn of blindness unless she gives up reading and sewing.
- Billy Budd and Other Stories, Billy Budd, early chapters
Billy's 'organic hesitancy', a stutter that seizes him under strong emotion.
- Black Beauty, Part II
Reuben Smith rides drunk, Beauty falls and breaks his knees, Smith is killed; Beauty is left scarred and devalued.
- Bleak House, Chapters XXXI and XXXV
Esther nurses Charley through the fever, falls ill herself, loses her sight for a time, and recovers with a changed face.
- Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, Chapter 15, Eunuchs
Eunuchs as court officials, churchmen and guardians, and how castration shaped their status.
- Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, Chapter 20, Basil II
The reported mass blinding of Bulgarian captives and the political use of mutilation.
- Candide: Or Optimism, Ch. 4
Candide finds Pangloss disfigured by syphilis; Pangloss explains the genealogy of the disease and its 'necessity'.
- Candide: Or Optimism, Ch. 19
The enslaved man in Surinam missing a hand and a leg as punishment.
- Cannery Row, Chapters on Frankie
Frankie's devotion to Doc, his theft of a clock as a gift and his commitment to an institution.
- Chronicle of the Fourth Crusade and the Conquest of Constantinople, The Doge and a Number of Venetians Take the Cross
Description of Dandolo's sight lost through a wound in the head; translator's note on the uncertainty.
- Chronicle of the Fourth Crusade and the Conquest of Constantinople, Message of Alexius, the Son of Isaac
The blinding of Emperor Isaac by his brother.
- Chronographia, Reign of Michael V
The blinding of the deposed emperor and his uncle after the rising of 1042.
- City of God, Book 22
Resurrection raises questions of bodily restoration, wounds, disabilities and identity.
- Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book I, ch. 8 (eighteenth branch of the king's ordinary revenue)
Idiots and natural fools distinguished from lunatics; the writ de idiota inquirendo and the jury test of a person's understanding.
- Cyrano de Bergerac, Act 1, Scenes 4-5
The nose tirade answers Valvert's insult; afterwards Cyrano tells Le Bret how his profile on a wall shames him and why he will not weep.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 11
Four circumstances behind natural evil: pain as motive, general laws, frugal endowment of animals, inaccurate workmanship of nature (including excess or deficiency of humours and disease).
- Discourses (selection) and Encheiridion, Encheiridion, chs. IX and XI
Disease and lameness as impediments to the body but not the will; the discipline of saying of the dead that they have been restored.
- Discourses (selection) and Encheiridion, Long's biographical note
Long weighs the story that Epictetus was lamed by his master against Simplicius's report that he was weak and lame from early life.
- Early Franciscan Sources, Life of St. Francis, Ch. XVII
The stigmata at La Verna are the major medieval case of sanctity written onto the body.
- Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book V, Chapter II
Bishop John teaches a mute youth to speak and has a physician treat his scalp.
- Effi Briest, Kessin chapters
Friendship with the hunchbacked apothecary Gieshübler.
- Essays, Essays XLII–XLIV, Of Youth and Age, Of Beauty, Of Deformity
Stages of life and bodily appearance as influences on character; deformity as a spur to boldness and ambition.
- Evangelium Vitae, Medicine and law
Evangelium Vitae gives this tag concrete force through this is one of the batch's most explicit medical-ethics texts, addressing abortion, euthanasia, suffering, conscience, and care for the vulnerable
- Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, Changelings, introduction
Yeats explains the belief that fairies carry off healthy children and leave sickly substitutes that pine away, and the folk tests used to detect them.
- Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, The Trooping Fairies, The Legend of Knockgrafton
The hunchback Lusmore, shunned by neighbors, is freed of his hump by the fairies; the greedy Jack Madden is given a second.
- Fairy Tales (Selection), The Hardy Tin Soldier
A soldier cast with one leg for lack of tin stands as firmly as the others and endures every danger.
- Fairy Tales (Selection), The Red Shoes
At Karen's own plea the executioner removes her dancing feet and makes her wooden feet and crutches; she lives on in service and repentance.
- Farewell to Baseball ("The Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth"), Family section
He thanks his wife for strength and courage, an early public tribute to a caregiver of a patient with a progressive neurological disease.
- Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, §§327-328
The grief of separation from his wife and children in prison and his fear for his blind daughter.
- Great Expectations, Chapter XVI
Mrs Joe's condition after the blow from the leg-iron: impaired senses and memory, and the signs she traces on a slate.
- 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.
- History of the Wars, Books I-II (The Persian War), Book I, ch. 11
Persian custom barring a man with a bodily defect, such as the one-eyed Zames, from the throne.
- Household Stories (Grimm's Fairy Tales), Rapunzel
The expectant mother pines and grows pale with longing for rampion; later the prince loses his sight among thorns and recovers it when Rapunzel's tears touch his eyes.
- Jane Eyre, Chapters XXVIII and XXXVI-XXXVII
Jane's starvation on the moors; the account of the fire, Bertha's death, the amputation of Rochester's hand and his blindness, and his partial recovery of sight.
- Johnny Tremain, Chapter 2
The cracked crucible, the burn, and Gran' Hopper's treatment, after which the thumb heals fused to the palm.
- Johnny Tremain, Chapter 3
Johnny's shame at his hand, his rejection by employers and his hidden despair.
- Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2
Casca reports that Caesar fell down in the market-place and foamed at the mouth; Brutus says he has the falling sickness. Caesar also tells Antony he is deaf in one ear.
- Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, Neurological lectures
The lectures use clinical signs, lesion localization, and pathology to classify disorders of movement and sensation.
- Little Lord Fauntleroy, Chapter VIII
Cedric gives up his pony to the lame boy Hartle and later brings him a pair of crutches in the Earl's name.
- Lord of the Flies, Chapter 1
Piggy explains his asthma and need for glasses; Simon faints during the choir's march across the hot sand.
- Moby-Dick, Chapter 41
The history of Ahab's injury and the growth of his monomania during the long voyage home.
- Moby-Dick, Chapter 100
The Samuel Enderby's Captain Boomer and Dr Bunger describe the loss of his arm to Moby Dick.
- Moby-Dick, Chapter 106
Ahab's ivory leg is splintered and its injury to him described.
- Mother Courage and Her Children, Scene 6
Kattrin returns with a wound over the eye that will leave her disfigured.
- My Ántonia, Book II
The blind Black pianist Samson d'Arnault performs at the hotel.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 1
George describes the incident at Weed and Lennie's compulsion to stroke soft things; he rehearses what Lennie must do if in trouble.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 4
Crooks rubs liniment into his crooked back in his solitary room.
- On Computable Numbers and Computing Machinery, 1950 essay, objections about nervous systems and disability
Turing's survey of objections shows how embodiment and impairment enter debates about intelligence.
- On His Blindness (Sonnet XIX), Lines 1-8
The speaker's anxiety that loss of sight has made his gift useless and exposed him to rebuke.
- Paradise Lost, Book III
The invocation to holy Light laments the poet's blindness and asks for inward sight.
- Persian Letters, Early seraglio letters (c. Letters 9 and following)
The Chief Eunuch describes his castration and his resentment of the women he guards.
- Persuasion, Vol. II, Ch. 5
Anne visits Mrs Smith, disabled by illness and attended by Nurse Rooke, a sick-nurse of the Bath lodging-house world.
- Pollyanna, Chapters XXIII-XXVI
The motor-car accident, Miss Polly's account to Pendleton of an injury to the spine with paralysis from the hips down, and the specialist Dr. Mead's consultation.
- Pollyanna, Chapters XXXI-XXXII
Pollyanna is sent to a sanitarium run by a friend of Dr. Chilton and, after nearly ten months, writes that she has walked.
- Posterior Analytics and Physics, Posterior Analytics I.18 (81a–b)
Loss of any sense entails loss of a corresponding portion of knowledge, since universals are grasped by induction from perception.
- Posterior Analytics and Physics, Physics II.8 (199a–b)
The doctor who pours out the wrong dose and the malformations of early creatures as failures of purposive effort; nature compared to a doctor doctoring himself.
- Richard III, Act 1, Scene 1
Richard's opening soliloquy describes his deformity and premature birth; Hastings reports that the king is sickly and his physicians fear for him.
- Richard III, Act 3, Scene 4
Richard bares his arm before the council and claims it was withered by witchcraft, condemning Hastings.
- Ruth, Ch. 8
Abandoned, Ruth runs toward a pool to drown herself and is stopped by Benson.
- Second Treatise of Government, Ch. VI, §§57–61
Freedom tied to the age of reason; guardians must 'understand for' those without understanding; lunatics, 'ideots' and madmen remain under others' government.
- St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles, Benedict and William miracle collections
The collections record claims involving fever, blindness, paralysis, seizures, madness, leprosy, wounds, and accidents with unusually concrete social detail.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Victor Richardson)
Victor, blinded by a wound to the head, is visited in a London hospital before dying of his injuries.
- The Adventures of Pinocchio, Chapters 12 and 36
The Fox and the Cat feign lameness and blindness to win sympathy; at the end the Cat has truly lost his sight and the starving Fox has sold his own tail for food.
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Man with the Twisted Lip
The beggar Hugh Boone's scarred, drawn-up lip, which proves to be greasepaint and disguise worn by Neville St. Clair to draw alms.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Agesilaus 2–3
Agesilaus' lameness and the oracle warning Sparta against a 'lame kingship'.
- The Alexiad, Book XV, the Orphanage
The charitable city for orphans, the aged, the blind and the lame, with servants assigned to the disabled.
- The Arabian Nights Entertainments, The Little Hunchback
The hunchback chokes on a fishbone; a Jewish doctor, a purveyor and a broker each believe they have killed him until the barber revives him.
- The Arabian Nights Entertainments, The Story of the Blind Baba-Abdalla
A dervish's ointment shows hidden treasure when applied to one eye but blinds the greedy Baba-Abdalla when applied to the other.
- The Argonautica, Book II, Phineus and the Harpies
The blind old prophet, starved by the Harpies, totters out to meet the heroes and is fed once the sons of Boreas drive the birds away.
- The Athenian Constitution, Part 49
The Council examines disabled paupers, who receive a state allowance of two obols a day.
- The Black Arrow, Book V, Chapter I
Dick meets the young Duke of Gloucester, slightly deformed with one shoulder higher than the other, fighting off assailants.
- The Conquest of Gaul, Book VIII.44
Defenders of Uxellodunum have their hands cut off; the captive Drappes starves himself to death.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Paris section (Noirtier chapters)
Noirtier, paralysed and speechless, makes his will and his wishes known through eye signals.
- The Door in the Wall, Opening chapters
Robin falls ill and loses the use of his legs as plague spreads through London and his servants abandon the house.
- The Door in the Wall, St. Mark's hospice chapters
Brother Luke nurses Robin and sets him to whittling, reading and swimming to restore strength and hope.
- The Door in the Wall, Siege of Lindsay
Robin, on crutches, swims the river and crosses enemy lines to bring help.
- The Eagle of the Ninth, Chapters IV–V
Marcus is wounded under the chariot charge at Isca and learns that the leg will keep him from serving again.
- The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles, Part I, VII: King Phineus
The blind, aged king is starved by the Harpies, who snatch or foul his food until the sons of the North Wind drive them off.
- The Golden Legend: Popular Saints, Life of St. Lucy
Lucy's later eye patronage and martyrdom narratives make her important for the history of blindness devotion and ocular symbolism.
- 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 the Church, Books 8–9, Great Persecution
Executions, mutilations, mines and prisons under Diocletian dominate the late narrative.
- The Innocence of Father Brown, The Eye of Apollo, conclusion
Brown explains Pauline Stacey's hereditary failing sight, aggravated by sun-gazing, and how her blindness was used to kill her.
- The Institutes of Justinian, Book I, Title 23.3-4
Curators appointed for lunatics and prodigals, and for persons of weak mind, the deaf, the dumb and those with chronic disease.
- The Institutes of Justinian, Book II, Title 12.1-3
Lunatics cannot make wills except in a lucid interval; the rules for the deaf and dumb, and for those who lose hearing or speech through illness.
- The Institutes of Justinian, Book III, Title 19.7-8
The dumb and the stone-deaf cannot make a stipulation, and a lunatic cannot make any contract because he does not understand what he is doing.
- The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1709-1728 (early life)
Johnson's scrofula, his impaired eye, and the journey to London to be touched by Queen Anne on Sir John Floyer's advice.
- The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1737-1739 (Pope's note)
Pope's note on Johnson's convulsive infirmity and Boswell's comparison of it with Sydenham's description of St. Vitus's dance.
- The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, Chapter VI
Years of paralysis and pain endured with patience, and her recovery, which she credits to St. Joseph.
- The Metamorphosis, Part I
Gregor's first attempts to control an unfamiliar body, and his injury on the door frame when his father forces him back.
- The Natural History of Selborne, To Barrington, Letter XXVII
A village boy of very limited understanding spent summers catching bees and sucking their honey-bags, torpid by the fire in winter.
- The Nibelungenlied, Aventiure 3
Siegfried's dragon-blood invulnerability leaves one concealed vulnerable spot, making the hero's body both magical and anatomically fragile.
- The Old Man and the Sea, The sharks
The Old Man and the Sea gives this tag concrete force through its medical lens is practical and bodily: age, cramps, hand wounds, exhaustion, starvation, pain tolerance, and the dignity of care between santiago and manolin
- The Persian Expedition, Book IV, Chapter V
The Armenian snows: deep drifts, a north wind, men dying overnight without fire or food, hunger-faintness, snow-blindness and frostbitten toes, with practical remedies.
- The Phantom of the Opera, Chapter I
Buquet's description of the ghost's skeletal face and the discovery of Buquet hanged in the cellar.
- The Phantom of the Opera, Chapter XII
Christine's account of unmasking Erik and his despairing reaction.
- The Phantom of the Opera, Epilogue
Erik's childhood rejection by his parents and exhibition at fairs as a living corpse.
- The Poetic Edda, Hovamol, stanzas 68-71
Sayings on health, sickness and the usefulness of the maimed: the lame man rides, the handless herds, the deaf fight.
- The Portable Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury selections
Benjy's sensory narrative, Caddy's absence and Quentin's breakdown foreground disability, grief, time disturbance and suicidal despair.
- The Practice of the Presence of God, Second Conversation
Sent to buy wine though lame, he moves about the boat by rolling over the casks.
- The Prose Edda, Gylfaginning XXV and XXXIV
Tyr loses his hand in the Fenris-Wolf's jaws when the gods bind the wolf with Gleipnir.
- The Real Mother Goose, Jack and Jill
Jack breaks his crown in the fall down the hill.
- The Secret Garden, Colin's room
Colin's confinement, fear of deformity and expectation of death show hypochondriacal and disability-anxiety themes.
- The Story of My Life, Part I, Chapter I
The fever in her second year, the doctor's verdict, and her confused memory of turning her hot, dry eyes from the light.
- The Story of My Life, Part I, Chapter III
The visit to the oculist Dr. Chisholm in Baltimore and to Dr. Bell in Washington.
- The Story of My Life, Part I, Chapter XIII
Learning to speak in 1890 by feeling the position of Sarah Fuller's tongue and lips.
- The Story of My Life, Part III, Chapter IV
Macy and Sullivan on how Keller's speech was taught and how she reads lips with her fingers.
- The Theban Plays, Oedipus the King, recognition
Jocasta dies by hanging and Oedipus blinds himself after discovering his birth and crimes.
- The Theban Plays, Oedipus at Colonus, opening
The blind, dependent Oedipus arrives guided by Antigone, reframing disability and exile.
- The Theory of the Leisure Class, Chapter Seven
The corset, high heels and long skirts analysed as impairments that display the wearer's freedom from labour.
- The Travels of Ibn Battuta, Chapter XV (history of Delhi)
Sultan Muizz al-Din Kaiqubad suffers a complaint that withers one side of his body and that the physicians cannot remedy.
- The Trial, Chapter 6
The advocate Huld receives K. and his uncle in bed, weakened by a heart complaint, while Leni nurses him.
- The Trojan Women and Other Plays, Hecuba, blinding of Polymestor
Polymestor stumbles from the tent blinded by the captive women and cries for vengeance on all-fours like a beast.
- The Trumpet of the Swan, Chapter 5: Louis
The parents discover that Louis has no voice, and the cob and pen discuss what this will mean for him.
- The Trumpet of the Swan, Chapter 7: School Days
Louis learns to read and write in Mrs. Hammerbotham's class and begins to communicate with a slate.
- The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Chapter 3 and following
Mercy Wood, lame from a fever in childhood, does her work seated and with a crutch; the household takes her lameness as part of life.
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Chapter V, The Rescue of the Tin Woodman
The Tin Woodman tells how his enchanted axe cut off his legs, arms and head in turn and a tinsmith replaced each part with tin.
- Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, Chapter I
Childhood asthma and the discovery of his nearsightedness and first spectacles.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, Discourse XLII: Redemption
Cripples and a hunchback ask Zarathustra to heal them; he replies with folk sayings on the costs of cure and describes 'reversed cripples' who are all ear or all eye.
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapters 18-19
Tom Robinson's crippled left arm, injured in a cotton gin, is shown to the court.
- Treasure Island, Long John Silver throughout
Silver's one-legged body is central to his social performance, underestimated mobility and pirate image.
- Two Lives of Charlemagne, Notker's authorial tradition
Notker's remembered identity as the Stammerer raises questions about disability, voice and monastic authorship.
- Villette, Ch. XV
The long vacation: Lucy alone with a disabled pupil, then wholly alone, sleepless and despairing, until she confesses at a church and collapses.
- Waiting for Godot, Act II
Estragon cannot recall the events of the day before; Pozzo returns blind and Lucky dumb, and both collapse.
Quotes
“Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.”
“My arteries began beating so violently that I not only felt their motion, but even heard it, particularly that of the carotids, attended by a loud noise in my ears”
“A defect in the bladder caused me, during my early years, to suffer an almost continual retention of urine”
“The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children”
“Compared with the Moral Law the State is a crutch instead of a limb, an automaton instead of a man”
“There was once a poor man who lived in the fertile glen of Aherlow, at the foot of the gloomy Galtee mountains, and he had a great hump on his back:”
“he stood as firmly upon his one leg as the others on their two”
“when I behold a lump of deformity and diseases, both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my patience”
Frequently cited
“When I consider how my light is spent Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,”
“So much the rather thou, celestial Light, Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate; there plant eyes”
“I can be glad I've HAD my legs, anyway”
“you never, never know how perfectly lovely legs are till you haven't got them”
“But induction is impossible for those who have not sense-perception.”
“Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time Into this breathing world scarce half made up”
“And so lunatics and ideots are never set free from the government of their parents”
“Accordingly he cut off the hands of those who had borne arms against him. Their lives he spared, that the punishment of their rebellion might be the more conspicuous”
Frequently cited
“Thou hast only to follow the wall far enough and there will be a door in it.”
“Then they drew out their swords and smote her through the throat, but nevertheless she died not anon, but preached to the people”
“he eventually told the doctors to form an opinion whether such cases of blindness and deformity could be remedied by human aid.”
“disabled soldiers, struck down with snow-blindness or with toes mortified by frostbite”
“His eyes are so deep that you can hardly see the fixed pupils. You just see two big black holes, as in a dead man's skull.”
“The lame rides a horse, | the handless is herdsman, The deaf in battle is bold; The blind man is better | than one that is burned, No good can come of a corpse.”
“The corset is, in economic theory, substantially a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently and obviously unfit for work.”
“I had no idea how beautiful the world was until I got those spectacles.”