Hume subtitled his first book 'an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects', and he meant it literally: as Newton had explained the heavens by a few observed principles, Hume would explain belief, emotion and morality by a few principles of the mind. Book I, Of the Understanding, begins by dividing all perceptions into vivid impressions and fainter ideas, and holds that every simple idea is copied from a prior impression.
Medical tag
Humoral Medicine
Humoral theory (blood, phlegm, yellow/black bile), temperaments, Galenic medicine.
Works
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.
Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of England was published in London in November 1644, deliberately without a licence, a printer's name or registration with the Stationers' Company. It is written as an oration addressed to the Lords and Commons, though it was never delivered.
As You Like It begins with two households divided by envy. Orlando, youngest son of the late Sir Rowland de Boys, complains to the old servant Adam that his elder brother Oliver keeps him like a peasant and denies him the education his father willed him.
De Materia Medica is an ancient pharmacopoeia: a systematic guide to plants, animals, minerals, wines, oils and manufactured preparations used as medicines. Dioscorides does not write a narrative.
Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-dalal) is the intellectual autobiography of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, the most influential theologian of medieval Sunni Islam. Written in Arabic about 1106–1110, after he had resumed teaching at Nishapur, it answers a 'brother in the faith' who has asked how he found his way through the quarrelling schools of his day and why he gave up his famous chair at Baghdad.
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.
Bacon's Essays, or Counsels, Civil and Moral, grew over almost thirty years from a slim volume of ten pieces in 1597 to fifty-eight in the final edition of 1625, the text used here. Bacon borrowed the name essay from Montaigne, but where Montaigne explored himself at leisure, Bacon compressed observation into dense, balanced sentences meant for men of business and government.
Heraclitus's book does not survive; what remains are roughly 130 short sayings preserved as quotations by later authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus and Diogenes Laertius. Modern editions number them according to Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (DK), and the reference edition presents them in a fresh translation with commentary.
Galen: Selected Works introduces a physician whose ambition was encyclopedic. The surviving Galenic corpus ranges from technical anatomy and pulse lore to philosophical defenses of method, from therapeutics and compound drugs to autobiography and polemic against rivals.
Gargantua and Pantagruel is the collective title of five comic books about a dynasty of giants, written by François Rabelais and published between 1532 and 1564. Pantagruel appeared first, at Lyon in 1532, under the anagram pen-name Alcofribas Nasier; Gargantua, about the father, followed in 1534 or 1535 and is now printed as Book I. The Third Book (1546) and the Fourth Book (complete 1552) bore Rabelais's own name, and a Fifth Book was published in 1564, eleven years after his death; how much of it he wrote is disputed.
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver, presents itself as the sober memoir of a ship's surgeon. In Part I, shipwrecked, Gulliver wakes on the shore of Lilliput tied down by people six inches tall.
Henry IV, Part 1 shows King Henry IV, who took the crown from Richard II, troubled by rebellion and by his own son. In Act I the king, hoping to lead a crusade to atone for Richard's fall, hears instead of war on the Welsh and Scottish borders, and envies the Earl of Northumberland his son Harry Percy, called Hotspur, who has won a victory at Holmedon, while his own heir, Prince Hal, wastes his days in the taverns of Eastcheap with the fat old knight Sir John Falstaff.
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.
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.
Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's tragedy of the assassination of 44 BC, begins as Rome celebrates Caesar's triumph over the sons of Pompey. The tribunes rebuke the fickle crowd, a soothsayer warns Caesar to beware the Ides of March, and Caesar is offered a crown three times by Mark Antony and refuses it, then falls in a fit of the falling sickness.
Usama ibn Munqidh dictated these reminiscences, known in Arabic as the Kitab al-I'tibar (the Book of Learning by Example), when he was nearly ninety lunar years old and living in Damascus under Saladin's patronage. The book is not a continuous autobiography but a sequence of anecdotes, grouped loosely by subject and linked by association, meant to teach that the length of each life is fixed by God and that neither daring nor caution can change it.
Much Ado About Nothing is set in Messina, Sicily, where the governor Leonato welcomes Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon, and his officers home from a victorious war. With the Prince come the young Florentine lord Claudio and the witty Paduan soldier Benedick, and also the Prince's sullen half-brother Don John, lately reconciled after a rebellion.
The Novum Organum ('new instrument') is the second and only substantially completed part of Bacon's projected Instauratio Magna, a six-part plan to rebuild human knowledge from its foundations. Its title throws down a challenge to the Organon, the collection of Aristotle's logical works that had governed university teaching for centuries.
De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Seven Books on the Fabric of the Human Body) was printed at Basel by Johannes Oporinus in 1543, when its author, Andreas Vesalius, professor at Padua, was twenty-eight. Its seven books describe the bones and cartilages, the ligaments and muscles, the veins and arteries, the nerves, the organs of nutrition and generation, the heart and the organs of the chest, and the brain and the senses.
De Magnete, magneticisque corporibus, et de magno magnete tellure (On the Magnet, Magnetick Bodies Also, and on the Great Magnet the Earth) was published in London in 1600 by William Gilbert, a Colchester-born physician who became president of the College of Physicians that year. It is the first large book devoted to experimental study of magnetism and one of the earliest works of natural philosophy built on systematic, repeated experiment.
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.
Orlando is a comic, fantastical biography of an English nobleman and poet who lives from the last years of Elizabeth I to the eleventh of October 1928, ageing only about twenty years and becoming a woman along the way. The book opens with the sixteen-year-old Orlando slashing at a Moor's head in the attic of his family's enormous house in the country.
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of two young lovers from feuding families in Verona, compressed by Shakespeare into about four days. A sonnet Prologue announces that a pair of star-crossed lovers will end their parents' strife by their deaths.
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. Vitus and the Dancing Mania joins two histories that later language often confuses: the hagiographic cult of a youthful martyr and the medical naming of involuntary or epidemic movement. The saint layer is late antique and medieval.
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.
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 Anatomy of Melancholy presents itself as a medical treatise, laid out in the scholastic manner of partitions, sections, members and subsections, on 'what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it'. It is also an encyclopedia of Renaissance learning, a compendium of quotation from more than a thousand authors, a satire on human folly, and a consolation for its author and readers.
The Canon of Medicine (al-Qanun fi al-Tibb) is Ibn Sina's encyclopedia of medicine in five books, and Book I, the subject of this record, sets out the general principles on which the rest depends. It opens with a definition: medicine is the science of the states of the human body in health and when not in health, and of how health is lost and restored, with a theoretical part that gives knowledge and a practical part that guides the physician's judgment.
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories framed by a pilgrimage. One April, the narrator, who calls himself Chaucer, is lodging at the Tabard Inn in Southwark when a company of some twenty-nine pilgrims arrives on its way to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury.
The Collar is a 36-line lyric from George Herbert's The Temple, the book of religious poems published in 1633, a few months after his death. Its speaker, a man bound to God's service and often read as a priest like Herbert himself, rises in revolt against that service.
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.
Book I of The Faerie Queene, the Legend of the Knight of the Red Cross, or of Holiness, tells how a young, untried knight wins his spurs by freeing a kingdom from a dragon and, on the way, learns how easily a Christian soul is deceived. Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, has sent the Redcrosse Knight, who bears a bloody cross on breast and shield, to help the lady Una, whose royal parents are besieged in their brazen castle by a monstrous dragon.
The Merchant of Venice joins two stories, a bond for a pound of flesh and a lottery of caskets, and moves between the commercial city of Venice and Belmont, the country estate of the heiress Portia. Antonio, a wealthy merchant, opens the play sad without knowing why.
The Misanthrope and Other Plays collects several of Molière's comedies; the edition translated by John Wood and David Coward includes The Misanthrope, The Sicilian, Tartuffe, A Doctor in Spite of Himself and The Imaginary Invalid. Together they show the range of Molière's art, from the verse comedy of character to farce, and his satire of hypocrisy, pretension and medicine.
The Muqaddimah (Introduction) is the opening part of Ibn Khaldun's universal history, the Kitab al-Ibar, and has long been read on its own as a treatise on the nature of human society and the method of history. Ibn Khaldun wrote it in 1377 during a retreat from court life at the castle of Qal'at Ibn Salama, in the hills of what is now western Algeria, and kept revising it for the rest of his life in Cairo.
Ammianus Marcellinus wrote his history in thirty-one books, beginning with the accession of Nerva in AD 96, where Tacitus had stopped, and ending with the Gothic victory at Adrianople in 378. The first thirteen books are lost.
The Satires of Horace and Persius brings together two Roman satiric voices separated by style, temperament and political world. Horace's Sermones, written after the civil wars and during the rise of Augustus, are conversational poems about greed, ambition, social climbing, sexual folly, legacy-hunting, literary quarrels, dinner parties and the art of living within limits.
The Sceptical Chymist is a philosophical dialogue in which Robert Boyle tests the two reigning theories of what bodies are made of: the four elements of the Aristotelians (earth, water, air and fire) and the three principles, or tria prima, of the Paracelsian chemists (salt, sulphur and mercury). Both schools appealed to the same evidence, the analysis of mixed bodies by fire.
The Taming of the Shrew is a play within a play. In the Induction, the drunken tinker Christopher Sly is thrown out of an alehouse and falls asleep on the heath.
Timaeus offers Plato's most elaborate cosmological account, framed by Socrates' wish to see the ideal city in motion and Critias's story of ancient Athens and Atlantis. Timaeus then delivers a likely story about the cosmos, not a demonstration with mathematical certainty.
Passages
- A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part III, Sect. 9–10
Repetition, education and lying give ideas the vivacity of belief; a lively imagination can degenerate into madness when a ferment of the blood and spirits makes fictions indistinguishable from memories.
- A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, Sect. 7
Hume's despair, dread of error, sense of monstrous isolation and 'heated' brain, followed by recovery through dining, backgammon and conversation; he names his mood a splenetic humour.
- 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 II
Constitutions, diets and seasons that dispose to smallpox and to measles.
- Areopagitica, Part two, on reading
Wholesome and unwholesome meats, the vitiated stomach and healthy concoction, and God's leaving the diet of body and mind to temperance.
- As You Like It, Act 4, Scene 1
Jaques's catalogue of the kinds of melancholy and Rosalind's reply.
- De Materia Medica, Book 4, hellebore
Black and white hellebore are purgative drugs associated in ancient medicine with melancholia and madness.
- Deliverance from Error (The Confessions of al-Ghazali), Divisions of the Philosophic Sciences (Physics; Moral Philosophy)
Medicine as the study of the body's organs and their changes; the honey in the surgeon's cupping glass.
- Don Quixote, Part I, Ch. 1
Little sleep and much reading dry Alonso Quixano's brain until he loses his wits.
- Essays, Essay XXVII, Of Friendship
Friendship as the remedy for 'stoppings and suffocations' of the heart; contemporary remedies for liver, spleen, lungs and brain; those without friends as cannibals of their own hearts; a physician unacquainted with the patient's body may cure the disease and kill the patient.
- Fragments, Diogenes Laertius, Lives IX.3–4 (ancient testimony)
Account of Heraclitus's dropsy, his riddle to the physicians and his attempt to cure himself with dung.
- Galen: Selected Works, On the Natural Faculties, Book 1
Galen argues that organs possess faculties such as attraction, retention and expulsion, grounding physiology in active powers.
- Galen: Selected Works, Commentaries on Hippocratic aphorisms
Galen’s discussions of melancholia, mania and phrenitis transmit Hippocratic categories through humoral explanation.
- Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book I, Chapter XXIII
Ponocrates purges Gargantua with Anticyrian hellebore to make him forget the sophisters' teaching, then sets a regimen of study, meals, exercise and sleep.
- Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book III, Chapters XXXI-XXXIV
The physician Rondibilis advises Panurge on the cooling of desire, on marriage and on cuckoldry, and accepts his fee with a show of reluctance.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part IV, Ch. 6
Gulliver explains European physicians, purges, clysters and the habit of foretelling death to save reputation.
- Henry IV, Part 1, Act 2, Scene 3
Lady Percy describes Hotspur's lost appetite and sleep, his starting, sweating and murmuring of battles in his dreams.
- 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.
- Hippocratic Writings, Aphorisms, Book 6
Aphoristic remarks classify melancholic and phrenitic states within bodily illness and prognosis.
- Memoirs of Usama ibn Munqidh, Section I, ch. 8, 'Their curious medication'
Thabit's poultice and diet; the Frankish amputation by axe and the scalp incision of a woman judged possessed; both patients die.
- Much Ado About Nothing, Act 1, Scene 3
Don John rejects Conrade's counsel of patient sufferance, which he calls a moral medicine, and insists on showing his sadness.
- Much Ado About Nothing, Act 3, Scene 4
Margaret recommends distilled Carduus benedictus for Beatrice's cold, with a pun on Benedick.
- Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism LXVI
Bacon criticises the doctrines of elementary qualities and occult specific powers while commending physicians' attention to attraction, astringency, maturation and other secondary qualities of medicines.
- On the Fabric of the Human Body (Preface), Fabrica, Book VI
Description of the heart and doubt that blood sweats through the septum between the ventricles, sharpened in the 1555 edition.
- On the Magnet (De Magnete), Book I, Ch. XV
Preparation and use of iron and steel as remedies for disorders of the liver and spleen, with warnings against their misuse and a discussion of whether iron is warm or cold.
- On the Magnet (De Magnete), Book II, Ch. II
Galen's three kinds of attraction and the analogy of the cupping-glass, which Gilbert rejects as explanations of amber's attraction.
- On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (De Motu Cordis), Introduction
Harvey sets out and examines the Galenic teaching on arteries, spirits, pores in the septum and the uses of the pulse.
- Orlando: A Biography, Chapter 1
Orlando's sudden falls from joy into melancholy on the frozen Thames, and the narrator's reflection on happiness, melancholy and madness.
- Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 1
Montague describes Romeo's sleeplessness, tears and darkened room, calling it a black and portentous humour; Benvolio prescribes looking at other beauties.
- Sonnets, Sonnets 44-45
The four elements divided between the heavy body (earth, water) and swift thought and desire (air, fire); when the lighter two are absent, the speaker sinks into melancholy.
- Sonnets, Sonnet 118
Purging to prevent unseen maladies used as a figure for the speaker's turning to worse company; the couplet says the drugs poison him.
- St. Vitus and the Dancing Mania, Hecker on Paracelsus
Paracelsus divides the disorder into kinds and treats some patients by coercive regimen, showing medicalization without modern therapeutic softness.
- Summa Theologica, I, Q. 91, Art. 3
The fitness of the human body: equable temperament, the largest brain relative to body size, upright posture, and the trade-off with smell and speed.
- Summa Theologica, I, Q. 111, Arts. 3–4
How angels or demons can move the imagination and senses, set against natural causes of dream-visions and hallucinations in disturbed humours.
- The Alexiad, Book I
Anna's analogy between the empire's rebels and fevers that physicians attribute to climate, diet or the humours.
- The Alexiad, Book XV, last illness
The physicians' dispute over purging, Alexios's breathlessness and swelling, the family's vigil, and his death in August 1118.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 1, Sect. 1, Memb. 1, Subs. 4–5; Memb. 3, Subs. 1
Distinctions between madness, frenzy, melancholy as disposition and melancholy as habit, and the definition of melancholy as dotage without fever, with fear and sadness.
- The Canon of Medicine, Book I, Part 1, Theses III-IV
The temperaments and their variation by age and sex; the four humours, their normal and abnormal forms, and their generation in the liver.
- The Canon of Medicine, Book I, Part 2, Thesis 3
The pulse and the urine as signs of disease, with their classification by quality and rhythm.
- The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, the Doctor of Physic
The portrait of the physician, his learning in humours and astrology, and his love of gold, which in physic is a cordial.
- The Canterbury Tales, The Knight's Tale, Arcite in exile
Arcite wastes with the lover's malady, engendered of melancholic humours.
- The Canterbury Tales, The Nun's Priest's Tale
Pertelote's diagnosis of humours too abundant and her herbal prescription; Chanticleer's defense of prophetic dreams.
- The Collar, Title and lines 33-34
The likely pun on choler and the speaker's mounting rage just before the call.
- 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 Faerie Queene, Book I, Book I, Canto X, stanzas 23-29
Coelia summons the leech Patience for a soul-diseased knight; diet, salves, Penance, Remorse and Repentance complete the cure.
- The Merchant of Venice, Act 1, Scene 1
Antonio's unexplained sadness, his friends' guesses at its cause, and Gratiano's humoral advice to play the fool.
- The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1
Shylock compares his hatred of Antonio to men's involuntary aversions to a gaping pig, a cat or the bagpipe.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Misanthrope, subtitle and Act 1, Scene 1
Alceste's black humour and contempt for society, framed by the subtitle 'The Atrabilious Lover' (atrabile = black bile).
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Imaginary Invalid, Act 2
The Diafoiruses visit; young Thomas Diafoirus boasts of rejecting the circulation of the blood; the doctors examine Argan.
- The Muqaddimah, Chapter 6 (the science of medicine)
Medicine described as a craft based on Galen and later Arabic physicians, with remarks on Bedouin medicine and the medicine of the prophetic tradition.
- The Roman History, Book XIX, ch. 4
Unburied dead at Amida breed pestilence; Ammianus explains the causes and three kinds of plague and the garrison's recovery after rain.
- The Satires of Horace and Persius, Horace, Satire 1.5
The journey to Brundisium includes bodily discomforts, travel ailments and comic attention to digestion and irritation.
- The Sceptical Chymist, The Second Part
Discussion of the physicians' teaching that chyle becomes blood and blood the parts of the body, as an analogy for the transformation of matter.
- The Taming of the Shrew, Induction, Scene 2
The Lord's servants persuade Sly that he has been mad for fifteen years, mention his physicians' orders, and announce a comedy as a remedy for melancholy.
- The Taming of the Shrew, Act 4, Scene 1
Petruchio throws out the supper as burnt meat that engenders choler, then explains in soliloquy his plan to keep Kate hungry and sleepless like an untrained hawk.
- The Taming of the Shrew, Act 4, Scene 3
Grumio offers the starving Kate one dish after another and withdraws each as too choleric.
- Timaeus, Embodiment and disorder
Timaeus gives this tag concrete force through timaeus is unusually rich for medical history because it links soul, body, marrow, organs, disease, diet, and psychic disorder inside a single cosmic anatomy
Quotes
“When the imagination, from any extraordinary ferment of the blood and spirits, acquires such a vivacity as disorders all its powers and faculties, there is no means of distinguishing betwixt truth and falshood”
“it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects”
“To define drunkenness, to know that it is caused by vapours which rise from the stomach and cloud the seat of intelligence, is quite a different thing to being drunk.”
Frequently cited
“In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits”
“you may take sarza to open the liver, steel to open the spleen, flowers of sulphur for the lungs, castoreum for the brain; but no receipt openeth the heart, but a true friend”
“This fancy will be more certainly understood by interrogation: “What do I know?” as I bear it with the emblem of a balance”
“His life was gentle, and the elements So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, “This was a man”
“To the knight I applied a small poultice until the abscess opened and became well; and the woman I put on diet and made her humor wet.”
“thus of all animals he has the least sense of smell. For man needs the largest brain as compared to the body”
“Indeed, the commotion of the spirits and humors may be so great that such appearances may even occur to those who are awake, as is seen in mad people, and the like”
“The common sort define it to be a kind of dotage without a fever, having for his ordinary companions, fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion”
“But physicians still keep to the opinion that the brain is the chief seat of sentient life, and that each sense has its own distinct member whereby it manifests function.”
“For just as bad habits of thought supervene on intemperament of the body, so also a physical intemperament may be traced to habits of mind which are contrary to the ideal.”
“Unquiet meals make ill digestions; Thereof the raging fire of fever bred, And what’s a fever but a fit of madness?”
“Both philosophers and skilful physicians agree that excess of cold, or of heat, or of moisture, or of drought, all cause pestilences;”
“Seeing too much sadness hath congeal’d your blood, And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy”