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
Heredity Degeneration
Heredity, inherited madness or disease, degeneration theory, eugenics.
Works
In the 1990s scientists at Myriad Genetics, a Salt Lake City company, determined the location and nucleotide sequence of two human genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. Certain mutations in these genes greatly raise a woman's risk of breast and ovarian cancer, and knowledge of the sequences allowed Myriad to build tests that detect those mutations.
Subtitled 'Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future', Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche's attempt to restate in plain argumentative prose, divided into 296 numbered sections and a closing poem, the ideas that Thus Spoke Zarathustra had put in prophetic form. The preface opens by supposing that truth is a woman and that dogmatic philosophers, with their clumsy seriousness, have never known how to win her.
Maudsley's Body and Mind argues that mental life cannot be separated from bodily organization, nervous function, heredity, and disease. Based on the Gulstonian Lectures, the book brings Victorian psychiatry, physiology, and evolutionary thought into one frame.
This record concerns compulsory sterilization and is best read with a teacher's guidance. In March 1924 Virginia enacted a statute permitting the superintendents of certain state institutions to have inmates sterilized if, after a hearing, they were found to be afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity or what the law called imbecility.
Bleuler's Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias reworks Kraepelin's deteriorating psychosis into a broader and more psychologically complex group of disorders. Its most famous act is terminological: Bleuler introduces schizophrenia to name a splitting or disjunction in psychic functions, not a split personality in the popular sense.
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.
East of Eden is a multigenerational saga set mainly in the Salinas Valley of California from the Civil War to the First World War, which retells the story of Cain and Abel through two families: the Trasks and the Hamiltons, the latter being the narrator's own maternal ancestors. Samuel Hamilton, a poor, inventive, generous Irish immigrant farmer and blacksmith, raises a large family on barren land.
Montaigne called his pieces essais, 'trials' or 'attempts', and the word names both a method and a new literary genre. The book gathers 107 chapters in three books, ranging from one-page notes on thumbs, smells and names to the sprawling 'Apology for Raymond Sebond', which fills a sixth of the whole.
Essays and Aphorisms is the title of the selection translated by R. J. Hollingdale from Schopenhauer's Parerga and Paralipomena, the two volumes of 'appendices and omissions' he published in 1851 to make his system available to general readers. The book that resulted is the opposite of a treatise: short, sardonic, quotable pieces on suffering, death, religion, women, reading, noise, ethics and psychology, all resting on the metaphysics of his early masterpiece.
Gregor Mendel's 'Experiments in Plant Hybridisation' was read to the Natural History Society of Brünn (now Brno, in the Czech Republic) at its meetings of 8 February and 8 March 1865 and printed in the Society's proceedings, which appeared in 1866. Mendel, an Augustinian friar and schoolteacher, reported eight years of crossing varieties of the garden pea in his monastery garden.
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.
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.
Jude Fawley is an orphan boy raised by his great-aunt Drusilla in the downland village of Marygreen. When the schoolmaster Richard Phillotson leaves for the university city of Christminster, Jude fixes his hopes on following him.
Kraepelin's Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry introduces readers to psychiatric diagnosis through bedside cases and disease course. Rather than beginning with abstract definitions, the lectures proceed from patients: mood disturbance, excitement, confusion, delusions, hallucinations, deterioration, alcoholism, epilepsy, paralysis, dementia praecox, manic-depressive insanity, and other clinical groupings.
Griesinger gives nineteenth-century psychiatry a somatic and medical program. Mental Pathology and Therapeutics treats insanity as a disorder of the brain, even while admitting how little pathological anatomy could yet prove.
Jefferson's selected writings show the range and tensions of the revolutionary Enlightenment in America. Notes on the State of Virginia began as answers to questions from a French diplomat, but it became Jefferson's most sustained book: a survey of Virginia's geography, natural history, laws, economy, population, slavery, Indigenous peoples, education, religion, and politics.
On the Origin of Species argues that species are not fixed, separately created kinds but populations changed over time by variation, inheritance, struggle, natural selection, and descent with modification. Darwin begins with variation under domestication, using pigeons, livestock, and cultivated plants to show how small differences can be preserved and accumulated.
Psychopathia Sexualis is a medico-forensic taxonomy of sexual behavior written for physicians and lawyers. Krafft-Ebing organizes case histories under categories such as hyperaesthesia, anaesthesia, paraesthesia, sadism, masochism, fetishism, and contrary sexual feeling, using the language of degeneration, neuropathic heredity, and criminal responsibility.
Mr. Utterson, a reserved and loyal London lawyer, takes his Sunday walk with his kinsman Richard Enfield, who points out a shabby door in a by-street and tells how, at three one winter morning, he saw a small man trample a little girl and walk on. Caught and threatened, the man paid close to a hundred pounds in compensation with a cheque signed by a respected gentleman.
The Abolition of Man is the text of three lectures C. S. Lewis gave as the Riddell Memorial Lectures at King's College, Newcastle upon Tyne, then part of the University of Durham, in February 1943, and published that year by Oxford University Press with the subtitle Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. The first lecture, Men without Chests, begins with a small English textbook for schoolchildren, which Lewis calls The Green Book and whose authors he names Gaius and Titius out of courtesy.
The Antichrist is Nietzsche's most direct assault on Christianity as a moral and cultural force. It argues that Christianity reverses life-affirming values, sanctifies weakness, elevates pity, falsifies psychology, and turns resentment into virtue.
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 Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is a selection of Lovecraft's tales, edited with notes by the Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, tracing his development from early Poe-influenced pieces to the 'cosmic horror' for which he is known. Lovecraft's central idea is that humanity is an insignificant accident in a vast, indifferent universe, and that knowledge of this truth is enough to destroy sanity.
The Descent of Man applies evolutionary theory to human beings and develops Darwin's account of sexual selection. Darwin argues that humans share ancestry with other animals and that differences between human and animal mental faculties are differences of degree rather than absolute kind.
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.
The Murder on the Links is Agatha Christie's second Hercule Poirot novel, narrated like the first by Captain Arthur Hastings. Returning from Paris on the Calais boat-train, Hastings meets a pert young actress with black curls who calls herself Cinderella.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde's only novel, a moral fable told in the polished language of the London drawing room. In the studio of the painter Basil Hallward, the witty Lord Henry Wotton sees an unfinished portrait of an extraordinarily handsome young man and insists on meeting its subject.
The Portable Faulkner is not a single work in the usual sense but an edited map of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction. Malcolm Cowley arranged stories, novel excerpts, genealogical material and commentary so that readers could see Faulkner's invented county as one continuous historical field.
The 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.
The Twelve Caesars offers biographies of Julius Caesar and the first eleven Roman emperors from Augustus through Domitian. Suetonius does not write history as Tacitus does, with sustained analysis of institutions and causation.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. Instead of studying churches, creeds or theology, James studies personal religious experience as a psychologist, drawing on a large collection of first-person documents: diaries, autobiographies, letters and replies to questionnaires.
Twilight of the Idols is Nietzsche in compressed diagnostic form. Subtitled How to Philosophize with a Hammer, it tests inherited idols by sounding them for hollowness.
What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell is a short book based on public lectures that Erwin Schrödinger gave at Trinity College Dublin in February 1943, under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
White Fang follows a wolf-dog from his birth in a cave in the frozen North to a sunny estate in California. The novel opens with two men, Bill and Henry, hauling a coffin across the Yukon wilderness while a starving wolf pack trails them.
Passages
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, A Doll's House, Act 2
Dr Rank speaks of the inherited disease destroying his spine and of the final examination he is making on himself.
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, Ghosts, Act 2
Osvald recounts the Paris doctor's verdict that he was born with a worm-eaten constitution, and reveals he carries morphine powders.
- Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., Opinion of the Court, Part I–B, at the sentence beginning The average American woman has a 12- to 13-percent risk
Thomas gives the Court's figures for the lifetime cancer risk associated with BRCA mutations, the medical stakes that made Myriad's test valuable.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Three, §62
Religions as protectors of the 'defective, diseased, degenerating'; the passage expresses selectionist views that later eugenic readers exploited.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Six, §208
Scepticism diagnosed as 'nervous debility' produced by mixing of classes and races, an example of degeneration theory applied to culture.
- Body and Mind, Heredity sections
The discussion of inherited predisposition shows Victorian psychiatry moving toward degeneration theory.
- Buck v. Bell, Opinion of the Court, the statute's preamble: that experience has shown that heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, imbecility, etc.
Holmes summarizes the legislative findings on heredity and the discharge of institutionalized patients, the hereditarian premises on which the statute rested.
- Dracula, Ch. 25
Mina and Van Helsing describe Dracula as a criminal type in the terms of Nordau and Lombroso.
- East of Eden, Part One (Cathy's early chapters)
The narrator's reflections on Cathy as a 'monster' born without conscience, and her killing of her parents.
- Essays, Book II, Ch. XXXVII, 'Of the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers'
First-person account of kidney stone attacks, speculation on hereditary transmission from his father, and a long critique of physicians' contradictions and fees.
- Essays and Aphorisms, On Human Nature, 'Government', 'Free-will and Fatalism' and 'Character' (stored text)
Character inherited from the father, innate and unalterable; intellectual differences grounded in brain and nervous system.
- Experiments in Plant Hybridisation (in Bateson's Mendel's Principles of Heredity), Bateson, Introduction, opening and section on the law of ancestral heredity
Bateson's forecast that the laws of heredity will change man's outlook and power, and his comparison of Galton's ancestral law, drawn partly from human stature, with Mendel's principle.
- Experiments in Plant Hybridisation (in Bateson's Mendel's Principles of Heredity), Mendel, The Reproductive Cells of the Hybrids
The hypothesis that hybrids form equal numbers of germ cells of each parental type, the basis of later recessive and dominant patterns of inherited disease.
- Heart of Darkness, Part I (the Company office)
The doctor measures Marlow's cranium, asks whether there is madness in his family and notes that he never sees those who go out return.
- Jane Eyre, Chapters XXVI-XXVII
Bertha is shown in her attic room with Grace Poole; Rochester recounts her family history of madness, his reasons for keeping her at Thornfield, and the hiring of her keeper from the Grimsby Retreat.
- Jude the Obscure, Part Sixth, Ch. II
The deaths of the three children at the Christminster lodgings, the boy's note, and the Doctor's theory of children who wish not to live.
- Notes on the State of Virginia, Selected Letters, and The Jefferson Bible, Notes on Virginia, queries on population and race
Jefferson's racial claims show Enlightenment classification entering political arguments about slavery, bodily difference, and human equality.
- On the Origin of Species, Variation under domestication
On the Origin of Species gives this tag concrete force through darwin matters to medicine through heredity, variation, adaptation, population thinking, and later debates over degeneration, eugenics, and disease ecology
- Psychopathia Sexualis, Case-history sections
The cases show the power and danger of translating desire into degenerative pathology.
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case
Jekyll explains that his original supply of salt was impure, that fresh supplies fail, and that he expects his last transformation.
- The Abolition of Man, Lecture III
Power over nature analysed as power of some men over others, with contraception, eugenics and prenatal conditioning as examples of control by one generation over its successors.
- The Antichrist, Opening aphorisms
Nietzsche uses health, decadence, and instinct as evaluative language against Christian morality.
- 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 Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family'
A family history of madness and 'taint' culminating in Arthur Jermyn's self-immolation.
- The Descent of Man, Race and inheritance sections
Victorian heredity and racial assumptions show both the influence and the danger of evolutionary medicine.
- The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chapter 1
Watson reads Dr. Mortimer's entry in the Medical Directory: Charing Cross house-surgeon, prize essay on whether disease is a reversion, papers on atavism in the Lancet and on progress in the Journal of Psychology.
- The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chapter 1
Mortimer admires Holmes's long skull and supra-orbital development and asks to run his finger along his parietal fissure.
- The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chapter 13
Holmes uncovers Stapleton's face in the portrait of Hugo Baskerville and speaks of a physical and spiritual throwback.
- The Murder on the Links, Chapter 28, Journey's End
Jack fears that as his father's son no one will marry him; Poirot says he believes in heredity but reminds him that he is also his mother's son.
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter XI
Dorian walks the portrait gallery at Selby and imagines inheriting the sins and passions of his ancestors.
- The Portable Faulkner, Light in August selections
Joe Christmas's alienation and the violence around racial identity invite discussion of trauma, heredity myths and social pathology.
- The Portable Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! selections
Sutpen's dynastic design and its collapse link racial violence, obsession, family secrets and intergenerational damage.
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Chapter XLI
Helen describes giving her son wine dosed with tartar-emetic until he is disgusted by every kind of liquor, and her fear that he may inherit the taste.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture I: Religion and Neurology
Critique of medical materialism; acknowledgement that religious leaders often show nervous instability, and the argument that origin does not determine value.
- Twilight of the Idols, Skirmishes sections
Health, sickness, strength, and decline become tools of cultural criticism.
- What Is Life?, Chapters 2-3
Mendelian inheritance, recessive mutations carried without effect in heterozygotes, and X-ray induced mutation rates used to estimate gene size.
- What Is Life?, Chapter 4
The permanence of hereditary traits across many generations explained by the quantum stability of the gene molecule.
- White Fang, Part V, Chapter V
The account of Jim Hall's childhood and prison treatment, described as soft clay moulded by brutality.
Quotes
“skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain many-sided physiological temperament, which in ordinary language is called nervous debility and sickliness”
“A man's character, as my readers are aware, assuredly comes to him from his father”
“the changes take place inside, you know”
“They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them.”
“Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult—at least I have found it so—than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind”
Frequently cited
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one”
Frequently cited
“from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”
“There was consumption in my father's family, two of his brothers having died of that disease, which made my symptoms more alarming”
“might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of weariness, of disease, of anarchically disintegrating instincts”
“it is an interesting instance of a throwback, which appears to be both physical and spiritual.”
“You are your mother’s son as well as your father’s.”
“Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic”
“His heredity was a life-stuff that may be likened to clay.”