The title play, A Doll's House (1879), takes place over three days of Christmas in the comfortable Norwegian home of Torvald Helmer, a newly appointed bank manager, and his wife Nora, whom he treats as a charming pet, calling her his songbird and squirrel. Years earlier, when Torvald was gravely ill and doctors advised a year in Italy, Nora secretly borrowed the money from the lawyer Krogstad, forging her dying father's signature as guarantor.
Medical tag
Fever Infection
Fevers (typhus, scarlet, 'brain', 'nervous' fever), infection, sepsis.
Works
A Little Princess opens on a foggy London day as seven-year-old Sara Crewe rides in a cab with her adoring father, Captain Ralph Crewe, a young officer who has brought her from India to Miss Minchin's Select Seminary for Young Ladies. Because her father is rich, Sara is given a private sitting room, a French maid, a pony and a doll named Emily whom she half believes can walk and talk when no one is looking.
A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia is one of the most important public-health and Black-authored documents of the early United States. Written by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones after the devastating yellow fever epidemic of 1793, it answers Mathew Carey's published accusations that Black Philadelphians profited from disaster or behaved badly during the crisis.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man follows Stephen Dedalus, a boy from a Catholic Dublin family, from his earliest memories to the eve of his departure from Ireland at about twenty. Its five chapters are written in a style that grows with him, from the nursery language of the opening, in which his father tells him a story about a moocow and baby tuckoo, to the abstract arguments and private diary of the last chapter.
A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, was published in London in 1843 in two volumes and went through eight editions in John Stuart Mill's lifetime, the last revised in 1872. Of its six books, the third, Of Induction, is the longest and the most influential; the library text gives that book alone, from an 1882 American printing of the eighth edition.
A Tale of Two Cities moves between London and Paris from 1775 to the Reign of Terror in 1793-94. In Book the First, Recalled to Life, Jarvis Lorry, a clerk of Tellson's Bank, travels by the Dover mail and sends back the cryptic message Recalled to life by the porter Jerry Cruncher.
Al-Razi's treatise, known in Arabic as Kitab al-Judari wa al-Hasba (The Book of Smallpox and Measles), is a short practical monograph in fourteen chapters by the leading physician of the Abbasid world. It is usually described as the earliest surviving work devoted to these diseases and the first to set out clearly how to tell them apart at the bedside.
Huckleberry Finn tells his own story in the speech of a half-schooled Missouri boy, some forty or fifty years before the book appeared. After the treasure found at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the Widow Douglas has taken Huck in to civilize him, while her sister Miss Watson drills him in manners and spelling.
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.
Apologia Pro Vita Sua is John Henry Newman's defence of his honesty, written in 1864 in reply to the novelist and clergyman Charles Kingsley, who had written in Macmillan's Magazine that truth for its own sake had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy and that Father Newman taught it need not be. After an exchange of letters and a pamphlet by Kingsley, Newman decided that the only adequate answer was a history of his own mind.
The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie is the steel manufacturer's own story of his life, written mostly in summers at a cottage in the Scottish Highlands after his retirement and left unfinished when the First World War began in August 1914. His widow, Louise Whitfield Carnegie, contributes a preface, and Professor John C. Van Dyke, who arranged the manuscript, adds an editor's note and footnotes; the book appeared in 1920, the year after Carnegie's death.
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.
Botchan is a comic first-person novel about a hot-tempered, stubbornly honest young man from Tokyo who spends a few months teaching mathematics in a provincial middle school and cannot bear the scheming he finds there. The narrator is never named; the old family servant Kiyo calls him Botchan, roughly 'young master', which this translation renders as Master Darling.
Carmilla is a Gothic vampire novella narrated by Laura, the nineteen-year-old daughter of an Englishman who retired from the Austrian service and bought a lonely castle in the forests of Styria. A brief prologue presents the story as a case from the papers of the physician Doctor Hesselius and notes that its narrator has since died.
The Confessions is a prayer in thirteen books addressed to God, in which Augustine recounts his life up to his mother's death and then turns to philosophical reflection on memory, time and the creation narrative of Genesis. Books I to IX are autobiographical.
Crime and Punishment follows Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished former student in St. Petersburg, as he murders the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta while testing an idea about extraordinary persons who may step over ordinary law. Dostoevsky makes the crime happen early, so the central drama becomes not detection alone but the decomposition of Raskolnikov's theory inside his body, mind, and relationships.
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.
Daisy Miller: A Study is told in close third person through Frederick Winterbourne, a young American who has lived most of his life in Geneva and has grown, in his aunt's phrase, too used to European ways. At a hotel in Vevey on Lake Geneva he meets Annie 'Daisy' Miller, a pretty, rich and uninhibited girl from Schenectady, New York, travelling with her vague, dyspeptic mother and her brash little brother Randolph, accompanied by a courier, Eugenio, whom they treat almost as a member of the family.
Death Comes for the Archbishop follows Jean Marie Latour and Joseph Vaillant, French missionary priests sent to the newly annexed American Southwest to organize the Catholic Church in New Mexico. Cather shapes the novel less as a conventional plot than as a sequence of remembered journeys, encounters, hardships, and acts of pastoral administration.
Death in Venice follows the last weeks of Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated German writer in his fifties, ennobled on his fiftieth birthday, whose prose epic on Frederick the Great and other works have made him a model of disciplined art. Thomas Mann published the novella in 1912, and it is told in five chapters by a narrator who comments on Aschenbach with a mixture of sympathy and irony.
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.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. An impoverished hidalgo of about fifty, Alonso Quixano, reads chivalric romances until, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dries up and he loses his wits.
Dracula is told through journals, letters, phonograph diaries, telegrams and newspaper cuttings assembled by its characters. Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to Transylvania to arrange the purchase of a London property, Carfax, for Count Dracula.
Emma Woodhouse, not quite twenty-one, is the clever, handsome and wealthy mistress of Hartfield, a house in the Surrey village of Highbury, where she keeps company with her fond, fretful and health-obsessed widowed father. When her governess and friend Miss Taylor marries the genial widower Mr. Weston, Emma credits herself with the match and resolves to arrange more.
Essays on Education in a Republic gathers the six essays on schooling that open Benjamin Rush's Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical, published in Philadelphia in 1798. Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote them between 1786 and 1791 to ask what kind of education a free people needs once it has made itself a republic.
Washington's Farewell Address and selected letters present leadership as restraint, reputation, and institutional precedent. The Farewell Address, published in 1796 near the end of his presidency, warns against sectional division, party spirit, foreign entanglement, public debt, and attacks on constitutional authority.
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.
The First Oration Against Catiline is the speech Cicero, as consul, delivered to the Roman senate on 8 November 63 BC in the temple of Jupiter Stator, with Lucius Sergius Catilina himself sitting among the senators. Catiline, twice defeated for the consulship and deep in debt, had been organizing a rising: his ally Gaius Manlius was raising an army in Etruria, and on the night of 6-7 November conspirators met at the house of Marcus Laeca, where two men undertook to murder Cicero at his morning reception.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a frame narrative told through the letters of Robert Walton, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice. Walton rescues a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing a gigantic figure across the frozen sea, and who tells his story as a warning to a man whose ambition resembles his own.
Germ Theory Papers gathers four scientific papers that the Harvard Classics printed together in 1910, in the volume of Scientific Papers that also contains Harvey: one by the Glasgow surgeon Joseph Lister and three by the French chemist Louis Pasteur. Each comes with the series' brief introductory note on its author.
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.
On a cold December morning in Holland, fifteen-year-old Hans Brinker and his twelve-year-old sister Gretel skate on the canal near the village of Broek on wooden runners Hans has carved himself. Their family is very poor.
Heart of Darkness is told by an unnamed narrator aboard the yawl Nellie, anchored in the Thames estuary at dusk, who reports a story told by his companion, the seaman Charles Marlow. Marlow begins by observing that the Thames, too, was once one of the dark places of the earth when the Romans came.
Henry V follows the young King Henry, once the tavern-haunting Prince Hal, as he leads England to war with France and wins the battle of Agincourt in 1415. A Chorus opens each act, asking the audience to let their imaginations fill the small wooden theatre with the vasty fields of France.
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.
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.
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.
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.
David McCullough's John Adams is a full narrative biography of the second president of the United States, built largely on the Adams family papers and especially on the letters between John and Abigail Adams. It follows Adams from his boyhood on a farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, where he was born in 1735, through Harvard College, schoolteaching in Worcester and the law, to his marriage in 1764 to Abigail Smith, whom McCullough presents as his closest adviser and equal partner.
Just So Stories is Rudyard Kipling's collection of comic tales that explain, in the voice of a father talking to a child he calls O Best Beloved, how things in the world came to be the way they are. Each story is followed by a poem.
Kidnapped is narrated by David Balfour, a seventeen-year-old Lowland Scot who in June 1751, after his father's death, leaves the village of Essendean with a letter for the House of Shaws. The minister Mr. Campbell sends him off with a shilling, a Bible and a handwritten recipe for lily-of-the-valley water, and with the news that he is a Balfour of Shaws.
Lassie Come-Home is the story of a tricolour collie who crosses hundreds of miles of Scottish and English country to return to the boy she loves. In the Yorkshire mining village of Greenall Bridge, Lassie belongs to Sam Carraclough, and every man in the village agrees she is the finest collie he has ever seen.
Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages, is the third of Thomas Bulfinch's books of legend, published in 1863. It retells in English prose the romances that grew up around Charlemagne and his twelve peers, or paladins, chiefly as the Italian Renaissance poets Luigi Pulci, Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto shaped them.
Napoleon dictated or wrote tens of thousands of letters, often several dozen a day, to generals, ministers, prefects, bishops, kings, his family and the women he loved. Napoleon III's government published a thirty-two-volume Correspondance de Napoléon Ier between 1858 and 1870, pruning letters that embarrassed the dynasty; the Fondation Napoléon's complete edition, begun in 2004, runs to more than forty thousand items.
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil was published in London in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, and its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny subjects, holding a sword and a bishop's crozier above a peaceful town. The Introduction states the governing analogy: as art can make automata with springs for hearts and strings for nerves, so human art creates the commonwealth, an artificial man whose soul is sovereignty.
Sulpitius Severus's Life of St. Martin made Martin of Tours one of the defining saints of the Latin West. The narrative begins with Martin's birth in Pannonia, upbringing in Italy, and reluctant military service.
Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain's book about the great river in two eras: the steamboat age of his youth and the changed river he revisited in 1882. It opens with three chapters of history and lore, from De Soto and La Salle to the keelboat and raft men, including a long raft episode with the boy Huck Finn borrowed from the novel Twain was then writing.
Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers is Ralph Moody's memoir of the four years, 1906 to 1910, that his family spent on a Colorado ranch, told from the point of view of the boy he was, eight years old when the story begins. His father, Charles, has a persistent cough from his work in a New Hampshire mill, and when a cousin, Phil, who sells gold stock in Denver, promises better prospects, the family leaves East Rochester for a run-down rented ranch near Fort Logan, southwest of Denver.
Little House in the Big Woods follows one year in the life of a pioneer family in a log house in the forests of Wisconsin, seen through the eyes of Laura, who is about five. She lives with Pa, who hunts, traps and farms; Ma, who keeps the house; her older sister Mary; baby Carrie; and Jack, the brindle bulldog.
Little House on the Prairie follows the Ingalls family through roughly a year in Kansas, on land the book calls Indian Territory, around 1869 and 1870. Pa sells the little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin because the woods are filling with people and the game is growing scarce.
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.
Little Women follows the four March sisters growing up in a New England town during and after the American Civil War, while their father serves as an army chaplain. Meg, the eldest, is pretty and longs for fine things; Jo, a tomboyish aspiring writer with a quick temper, is the heart of the book; Beth is shy, gentle and musical; and Amy, the youngest, is artistic and vain.
Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects is a collection of biographies of Italian artists from the late thirteenth century to Vasari's own day, arranged to tell the story of how the arts of design, after their decline in late antiquity, were reborn in Tuscany and brought to perfection in the age of Michelangelo. The library text is the first of the ten volumes of Gaston du C. de Vere's English translation of the 1568 edition, published 1912-1915.
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.
Lord Jim begins with an omniscient narrator describing Jim, a young English parson's son who went to sea after reading light holiday literature and dreams of heroic deeds. Injured by a falling spar, he recovers in an Eastern port and takes a berth as chief mate of the Patna, a decrepit steamer carrying eight hundred Muslim pilgrims across the Arabian Sea.
Man's Search for Meaning has two parts. The first, Experiences in a Concentration Camp, is not a chronicle of atrocities but a psychiatrist's account of how ordinary prisoners lived, suffered and either kept or lost their inner hold on life.
Mansfield Park follows Fanny Price, the timid daughter of a poor, overburdened family in Portsmouth, who at ten is taken in by her wealthy aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, at Mansfield Park in Northamptonshire. Her other aunt, the officious and mean Mrs Norris, never lets her forget her dependent status, and her cousins Tom, Maria and Julia treat her with indifference.
Sherman's Memoirs, published in two volumes in 1875 and revised in 1886, present themselves less as history than as testimony; in the preface to the second edition he says he writes as a witness before the tribunal of history, supplying material for some future historian. The first volume, the text stored in this library, runs from his Ohio boyhood to the Meridian campaign of February 1864.
Middlemarch, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, follows several households in and around a Midlands market town from 1829 to 1832, the years leading to the first Reform Act. Its Prelude recalls Saint Teresa of Ávila and asks what becomes of women with a similar longing for a great life who are born into an age that gives it no outlet.
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.
No Exit and Three Other Plays is an American collection of four of Jean-Paul Sartre's plays from the years of the German occupation and just after it, in which his philosophy of freedom and responsibility is worked out on the stage. Stuart Gilbert translated No Exit and The Flies, and Lionel Abel translated Dirty Hands and The Respectful Prostitute.
Northanger Abbey follows Catherine Morland, the unremarkable seventeen-year-old daughter of a country clergyman, whom the narrator teasingly insists no one would have supposed born to be a heroine. Catherine is a devoted reader of Gothic novels, especially Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.
Number the Stars is set in Copenhagen and on the north coast of Zealand in September and October 1943, during the German occupation of Denmark. Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen and her best friend Ellen Rosen race each other home from school and are stopped on the street by two German soldiers; Annemarie's little sister Kirsti, five, chatters at them fearlessly.
Old Yeller is narrated by Travis Coates, who looks back on the year he was fourteen, in the late 1860s, on his family's homestead near the settlement of Salt Licks in the Texas Hill Country. After the Civil War cattle money is scarce, so Papa joins the other men of the settlement on a long drive to sell cattle in Kansas, leaving Travis as the man of the place with Mama and his little brother, Arliss.
Oliver Twist, subtitled The Parish Boy's Progress, follows an orphan from a workhouse cradle to a safe home, passing on the way through the criminal underworld of 1830s London. Oliver is born in a workhouse in an unnamed town; his mother dies within minutes, leaving only a locket and a ring that later prove who she was.
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.
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 Nature of the Universe, better known as De Rerum Natura, is a philosophical poem that tries to cure fear by explaining the world. Lucretius addresses Memmius and invokes Venus, then argues that religion has driven human beings to cruelty, as in the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
On the Road is narrated by Sal Paradise, a young writer living with his aunt in New Jersey, and records a series of journeys back and forth across the United States and into Mexico between 1947 and 1950. The engine of the book is Dean Moriarty, a fast-talking, car-stealing, endlessly restless young man from Denver who seems to Sal the embodiment of a wild, joyous American energy.
On War (Vom Kriege) is an unfinished philosophical inquiry into the nature of war, written by a Prussian staff officer who had lived through the Napoleonic transformation of warfare. It is organised in eight books, but Clausewitz left a note in 1827 saying that only the first chapter of Book I satisfied him, and he was revising the whole when he died.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich follows a single winter day, from reveille at five in the morning to lights-out, in a Soviet special labour camp on the steppe of Kazakhstan in the early 1950s. Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a peasant from the village of Temgenyovo, was captured by the Germans in 1942, escaped back to his own lines, and was charged with treason as a supposed German spy; he signed a confession because refusing meant being shot.
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.
The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant were written in a race against death. In the spring of 1884 the brokerage firm of Grant & Ward collapsed through his partner's fraud, leaving the former president living on borrowed money.
Philosophy of Natural Science is a short introductory textbook by the German-American philosopher Carl G. Hempel, published in 1966 by Prentice-Hall in its Foundations of Philosophy series. It is still under copyright, so the library holds no text; this record describes the book in its own words and quotes only two short sentences.
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.
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.
Sanshirō follows Ogawa Sanshirō, a young graduate of the higher school in Kumamoto, through his first autumn and winter as a student at Tokyo Imperial University in the late Meiji period. The novel opens on the long train journey from Kyushu.
Sense and Sensibility follows two sisters whose temperaments represent the opposed values of its title. When Henry Dashwood dies, Norland Park in Sussex passes to John, his son by a first marriage, who promises to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters but is talked out of any real generosity by his grasping wife Fanny.
Donne's Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions bring the metaphysical imagination into pulpit and sickroom. The sermons, including Death's Duel, display a preacher fascinated by mortality, judgment, resurrection, the body, and the unstable boundary between private self and Christian community.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence's account of his two years with the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, from his first visit to the Hejaz in October 1916 to the entry into Damascus in October 1918. It opens with an introductory chapter that admits the book's political bad conscience: Lawrence knew that Britain and France had already divided the Arab lands in the Sykes–Picot agreement while he encouraged the Arabs to fight for independence.
Shakespeare's Sonnets is a sequence of 154 fourteen-line poems, nearly all in the form now named after him: three quatrains rhyming abab cdcd efef and a closing couplet gg, in iambic pentameter. The sequence has no plot in the ordinary sense, but readers since the eighteenth century have traced a loose story.
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.
Sts. Roch and Sebastian became plague saints through two different imaginative routes. Sebastian is an older martyr of the Roman persecution tradition.
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.
Surprised by Joy is C. S. Lewis's account of his life from early childhood to his acceptance of Christianity in 1931. Lewis says in his preface that the book is not a full autobiography but the story of his conversion, and that it follows one thread: his experience of what he calls Joy, a sudden, piercing longing for something unnamed that is itself more desirable than any ordinary satisfaction.
Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann) is the first volume of Marcel Proust's seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time, which C. K. Scott Moncrieff translated under the title Remembrance of Things Past. Grasset issued it at Proust's expense in November 1913.
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.
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.
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 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 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 Art of War is a short treatise of thirteen chapters, around six thousand Chinese characters, written as a sequence of terse sayings introduced by the formula 'Sun Tzu said'. It begins by declaring war a matter of life and death for the state, to be studied through five constant factors: the moral law that binds people to their ruler, heaven (weather and seasons), earth (terrain and distance), the commander's qualities, and method and discipline.
Dell'arte della guerra, printed in Florence in 1521, is the only one of Machiavelli's political works published in his lifetime. It is a dialogue in seven books, set in 1516 in the Orti Oricellari, the shaded garden of Cosimo Rucellai, where the humanist circle that Machiavelli frequented met to discuss Livy and republican government.
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini is the life story of a Florentine goldsmith and sculptor, dictated in his late fifties and carried from his birth on All Saints' night in 1500 to 1562. It opens with Cellini's claim that anyone who has done excellent work and is honest should write his own life after forty, and with his ancestry and childhood: his father Giovanni, a musician and maker of instruments, wants him to be a flute-player, and once boxes his ears so that he will remember the salamander they have seen in the fire.
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872 when Nietzsche was a twenty-seven-year-old professor at Basel, argues that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two opposed artistic drives, which he names after the gods Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian is the drive toward clear form, measure and individuation, whose physiological analogue is the dream, in which every person is a perfect artist of images.
The Borrowers is told within a frame. A girl called Kate, about ten, sits crocheting with old Mrs May, who lives in two rooms of Kate's parents' house.
The Boxcar Children follows four orphaned brothers and sisters: Henry, fourteen; Jessie, twelve; Violet, ten; and Benny, six. After their parents die, the children set out on their own rather than go to their grandfather, whom they have never met and believe to be a hard man who disliked their mother.
The Bronze Bow is set in Galilee in the years of Jesus' public ministry, under Roman rule. Its hero, Daniel bar Jamin, is eighteen and has lived for five years with an outlaw band in the hills above his village of Ketzah, near Capernaum.
Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Civili, in three books, narrate the first two years of the war he fought against Pompey and the senatorial party, from January 49 BCE to the beginning of the Alexandrian war in late 48. The work is unfinished, breaking off in Alexandria, and it is the most openly political of his writings: its constant task is to show that Caesar was forced into war by a faction of personal enemies, that he repeatedly sought peace, and that he treated defeated fellow citizens with a mercy his opponents never showed.
The Comedy of Errors takes place in a single day in the Greek city of Ephesus, where two sets of identical twins, separated as babies, are mistaken for each other until the whole town seems bewitched. Egeon, an old merchant of Syracuse, has been arrested because the two cities are at war and any Syracusan found in Ephesus must pay a thousand marks or die.
The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman gathers the evolving work of a poet who made the self expansive enough to contain a democracy. The center is Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised across multiple editions until Whitman's death.
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.
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.
The Fall is a short novel in six chapters made up entirely of the monologue of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a Frenchman living in Amsterdam, who over five days talks to a stranger he meets at a sailors' bar called Mexico City. The listener never speaks in the text; his replies are implied by Clamence's answers.
The Fall of the Roman Republic is a selection of six of Plutarch's Roman Lives, arranged to tell the story of the Republic's collapse in the century before Augustus: Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar and Cicero. Read in sequence, they show how military glory, personal ambition and civil war destroyed Rome's traditional government.
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.
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 Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's history of the Soviet system of prisons, labour camps and exile, which he likened to an archipelago of islands scattered across the country, visible only to those taken there. Written in secret between 1958 and 1968, it draws on Solzhenitsyn's own eight years as a prisoner and on the testimony of some two hundred and twenty-seven other former prisoners, together with published Soviet sources.
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 Peloponnesian War is Thucydides’ unfinished account of the war between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 411 BCE. Unlike Herodotus’ broad storytelling, Thucydides narrows his gaze to power, fear, interest, decision and the deterioration of civic language under pressure.
The Hound of the Baskervilles brings Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to Dartmoor to investigate a family curse. It opens in Baker Street with a walking stick left by a visitor, from which Holmes deduces a young country doctor with a curly-haired spaniel.
Die Traumdeutung appeared in November 1899 with the date 1900 on its title page, and Freud regarded it as his most important book. Its central claim is that dreams are meaningful psychic acts that can be interpreted, and that every dream, properly analysed, proves to be the fulfilment of a wish.
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 Journal of John Woolman is the spiritual autobiography of a New Jersey Quaker tailor and minister, begun in his thirty-sixth year and continued until a few days before his death. He opens in Northampton, Burlington County, where as a child he reads the twenty-second chapter of Revelation by the roadside and, soon after, kills a mother robin with a stone and then her nestlings, an act whose horror teaches him that God has placed in every mind a principle of goodness toward all creatures.
The Jungle Book is a collection of seven animal stories, each followed by a song or poem. The first three tell of Mowgli, a man's cub raised by wolves in the Seeonee hills of central India.
Izaak Walton's Lives are short, affectionate biographies of English churchmen, written by a London tradesman and angler who loved the Church of England and the men who served it. The library text is the second volume of the Cassell's National Library edition of 1898, based on John Major's 1825 edition with Austin Dobson's notes, and contains three of the five lives: Richard Hooker (first published 1665), George Herbert (1670) and Robert Sanderson (1678); the lives of Donne and Wotton belong to the first volume and are not included.
The Meek One (Krotkaya), also translated as A Gentle Creature, is a long short story that Dostoevsky published in his one-man journal A Writer's Diary in November 1876, prompted by newspaper reports of suicides, including that of a young seamstress who leapt from a window holding an icon. In a short preface Dostoevsky calls it a 'fantastic' story, explaining that it is realistic in every respect except its form: it imagines the inner monologue of a man as though a stenographer could record his chaotic thoughts.
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 Metaphysical Poets is Helen Gardner's anthology of English poets of the seventeenth century who wrote in the style that Samuel Johnson, borrowing a phrase from Dryden, called 'metaphysical'. Johnson complained that in their verse the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked by violence together; T. S. Eliot, in his 1921 review of Herbert Grierson's earlier anthology, praised them for a unified sensibility in which thought and feeling were fused.
The Moffats follows a year in the life of a family with little money and a great deal of fun in the small Connecticut town of Cranbury, around the time of the First World War. Mama, a widow, earns their living as a dressmaker in the rented yellow house on New Dollar Street, where she lives with her four children: Sylvie, the eldest, gentle and grown-up; Joey, the steady older brother who does the heavy chores; Jane, the imaginative middle girl through whose eyes much of the book is seen; and Rufus, five and a half and always in the middle of something.
The Monroe Doctrine is the name later given to a few passages in President James Monroe's Seventh Annual Message to Congress, sent in writing on December 2, 1823, and read aloud to the new Eighteenth Congress. The library text gives the whole message, so readers can see the famous statements in their setting.
The Moonstone, subtitled A Romance, tells the story of a great yellow diamond taken from India and the year of suspicion that follows its disappearance from an English country house. A Prologue, drawn from a family paper, describes the storming of Seringapatam in 1799, when the officer John Herncastle seizes the jewel from Tipu Sultan's treasury, killing its guardians; one dying Indian warns that the Moonstone will have its vengeance.
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 Plague is a chronicle of an epidemic of bubonic and then pneumonic plague in Oran, a commercial port on the Algerian coast, in an unspecified year of the 1940s. The narrator, who reveals himself only at the end as the physician Bernard Rieux, writes as an impartial witness, drawing also on the notebooks of his friend Jean Tarrou.
The Power and the Glory is set in an unnamed Mexican state during an anticlerical campaign that has outlawed or driven out Catholic priests. Its central figure is the last active priest in the region, a fugitive known as the whisky priest because of his alcoholism and moral failures.
The Prince is a short treatise in twenty-six chapters that Machiavelli wrote in 1513, shortly after losing his post in the Florentine chancery, and dedicated, in its final form, to Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino. In the dedication he offers the Medici what he calls his knowledge of the actions of great men, gained from long experience of modern affairs and continual reading of ancient ones.
The Railway Children tells how Roberta (Bobbie), Peter and Phyllis lose their comfortable London life and find friends, work and courage beside a country railway line. One evening, just after Peter's birthday, two men call, Father goes away with them, and Mother will say only that he has gone on business and that the children must not ask.
The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan is the young Winston Churchill's history of the Anglo-Egyptian campaigns of 1896–1899 that destroyed the Mahdist state in the Sudan. Churchill begins with geography and the Nile, which he presents as the thread on which the whole story hangs, and then with the rebellion of Muhammad Ahmad, a Dongolawi boat-builder's son and Sufi ascetic who proclaimed himself the Mahdi in 1881.
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 Sign of the Beaver takes place in the Maine woods in 1768. Matt Hallowell, twelve years old and about to turn thirteen, has helped his father clear land and build a log cabin on a new claim.
The Song of Hiawatha is a book-length poem in twenty-two cantos with an Introduction, retelling legends of the Ojibway and neighbouring peoples around a single hero on the south shore of Lake Superior, which the poem calls Gitche Gumee, the shining Big-Sea-Water. The Introduction presents the songs as gathered by the singer Nawadaha from the forest, the birds and the rivers, and addresses readers who believe every human heart is human.
The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is John Muir's account of his first twenty-five years, from a Scottish seaside town to the edge of what he calls the University of the Wilderness. In the first chapter he remembers Dunbar on the stormy North Sea coast: rambles with his grandfather David Gilrye, who taught him his letters from shop signs, scrambles over the ruins of Dunbar Castle, fights and dares with schoolmates, the servant girls' terrifying tales of the Dandy Doctors who were said to steal children for the Edinburgh dissecting rooms, and a school where Mr. Lyon and his father together drilled grammar and Bible verses into him by memory and the rod.
The 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 Sword in the Stone is T. H. White's comic and affectionate account of the boyhood of King Arthur, set in a merry, anachronistic Middle Ages. Arthur, called the Wart, is an orphan of unknown birth raised by the kindly Sir Ector at the Castle of the Forest Sauvage alongside Ector's son Kay, an older, proud and often unhappy boy who will one day be a knight while the Wart expects to be his squire.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë's second novel, is told in letters written in 1847 by the farmer Gilbert Markham to his friend and brother-in-law Jack Halford, enclosing a long diary. In the autumn of 1827 a young widow calling herself Mrs. Graham takes rooms in the half-ruined Elizabethan mansion of Wildfell Hall with her small son Arthur and an old servant, Rachel.
Richard Hannay, a thirty-seven-year-old Scottish-born mining engineer who has made his money in Rhodesia, has come home to London in the spring of 1914 and finds himself bored almost to despair. One May evening a neighbor from the top floor of his building, an American named Franklin P. Scudder, begs to be taken in.
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.
The True Story of My Life is the autobiographical sketch Hans Christian Andersen wrote in 1846, at forty-one, for a collected edition of his works. He opens by calling his life a lovely story, happy and full of incident, and says it shows that a loving God directs all things for the best.
The Vampyre is a brief but enormously influential Gothic tale that turns the vampire from folkloric corpse into a fashionable aristocratic predator. Aubrey, a young gentleman of imagination and moral seriousness, enters London society and becomes fascinated by Lord Ruthven, a mysterious nobleman whose charm is inseparable from coldness.
The Velveteen Rabbit, or How Toys Become Real (1922), is Margery Williamss tender story of a stuffed rabbit who longs to become Real. At first he is unused in the nursery; the wise Skin Horse explains that Real is not how you are made but what happens when a child loves you for a long time.
The Voyage of the Beagle is Darwin's account of his five-year journey around South America, the Pacific, Australia, and the Atlantic aboard HMS Beagle. It is a travel book before it is an evolutionary treatise: Darwin describes landscapes, fossils, earthquakes, volcanoes, coral reefs, animals, plants, Indigenous peoples, imperial violence, slavery, disease, and the practical hardships of field observation.
The War of the Worlds is told by an unnamed writer on philosophical subjects who lives on Maybury Hill near Woking in Surrey, looking back some years after the events. Book One, The Coming of the Martians, opens with astronomers seeing jets of gas leap from the surface of Mars.
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.
Walter Hartright, a young London drawing-master, is engaged through his Italian friend Professor Pesca to teach watercolour at Limmeridge House in Cumberland. Walking home across Hampstead Heath late on the night before he leaves, he is touched on the shoulder by a woman dressed entirely in white who asks the way to London and speaks fondly of Limmeridge; soon after, two men in a chaise ask a policeman whether he has seen a woman escaped from an asylum.
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.
Till We Have Faces, subtitled A Myth Retold, rewrites the story of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius's Golden Ass, told by one of Psyche's elder sisters. Orual, now an old queen of Glome, a small barbarian kingdom on the edge of the Greek world, writes her book as a formal accusation against the gods.
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.
Twenty Years at Hull-House is Jane Addams's account of her early life and of the settlement house she founded on Chicago's West Side in 1889. The first four chapters are autobiographical.
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.
Unbroken is Laura Hillenbrand's biography of Louis Zamperini, an American runner and Army Air Forces bombardier who survived a plane crash, weeks adrift in the Pacific and more than two years as a prisoner of war in Japan. The book begins with Louie as the restless, thieving son of Italian immigrants in Torrance, California, in the 1920s.
Uncle Vanya, subtitled Scenes from Country Life, takes place over a few months on a provincial Russian estate. For twenty-five years Ivan Petrovich Voitski, Uncle Vanya, has managed the property with his niece Sonia, sending its income to her father, Professor Alexander Serebrakoff, the widower of Vanya's sister, whom Vanya once revered as a great scholar.
Understood Betsy follows nine-year-old Elizabeth Ann, an orphan raised in a medium-sized Midwestern city by her Great-aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances, a piano teacher who has studied child-rearing books and correspondence courses and is determined that her niece shall be thoroughly understood. Elizabeth Ann is thin, pale and frightened of dogs, thunder and examinations, and Aunt Frances shares and rehearses every fear with her.
Up from Slavery is Booker T. Washington's account of his rise from a slave cabin in Virginia to the leadership of Tuskegee Institute. He begins with what he does not know: the exact date of his birth, about 1858 or 1859 as he gives it, and the name of his white father.
War and Peace follows several Russian noble families from 1805 to 1820, through the wars against Napoleon and the French invasion of 1812. It opens at a St. Petersburg soirée given by Anna Pávlovna Schérer in July 1805, where talk of Bonaparte mixes with gossip about inheritances.
Washington: A Life is Ron Chernow's single-volume biography of George Washington, published in October 2010 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2011. Chernow's central aim is to replace the remote, marble figure of patriotic legend with a man of strong passions, ambition and a fierce temper, held in check by a lifelong discipline of self-command.
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands is the lively autobiography of a Jamaican doctress, nurse and businesswoman. Mary Seacole begins in Kingston, where she was born to a Scottish soldier and a Creole mother who kept a boarding house and was famous for her cures; she declines to give the year, saying only that she and the century were young together.
Wuthering Heights is a violent family romance told through layered narration. Mr. Lockwood, a tenant at Thrushcross Grange, becomes curious about his landlord Heathcliff and the strange household at Wuthering Heights.
Passages
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, A Doll's House, Act 1
Nora reveals that Torvald's life was saved by a year in Italy prescribed by doctors, paid for with the secret loan.
- A Little Princess, Chapter 7, The Diamond Mines Again
Mr. Barrow tells Miss Minchin that Captain Crewe died of jungle fever combined with the strain of his business losses.
- A Little Princess, Chapter 12, The Other Side of the Wall
Carrisford and Carmichael recall Carrisford's flight, sleeplessness, delirium and hospital confinement with brain fever.
- A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, Defense of Black caregivers
Allen and Jones describe dangerous care work performed by Black residents during the epidemic.
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chapter I
Stephen's fever after the ditch, the infirmary with Brother Michael, and his imagined death and the news of Parnell's death.
- A System of Logic, Book III: Of Induction, Book III, Ch. V, § 3
The man who takes mercury, goes out of doors and catches cold, used to show that the cause is the whole set of conditions.
- A System of Logic, Book III: Of Induction, Book III, Ch. V
Discussion of volition, nerves and muscles in the production of bodily motion, and of the continuance of effects such as brain-fever after sunstroke.
- A Tale of Two Cities, Book III, Chapter 10
Manette's letter describes attending the Evremonde brothers' victim in a high fever of the brain, using narcotic medicines from their case, and the dying brother's wound, and records his fear that his reason will not remain unimpaired.
- A Treatise on the Smallpox and Measles, Chapter I, §§5–8
The must-and-wine theory of smallpox as fermentation of children's blood, and why young and old are rarely attacked except in putrid air.
- A Treatise on the Smallpox and Measles, Chapter III
Prodromal symptoms and the differential diagnosis of smallpox and measles.
- A Treatise on the Smallpox and Measles, Chapter VII
Protection of the eyes, throat, joints, soles and palms; eye-drops of rose-water, sumach and pomegranate; opening of large pustules.
- A Treatise on the Smallpox and Measles, Chapter XIV
Prognostic signs: color, size and spacing of pustules, timing of eruption, fever after eruption, delirium and swooning as fatal signs; scarification of a threatened limb.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter XVI
Huck lets slave hunters believe his father on the raft has smallpox, and they keep their distance and give him money.
- All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter X
The surgeons' table, Paul's fear of chloroform and amputation, the nuns' ward, the Dying Room, tetanus deaths, traction, X-rays, and Albert's amputation.
- Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Part III
Fever at Leonforte in Sicily in 1833, his servant's nursing, and his recovery with a sense of mission.
- Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Part III
Exhaustion on the journey home and several days laid up at Lyons.
- Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, Chapter VIII
A sunstroke on the railway line in Virginia and a breakdown from overwork after his Washington service.
- Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, Chapter XV
His typhoid fever of 1886 and the deaths of his mother and brother within a few days while he was ill.
- Black Beauty, Part I (Birtwick chapters)
Joe Green gives the overheated Beauty cold water and no blanket; Beauty falls seriously ill and is treated by the horse doctor and nursed by John.
- Black Beauty, Part IV (London)
Jerry Barker falls ill with bronchitis from exposure and must give up cab work.
- Bleak House, Chapters XVI and XLVI
Descriptions of Tom-all-Alone's as a source of fever that spreads to every class of society.
- 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.
- Botchan, Chapter XI
Kiyo's death from pneumonia in February and her deathbed request about her grave.
- Carmilla, Chapter IV, Her Habits—A Saunter
Laura reports the deaths of peasant women after dreams of being seized by the throat; her father attributes such fancies to fever; Carmilla suffers a convulsive fit at the funeral hymn.
- Confessions, Book I.11
As a boy Augustine falls ill with a fever and stomach pains and begs for baptism, which is postponed when he recovers.
- Confessions, Book IX.10–13
Monica's fever and death at Ostia and Augustine's struggle to restrain his tears.
- Crime and Punishment, Confession and exile
Crime and Punishment gives this tag concrete force through this is a major psychiatric novel: fever, delirium, obsession, dissociation, alcoholism, suicide, trauma, and moral injury drive the action
- Cyrano de Bergerac, Act 5, Scene 3
Ragueneau tells Le Bret of the falling wood, the head wound, the loss of consciousness and the doctor's words about fever and meningitis.
- Daisy Miller, Part II (Colosseum scene)
Winterbourne warns Daisy of the danger of the Roman fever from the night air.
- Daisy Miller, Part II (closing pages)
Daisy's illness, the doctor's attendance, her death and burial in the Protestant cemetery.
- Death Comes for the Archbishop, Appointment and arrival
Death Comes for the Archbishop gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes travel hardship, hunger, fever, aging, deathbed care, and the bodily cost of missionary life in an arid landscape
- Death in Venice, Chapter III
The sirocco leaves Aschenbach feverish and short of breath, prompting his failed attempt to leave Venice.
- Death in Venice, Chapter V
Thirsty and feverish, Aschenbach eats overripe strawberries in the city; his collapse on the beach follows days later.
- Discourses (selection) and Encheiridion, Discourses, "In What Manner We Ought to Bear Sickness" (III.10)
How a student should bear fever, thirst and hunger, and how he should regard the physician's good or bad report.
- Don Quixote, Part II, Ch. 74
Don Quixote falls into a fever, sleeps, wakes sane, renounces chivalry and dies.
- Dracula, Ch. 8–9
Sister Agatha writes from Budapest that Jonathan has been suffering from a violent brain fever.
- Emma, Vol. I, Ch. XII-XIII
Isabella and her father compare their medical men, Mr. Wingfield and Mr. Perry, and the merits of South End and Cromer for sea-bathing; Harriet's feverish sore throat makes Mr. Elton fear a putrid infection.
- Essays on Education in a Republic, Thoughts upon the Amusements and Punishments Proper for Schools, on gunning and on school rooms
Gunning exposes boys to fevers and accidents; long sitting deforms the body; crowding children into one room breeds fevers from morbid effluvia, which Rush says he has seen in many hundred cases.
- Farewell Address and Selected Letters, Revolutionary War letters on army health
Camp disease, supply shortages, and inoculation decisions show public health as military necessity.
- Fathers and Sons, Ch. 27
Bazarov cuts himself during a post-mortem on a typhus victim; he describes his symptoms clinically, accepts his death and sends for Odintsova.
- First Oration Against Catiline, Section 30
Cicero calls the conspiracy a disease of the republic that execution would check but not eradicate, and hopes Catiline's departure will remove its root and seed.
- First Oration Against Catiline, Section 31
The simile of fever patients who drink cold water, seem relieved, and then grow worse, applied to the danger hidden in the veins and bowels of the republic.
- Frankenstein, Vol. I, Ch. I–II (1818) / Ch. 2–3 (1831)
Victor's youthful reading of Agrippa, Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus; his mother dies of scarlet fever caught while nursing Elizabeth.
- Frankenstein, Vol. I, Ch. IV (1818) / Ch. 5 (1831)
Animation of the creature, Victor's nightmare of Elizabeth turning into his mother's corpse, flight, and months-long nervous fever nursed by Clerval.
- Frankenstein, Vol. III, Ch. IV (1818) / Ch. 21 (1831)
Imprisoned in Ireland after Clerval's death, Victor suffers prolonged fever and delirium; on the voyage home he relies on laudanum to sleep.
- Germ Theory Papers (Pasteur and Lister), Lister, On the Antiseptic Principle, opening
Lister links Pasteur's work on putrefaction to suppuration in wounds and introduces carbolic acid.
- Germ Theory Papers (Pasteur and Lister), Lister, On the Antiseptic Principle, closing
Ward health before and after antiseptic treatment: nine months without pyaemia, hospital gangrene or erysipelas.
- Germ Theory Papers (Pasteur and Lister), The Germ Theory and Its Applications (1878)
Serial culture of anthrax, the anaerobic septic vibrio, septic dust, and combined infections with the microbe of pus.
- Germ Theory Papers (Pasteur and Lister), On the Extension of the Germ Theory (1880), sections I–II
Cultures from recurrent furuncles and from the trephined tibia of a twelve-year-old girl with osteomyelitis.
- Germ Theory Papers (Pasteur and Lister), On the Extension of the Germ Theory (1880), section III
Observations of women with puerperal fever at the Lariboisière and recommendations for boric acid compresses after confinement.
- Great Expectations, Chapter LVII
Pip's fever and delirium, and Joe's nursing.
- Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, Chapter 5, Shadows in the Home
Dame Brinker tells how Raff was brought home from the flooded dike with his head bruised and cut, and how the fever passed but the dullness grew.
- Heart of Darkness, Part I (Central Station)
The manager's only qualification: he is never ill, in a place where Europeans die of fever.
- Heart of Darkness, Part III
Kurtz's emaciation and illness, his midnight crawl toward the forest, and his death.
- Heart of Darkness, Part III (the return)
Marlow wrestles with death in a long fever and returns to Europe irritable and estranged.
- Henry V, Act 2, Scene 1 and Scene 3
Falstaff falls sick; Nym says the king has run bad humours on him, and the Hostess describes his death.
- Heroides, Letter XXI (Cydippe to Acontius)
Cydippe describes her wasting, pallor and a fever that returns as her wedding approaches; the nurse guards her door and physicians cannot help.
- Hippocratic Writings, Epidemics, Books 1 and 3
Case notes track fever, delirium, sleep, stools, urine, crisis days and death or recovery across seasons.
- History of the Wars, Books I-II (The Persian War), Book II, ch. 22
Origin at Pelusium, spread along coasts, apparitions and dreams before onset, the mild fever and the appearance of swellings.
- Jane Eyre, Chapters V and IX
Lowood's scant, spoiled food and damp situation; the spring typhus epidemic; Helen Burns's death from consumption; the public inquiry and reform that follow.
- 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.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 19, Agrippa I's death
The sudden illness and death of Agrippa I are framed as divine judgment, showing how acute disease becomes political theology.
- John Adams, Part II
Adams's grave fever in Amsterdam during the negotiations with the Dutch Republic in 1781.
- Just So Stories, The Elephant's Child
Kolokolo Bird's refrain about the Limpopo River set about with fever-trees; the Crocodile stretches the young elephant's nose, which he wraps in cool banana leaves.
- Just So Stories, How the Alphabet Was Made
Tegumai draws the signs for yo, bad black swamp-water that gives fever, so that Taffy will know not to drink from a marked pool.
- Kidnapped, Chapter VII
David lies fevered in the dark hold until Mr. Riach, who calls himself more than half a doctor, insists he be moved to the forecastle.
- Kidnapped, Chapter XXIV-XXV
Exhausted and ill, David collapses after the quarrel; a doctor is fetched in Balquhidder and he is bedridden for a week.
- Lassie Come-Home, Journey chapters
Lassie swims a cold river and afterward falls sick and weak with fever.
- Legends of Charlemagne, The Battle of Roncesvalles
Orlando, spent with toil and fever, rides to a fountain where his dying horse kneels and falls; he strikes the rock with Durindana, receives Turpin's absolution and dies, and Charlemagne grieves over the field of slain.
- Letters of Napoleon, Russian campaign letters and bulletins (1812)
Reports from Moscow and the retreat that understate losses to cold, hunger and disease.
- Leviathan, Part I, Ch. VIII
Madness as excessive passion; rage and melancholy; the man in Bedlam who claims to be God the Father; drunkenness; the Abdera fever epidemic and the hanging maidens of a Greek city.
- Leviathan, Part II, Ch. XXIX
Diseases of the commonwealth compared to epilepsy, hydrophobia, ague, pleurisy, intestinal worms (ascarides) and bulimia.
- Life of St. Martin, Life, Ch. 7: fever and apparent death
The catechumen's fever and death become the first major healing miracle, blending sickroom detail with resurrection narrative.
- Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 29
Memphis's sewer system as the lesson of the yellow-fever epidemic, with Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg's description of the deserted, dying city.
- Little Britches, Final chapter
Father is thrown from Babe, his cough returns, a doctor diagnoses pneumonia and orders bed rest, and he dies; the family mourns.
- Little House in the Big Woods, Chapter 11, "Harvest"
Charley, stung all over by yellow jackets, is packed in mud and sheets and given herb tea for his fever by Ma and Aunt Polly.
- Little House on the Prairie, Chapter 15, "Fever 'n' Ague"
The whole family falls ill with chills and fever; Dr. Tan arrives, gives medicine, and Mrs. Scott nurses them; the watermelon and night-air theories of the illness are debated.
- Little Lord Fauntleroy, Chapter VI
Mr. Mordaunt reports that Higgins's children have had scarlet fever and the doctor has ordered wine and nourishing food the family cannot afford.
- Little Lord Fauntleroy, Chapter IX
Cedric describes Earl's Court, where houses are falling down, the rain comes in, and children die of fever; the narrator lists bad drainage, damp walls and leaking roofs.
- Little Women, Part One, Ch. 15
A telegram reports Mr March seriously ill in Washington; Marmee leaves to nurse him and Jo sells her hair.
- Little Women, Part One, Ch. 16–18
Beth nurses the poor Hummel family's sick baby, who dies of scarlet fever; Beth catches it; Amy is sent away; Dr Bangs attends.
- Little Women, Part One, Ch. 19–20
The crisis of Beth's fever passes; Marmee returns.
- Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (Volume 1), Lives of Taddeo Gaddi and Agnolo Gaddi
Brief notices of painters carried off by violent or malignant fevers.
- Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Life of Alexander, last chapters
The account of Alexander’s final illness from the royal diaries, day by day, with Plutarch’s doubts about the rumors of poison.
- Man's Search for Meaning, Part One, second phase
Frankl works as a doctor in a typhus camp, falls ill with fever, and keeps himself awake at night reconstructing his lost manuscript.
- Man's Search for Meaning, Part One, second phase
A fellow prisoner's dream foretells liberation on 30 March; when the date approaches without rescue he falls ill and dies, which Frankl links to the loss of hope.
- Mansfield Park, Vol. III, Ch. 13–14 (Ch. 44–45)
News that Tom has fallen dangerously ill with fever after a drinking bout and a fall; his return home and nursing.
- Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XIV (October 1863)
Willie's typhoid on the steamer Atlantic, the attending army surgeon's warning, death at the Gayoso Hotel, and Sherman's self-reproach and midnight letter.
- Middlemarch, Book III, Chapters XXVI-XXVII
Lydgate diagnoses Fred Vincy's typhoid fever against the prior opinion of Mr. Wrench and supervises his nursing.
- Moby-Dick, Chapter 110
Queequeg wastes with fever, orders his coffin and recovers.
- No Exit and Three Other Plays, No Exit
Estelle mentions dying of pneumonia; each character describes the manner of death.
- Northanger Abbey, Vol. II, Ch. 8–9
Catherine's suspicions about Mrs Tilney's death and Henry's account of her illness and the physicians who attended her.
- Number the Stars, Chapter 10
Mama tells the officer that the doctor warned of typhus and the casket should stay closed, then offers to open it herself.
- Old Yeller, Burn Sanderson's visit
Sanderson warns the family that hydrophobia is loose in the country and describes how it spreads among animals.
- Old Yeller, The wolf at the fire
A rabid wolf attacks Mama and Lisbeth at night; Old Yeller kills it and is bitten, and Mama and Travis decide he must be shot.
- Oliver Twist, Chapters XXVIII-XXX
Oliver, shot in the arm during the burglary, lies feverish at the Maylies' house; Mr. Losberne treats him and protects him from the Bow Street officers.
- Oliver Twist, Chapter XXXIII
Rose Maylie's sudden, dangerous fever and the anxious watch kept by Mrs. Maylie and Oliver until she recovers.
- On Medicine, Book 2
Fever, crisis, prognosis and evacuations structure the management of acute illness.
- On Medicine, Book 3
Inflammation is described through redness, swelling, heat and pain, a durable clinical formula.
- On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (De Motu Cordis), Ch. XVI
Contagion, poisoned wounds, rabies, the lues venerea, tertian fever and externally applied medicines are explained by the returning current of blood.
- On the Nature of the Universe, Book 6, plague of Athens
The poem ends with fever, thirst, sores, despair, contagion-like care and burial breakdown.
- On the Road, Part Three
Dean's injured thumb becomes infected and is treated, a recurring image of his self-inflicted damage.
- On the Road, Part Four (Mexico City)
Sal falls ill with fever and dysentery and is left behind by Dean.
- On War, Book V, Ch. 12, Marches (continued)
Sickness in crowded quarters versus on the road; soldiers drinking cold water after heat exhaustion; Napoleon's losses of 95,000 to sickness and straggling on the march to Smolensk in 1812.
- On War, Introductory memoir (Graham/Maude edition)
Clausewitz's death from cholera at Breslau in November 1831, apparently contracted with the army of observation on the Polish frontier.
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Morning, the infirmary
Shukhov, feverish, asks to be excused from work; Vdovushkin takes his temperature, finds it too low, and sends him out.
- Paradise Lost, Book XI
Michael's vision of the lazar-house lists the diseases, madness and melancholy that will afflict Adam's descendants.
- Personal Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XVI
A year-long attack of fever and ague in 1858 that undermines his farming.
- Personal Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XXXII
The flooded winter before Vicksburg: malarial fevers, measles and smallpox among troops, hospital arrangements Grant credits with limiting deaths, and orders establishing general hospitals between Duckport and Milliken's Bend.
- Philosophy of Natural Science, Ch. 2
Semmelweis rejects epidemic influences, overcrowding, rough examination, the priest's bell and delivery position as causes of the excess mortality in the First Division.
- Principles of Geology, Book II, Ch. XXVIII
Deaths after the Calabrian earthquake of 1783 from epidemics attributed to insufficient food, exposure and malaria from new stagnant lakes.
- Ruth, Ch. 5–7
Bellingham's fever in Wales; his mother takes over the sickroom and excludes Ruth.
- Ruth, Ch. 34–35
Ruth nurses Donne through the fever, falls ill herself and dies in delirium.
- Sanshirō, Final chapters
Sanshirō takes to his bed with influenza after returning Mineko's money.
- Sense and Sensibility, Vol. III, Ch. 6–7
Marianne's fever at Cleveland after walks in the wet; Mr Harris the apothecary attends, fears of infection send the Palmers' baby away, and Elinor nurses her through the crisis.
- Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Devotions, opening meditations
Donne observes the onset of illness and turns bodily vulnerability into spiritual inquiry.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book III (Wadi Ais, March 1917)
Ill with dysentery and fever and covered in boils, Lawrence lies in a tent for some ten days and thinks out the theory of guerrilla war.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book X (Damascus, October 1918)
Lawrence finds a Turkish military hospital full of dead and dying men and organises its cleaning and burials amid the chaos of the city's first days.
- Sonnets, Sonnet 147
Love as a fever that feeds the disease; Reason the physician leaves in anger because his prescriptions are ignored, and the patient is frantic-mad.
- St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles, Water of St. Thomas
Blood mixed with water becomes a portable contact relic used externally and internally in healing stories.
- 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.
- Sts. Roch and Sebastian: Plague Saints, Roch at Aquapendente and Piacenza
Roch tends plague victims and then contracts plague himself, making the healer's exposure central to the legend.
- Summa Theologica, I, Q. 84, Arts. 7–8
Understanding depends on phantasms; lesions in frenzy and lethargy impair it; sleep, vapours, fever-dreams and partly lucid dreams explained physiologically.
- Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, Chapter XII
Trench fever and hospital at Le Tréport, and the wound received at Mount Bernenchon in April 1918.
- Swann's Way, Place-Names: The Name
Excitement at the planned spring journey to Florence and Venice brings on a persistent fever, and the doctor forbids travel for a year and anything liable to excite the boy.
- Tanglewood Tales, The Wayside (introduction)
Hawthorne reports which Tanglewood children have had scarlet fever, whooping cough, a measles-like eruption, and troublesome second teeth.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Malta)
Nursing in Malta, including her own illness during service there.
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
Mrs. Toller explains that Alice Rucastle, harried by her father to sign away her rights, fell ill with brain fever for six weeks and had her hair cut off.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 22
Tom is laid up with measles for weeks while a revival sweeps the town.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 19
Alexander falls ill after bathing in the cold Cydnus and drinks his physician Philip's draught while showing him an accusation of poisoning.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 72
Hephaestion dies of fever after eating against his doctor's orders; Alexander has the physician executed and mourns extravagantly.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 75–77
Alexander's final fever at Babylon, day by day from the royal journals, with Plutarch's discussion of poisoning rumours.
- The Age of Fable, Chapter XII, Cadmus--The Myrmidons
Aeacus narrates the plague of Aegina: corrupted air and water, the death of animals first, fever and thirst, contagion that kills the physicians, and the collapse of social restraint.
- The Alexiad, Book I
Anna's analogy between the empire's rebels and fevers that physicians attribute to climate, diet or the humours.
- The Art of War, Ch. IX.11–12
Armies prefer high, sunny ground; camping on hard ground near water and pasture keeps the army free from disease; commentators call low ground damp and unhealthy.
- The Art of War, Book VI
How Roman generals avoided disease: fleeing fens and injurious winds, reading local inhabitants' complexions, shelter, shade, water, timing of marches, physicians, and daily exercise.
- The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Book II, Chapters LXXV-LXXVII
Fever and expectation of death during the casting of the Perseus, followed by sudden recovery.
- The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Book II, Chapter CXIII
The bad air of the Sienese Maremma and the fatal fever of Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici.
- The Birth of Tragedy, Attempt at Self-Criticism, §1
Nietzsche recalls convalescing from a disease brought home from the war and asks whether Socratism and scientific optimism are symptoms of decline and disease.
- The Borrowers, Opening chapters (frame)
Mrs May explains that her brother came from India to Great-Aunt Sophy's house to recover from an illness.
- The Boxcar Children, Chapters 11-12
Violet falls ill in the boxcar; Henry runs for Dr. Moore, who takes the children to his own house and nurses her back to health.
- The Bronze Bow, Final chapters
Leah falls into a high, wasting fever after Daniel drives Marcus away, and Jesus comes to the house and restores her.
- The Civil War, Book III.47–49
Dyrrachium: Caesar's troops eat chara bread and bark; Pompey's army suffers from foul smells, carcasses, hard labour and lack of water after Caesar dams the streams.
- The Civil War, Book III.87
Labienus describes Caesar's veterans as wasted by autumn pestilence in Italy, with invalid cohorts at Brundisium.
- The Comedy of Errors, Act 5, Scene 1
The Abbess traces the husband's supposed madness to broken sleep, disturbed meals and barred recreation leading to fever and melancholy, and offers syrups, drugs and prayers.
- 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 Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablets VII-VIII
Enkidu dreams of the gods' council and of the house of dust, falls sick, lies ill for twelve days and dies; Gilgamesh laments him and will not yield the body until decay begins.
- The Fall, Chapter 6
Clamence receives the stranger in his room while ill with fever.
- The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Life of Sulla 36
Sulla's final illness, described as an infestation of lice and an internal ulcer, ending in a haemorrhage.
- The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Life of Pompey 57
Pompey's serious illness at Naples and Italy-wide celebrations at his recovery.
- The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Chapter 2, The Happiest Age
Endemic disease, mortality, stature and the health of Roman populations at the Antonine peak.
- The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Chapter 6, The Wine-Press of Wrath
The first bubonic plague pandemic from 541, its biology, routes and mortality, alongside the volcanic cooling of the 530s.
- The Golden Legend: Popular Saints, Life of St. George
The healing fountain attached to George's church shows how martyr cult could become a site for illness narratives.
- The Hiding Place, Chapters 9-10
Corrie, sick with influenza, is arrested in the raid; her elderly father dies some ten days after the arrest while she is in solitary confinement.
- The Hiding Place, Chapters 13-14
Ravensbrück: hunger, cold roll calls, fleas and lice, the shared vitamin drops, and Betsie's decline and death in the camp hospital.
- The Histories, Book II, ch. 93
Vitellian soldiers settle in the unhealthy Vatican quarter by the Tiber; disease and mortality rise among the Germans and Gauls.
- The History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 2.47–54
The plague enters Athens and produces fever, inflamed eyes, throat distress, ulcers, thirst, diarrhea and high mortality.
- The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chapter 14
After the hound's attack Sir Henry is revived with brandy; that night the shock brings on a delirious high fever, and Mortimer later takes him round the world to recover.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter II, the dream of Irma's injection
A patient with hysterical symptoms, a throat examination revealing white patches, colleagues diagnosing infection and blaming an injection given with an unclean syringe; Freud's analysis of his own professional guilt.
- 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 Journal of John Woolman, Journal, Chapter II
The account of his sister Elizabeth, her care for the sick, and her death of smallpox.
- The Journal of John Woolman, Journal, Chapter XI (closing minutes)
Friends at York record the progress of his smallpox, his prayers, the attempts at medicine, his talk with the apothecary and his death.
- The Jungle Book, Mowgli's Brothers, opening
Father Wolf and the narrator explain that a jackal with dewanee, hydrophobia, is the most feared creature in the jungle.
- The Lives of Richard Hooker, George Herbert and Robert Sanderson, Life of Herbert, at Woodford
Herbert's quotidian ague, his self-prescribed diet, and the supposed consumption that followed.
- The Meek One, Part Two, Ch. 1
Her prolonged fever; the narrator arranges a doctor and nursing care; her silent withdrawal afterwards.
- The Metamorphosis, Part II, end, and Part III
The apple lodged in Gregor's back becomes an inflamed wound that weakens him over the following weeks.
- The Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, 'A Fever'
The poet addresses his feverish mistress, arguing that the world will perish if she dies.
- The Moffats, Chapter 7, Another Sign on the Yellow House
Rufus has scarlet fever, the house is quarantined, and Mama nurses him while the older children keep house.
- The Monroe Doctrine, Navy section, paragraph on Thompson's Island
The malignant fever at the West India station, the loss of medical officers, and Commodore Rodgers's mission with surgeons to determine the fever's origin.
- The Moonstone, Third Narrative
Franklin meets Ezra Jennings, who has nursed Mr. Candy through a fever that has destroyed parts of his memory and kept notes of his wandering speech.
- The Plague, Part I
The appearance of dying rats in buildings and streets, the concierge Michel's fever and swollen glands, and his death.
- The Plague, Part IV
Paneloux's final illness, which the doctors record as a doubtful case because it lacks the usual signs.
- The Prince, Chapter III
The extended analogy between foreseeing political trouble and the physicians' maxim about hectic fever: easy to cure but hard to detect early, easy to detect but hard to cure late.
- The Prince, Chapter VII
Borgia explains that he had planned for everything at his father's death except being himself at the point of death at the same time; illness, not lack of ability, ruins him.
- The Prince, Chapter XIII
Machiavelli recalls the hectic-fever analogy: the scanty wisdom of man cannot discern the poison hidden in a policy that looks good at first.
- The Railway Children, Chapter III, The old gentleman
Dr Forrest diagnoses Mother's influenza and lists what she needs; the children ask the old gentleman for it.
- The River War, Chapter III: The Dervish Empire
The Mahdi falls ill in June 1885; public prayers are offered; he dies of what his attendants recognise as typhus within days.
- The River War, Chapters IV–V
Reforms of the Egyptian army include hospital care for the sick (Ch. IV); the Suakin garrison (Ch. V) suffers malaria, liver abscess, bursati sores in animals and invaliding of a quarter of British officers.
- The River War, Chapter XII: The Battle of the Atbara
Wounded soldiers in high fever carried on a thirty-hour march back to camp without sleep.
- The River War, Chapters XVII–XVIII
Pestilential Fashoda and the Blue Nile operations, where malarial fever affects every European and at one time hundreds of men are sick.
- 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 Roman History, Book XXI, ch. 15
Constantius II falls ill with fever on the march and dies at Mopsucrenae in Cilicia.
- The Sign of the Beaver, Chapter 25
The family arrives and explains the delay: all were sick with typhus, and the baby born in Massachusetts has died.
- The Song of Hiawatha, Canto IX, Hiawatha and the Pearl-Feather
Nokomis describes the magician who sends fever and poisonous exhalations from the marshes.
- The Song of Hiawatha, Canto XX, The Famine
Famine and Fever enter the wigwam; Minnehaha's delirium and death; Hiawatha sits seven days speechless.
- The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, Chapter VI
Harvest work through mumps, pneumonia with no physician called, and the overwork common among the Scottish, English and Irish settlers.
- 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 Sword in the Stone, The Madame Mim episode (1938 text only)
In the shape-changing duel Merlyn becomes the microbes of a number of diseases and destroys the witch in her dragon form.
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Chapters XLVII–XLIX
Helen's letters report Huntingdon's hunting injury, his half-delirium and thirst, the doctor's order to bleed him, his relapse into wine, the onset of mortification, and his death.
- The Thirty-Nine Steps, Chapter VII
A bout of malaria lays Hannay low at Turnbull's cottage, and the roadman nurses him for about ten days.
- The Travels of Marco Polo, Book I, Chapter XXIX
The pure air of the Badakhshan mountains cures fevers, and Marco's own year of illness ends there.
- The True Story of My Life, Chapter I
His father's delirium about Napoleon, the visit to a wise woman instead of a physician, and the father's death.
- The True Story of My Life, Chapter I
Sick with measles, he watches his father leave for war and hears his grandmother say it would be good if he died.
- The Vampyre, Aubrey's return to England
Aubrey suffers fever, terror and apparent mental disorder after Ruthven returns and the oath prevents disclosure.
- The Velveteen Rabbit, Anxious Times / fever chapters
The Boys scarlet fever and the disposal of infected toys.
- The Voyage of the Beagle, imperial encounters
Darwin's observations of slavery in Brazil, frontier warfare in Argentina, and disease among peoples the ship visited set his natural history within the voyage's human world.
- The War of the Worlds, Book Two, Chapter II (What We Saw from the Ruined House)
The narrator's account of Martian anatomy: a body that is mostly brain, no digestion, feeding by injecting living blood, absence of sleep and fatigue, and the absence of bacteria and disease on Mars.
- The War of the Worlds, Book Two, Chapter VIII (Dead London)
The Martians found dead of putrefactive and disease bacteria, with the narrator's explanation of human resistance acquired through natural selection.
- The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Chapters 18-19
Fever spreads through the town, children die, Mercy lies near death, and a mob blames Hannah Tupper's witchcraft.
- The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Chapter 19
Mercy's fever breaks on the night Kit returns from helping Hannah escape.
- The Woman in White, Second Epoch, Marian Halcombe's diary and Mrs. Michelson's narrative
Marian's fever after the rain, the dispute in which Fosco calls the fever typhus against Mr. Dawson's opinion, Fosco's interference and Mrs. Rubelle's nursing.
- Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, Chapter VII
Wounds at San Juan, malaria and dysentery in the army before Santiago, and the round robin to General Shafter.
- Till We Have Faces, Part One, Chapters 4-5
Fever spreads through Glome; Psyche touches and blesses the sick, and the people's gratitude turns to fear as the plague continues.
- Till We Have Faces, Part One, Chapter 7
Orual lies ill with fever while Psyche is prepared for the Great Offering.
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 10
Calpurnia spots the mad dog Tim Johnson and Atticus shoots it in the street.
- Treasure Island, Stockade fighting
The loyal party deals with gunshot wounds, field treatment, fever risk and pain during the island conflict.
- Twenty Years at Hull-House, Chapter XIII, Public Activities and Investigations
The typhoid epidemic of 1902 and the residents' investigation of plumbing near clusters of cases.
- Two Lives of Charlemagne, Einhard, health and death
Charlemagne's fevers, aging and final illness make the emperor's body a political and moral subject.
- Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Part IV (Kwajalein)
Injections given to the captured airmen in what appear to have been medical experiments.
- Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Part IV (Omori and Naoetsu)
Hunger, dysentery, beatings and forced labor in the prisoner-of-war camps.
- Uncle Vanya, Act I
Astroff tells Marina of the typhoid epidemic at Malitskoi and the switchman who died under chloroform.
- Understood Betsy, Chapter I, Aunt Harriet Has a Cough
Old Mrs. Lathrop shouts from a window that the cook has scarlet fever and the house is quarantined.
- Up from Slavery, Chapter VIII
Olivia Davidson's earlier service nursing a smallpox patient in Mississippi and offering herself as a yellow fever nurse in Memphis.
- War and Peace, Book Five, Ch. XVII
Nicholas visits Denísov in a crowded military hospital where typhus is raging and amputees lie untended.
- Washington: A Life, Youth: voyage to Barbados (1751)
Washington contracts smallpox while accompanying his ailing half-brother Lawrence, who died of tuberculosis soon after.
- Washington: A Life, The first term (1789-1790)
The thigh abscess or tumour and the respiratory illness that twice put the new president's life in danger.
- Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Chapter VII
Nursing army officers and their families through the yellow fever epidemic in Kingston in 1853, with many death-bed scenes.
- Wuthering Heights, Catherine's illness and childbirth
Catherine's emotional crisis becomes feverish illness, delirium, childbirth and death.
Quotes
Frequently cited
“I have a work to do in England.”
“Now is the time for the fever. Let it be borne well.”
“As I have heard tell of a certain Spanish poet, who had been seized with sickness, and though he recovered therefrom yet remained so oblivious of his past life, that he would not believe the plays and tragedies he had written to be his own”
“so this disease which is in the republic, if relieved by the punishment of this man, will only get worse and worse, as the rest will be still alive.”
“This was the commencement of a nervous fever which confined me for several months”
Frequently cited
“his nose was as sharp as a pen, and ’a babbled of green fields”
“For the languor clings to me, for causes that do not appear; worn out, I find no help in the physician’s art.”
“breathed typhus through its crowded schoolroom and dormitory, and, ere May arrived, transformed the seminary into an hospital.”
“the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees”
“Which Venime I will not doubt to compare to the biting of a mad Dogge, which is a disease the Physicians call Hydrophobia, or Fear Of Water”
“the Blood in a Pleurisie, getting into the Membrane of the breast, breedeth there an Inflammation, accompanied with a Fever, and painfull stitches”
“But, after the lapse only of a few days, the catechumen, seized with a languor, began to suffer from a violent fever”
“I could not help reproaching myself for having consented to his visit in that sickly region in the summer-time”
“How many trifling illnesses by that means become serious, how many serious ones become mortal”
“I managed to keep along very well until 1858, when I was attacked by fever and ague”
“My reason, the physician to my love, Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,”
“Having been cured of a dangerous illness by the intercession of Cosmas and Damian, Justinian, in gratitude for their aid, rebuilt and adorned their church at Constantinople, and it became a celebrated place of pilgrimage”
“At Piacenza, he himself was stricken with the plague”
“If, however, the evaporation be somewhat less, phantasms appear, but distorted and without sequence; thus it happens in a case of fever”
“Nor could the physicians help, for the disease attacked them also, and the contact of the sick gave them infection”
“Then for to avoide infirmitie, thei did flie from places Fennie, or subjecte to hurtfull windes: whiche thei knewe not so well, by the qualitie of the situacion, as by the face of the inhabitours: for when thei sawe theim evill coloured, or swollen, or full of other infeccion, thei would not lodge there”
“and camp on hard ground, the army will be free from disease of every kind”
Frequently cited
“I felt such vigour fill my veins, that all those pains of fever, all those fears of death, were quite forgotten.”
“slowly recovering from a disease brought home from the field, made up his mind definitely regarding the "Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of _Music”
“that they themselves were not in good health from their confinement within so narrow a compass, from the noisome smell, the number of carcasses, and the constant fatigue to them, being men unaccustomed to work, and labouring under a great want of water”
“many fell victims to the autumnal pestilence in Italy, many returned home, and many were left behind on the continent. Have you not heard that the cohorts at Brundisium are composed of invalids”
“Unquiet meals make ill digestions; Thereof the raging fire of fever bred, And what’s a fever but a fit of madness?”
“The king established a church there in honor of Our Lady and of Saint George, in which there flows to this day a fountain of living water that heals sick people who drink from it”
“Father, don’t you see that I am burning”
“I believe my being here is in the Wisdom of Christ; I know not as to Life or Death.”
“Lord, abate my great affliction, or increase my patience: but Lord, I repine not”
“as the physicians say it happens in hectic fever, that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult to cure”
“Presently those who attended him could doubt no longer that he was attacked by typhus fever”
“The columns were encumbered with wounded, most of whom were already in a high state of fever, and whose sufferings were painful to witness”
“father was an enthusiast, and always said and believed that God and hard work were by far the best doctors.”
“He was a true friend in need, that old roadman.”
Frequently cited
“slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.”
“By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers”
“delirium falsifies perception, madness the thoughts”