Characters is a collection of brief sketches of recognizable social types: the dissembler, flatterer, chatterer, boor, complaisant man, reckless man, tactless man, mean man, show-off, coward, oligarchic sympathizer, late learner, slanderer and many others. Each sketch begins with a definition and then offers small scenes in which the type reveals himself through repeated behavior.
Medical tag
Hypochondria
Imagined or exaggerated illness; the malade imaginaire.
Works
Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel parodying the overwrought rural fiction of the early twentieth century, the 'loam and lovechild' school associated with writers such as Mary Webb and D. H. Lawrence. It is set in a slightly futuristic England of video-phones and air taxis.
Parker's Complete Poems gathers the light verse that made her one of the best-selling poets of the 1920s and 1930s. The core of the volume is her three collections, Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931), which were combined in Not So Deep as a Well (1936), together with uncollected and early verse published in magazines from the 1910s onward.
Rousseau's Confessions is the founding text of modern autobiography. It promises to show 'a man in all the integrity of nature', the author himself, concealing nothing.
Kant's first Critique asks whether metaphysics is possible as a science, and answers by examining reason's own powers before trusting any of its claims about God, the soul or the world as a whole. The first-edition preface describes human reason as burdened by questions it cannot dismiss and cannot answer, and the second-edition preface proposes a Copernican experiment: instead of assuming that knowledge must conform to objects, suppose that objects must conform to the forms of our knowing.
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.
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.
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.
Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind is often called the first American psychiatry textbook. Benjamin Rush gathers observations, classifications, causes, and treatments for mania, melancholy, hypochondria, derangement, moral faculties, memory, and related conditions.
The Pensées ('Thoughts') are the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, found after Pascal's death in 1662 as nearly a thousand notes, many on slips of paper threaded together in bundles. Pascal had planned a work that would first unsettle the complacent unbeliever (the honnête homme of polite society) by showing the misery and contradiction of the human condition, then show that Christianity alone explains that condition and offers its remedy.
Persuasion is Austen's last completed novel, a story of second chances. Anne Elliot is the overlooked middle daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, a vain and extravagant baronet of Kellynch Hall in Somerset.
Pollyanna Whittier, eleven years old, is the orphaned daughter of a poor missionary minister in the American West. Her mother, Jennie, had long ago disappointed her proud New England family by marrying the young minister instead of a wealthy suitor.
Pride and Prejudice turns courtship into a discipline of moral interpretation. Elizabeth Bennet first judges Fitzwilliam Darcy by his proud refusal to dance and by Wickham's persuasive account of injury, while Darcy judges Elizabeth through the embarrassment of her family, the inferiority of her connections, and his own rank.
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.
This selection gathers six of Edgar Allan Poe's best-known tales, two of them detective stories and four of them tales of terror, written between 1839 and 1846 and printed here from the Raven Edition of his works. The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) opens with an essay on the analytical mind and introduces C. Auguste Dupin, a poor but brilliant Parisian gentleman who shares lodgings with the unnamed narrator.
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 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 Life of Samuel Johnson is James Boswell's account of the poet, essayist, critic and lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), arranged year by year and built largely from conversations Boswell wrote down over twenty-one years of friendship. It opens with Johnson's birth in Lichfield, the son of a bookseller, his childhood scrofula, for which his mother took him to London to be touched by Queen Anne, and his schooling.
The 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 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 Secret Garden begins in imperial India, where Mary Lennox is a sickly, spoiled and emotionally neglected child. A cholera outbreak kills her parents and household, and Mary is sent to Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire to live with her reclusive uncle Archibald Craven.
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.
Uncle Tom's Cabin follows two lines of story that begin on the Kentucky farm of Arthur Shelby, a kindly but indebted master who agrees to sell two slaves to the trader Haley: Uncle Tom, his faithful and devout manager, and Harry, the small son of Eliza, Mrs. Shelby's maid. Overhearing the bargain, Eliza flees north with Harry that night, and with the slave-catchers close behind she crosses the Ohio River by leaping from one floating cake of ice to another.
Lucy Snowe tells her own story, years after the events, in a reserved voice that often withholds what she feels and sometimes what she knows. As a girl she stays with her godmother Mrs. Bretton in the old town of Bretton, where she watches the tiny, intense Paulina Home attach herself to Mrs. Bretton's teenage son Graham.
Passages
- Cold Comfort Farm, Early chapters and passim
Aunt Ada keeps to her room and controls her family through the memory of the woodshed.
- Cold Comfort Farm, Penultimate chapters
Flora's long conversation with Ada, which ends her self-imposed confinement.
- Complete Poems, 'Symptom Recital' (Sunset Gun or Death and Taxes)
A list of complaints of mood, sleep and temper presented as symptoms, revealed as signs of falling in love.
- Confessions, Book VI
The attack of pounding arteries and tinnitus with permanent partial deafness; insomnia; 'the vapors'; reading anatomy and imagining a polyp of the heart; the journey to the physicians of Montpellier and their waters and whey.
- Daisy Miller, Part I
Mrs Miller's dyspepsia and her faith in her doctor at home in Schenectady.
- Emma, Vol. I, Ch. I-III
Mr. Woodhouse's dislike of change and marriage, his gruel and fears about wedding cake, and his reliance on Mr. Perry are introduced at Hartfield's evening parties.
- 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.
- Pensees, Fragment 109, Section II
Health and sickness each produce their own desires; we take medicine cheerfully when ill; our fears come from imagining a state we are not in.
- Persuasion, Vol. I, Ch. 6–7
Mary's complaints of illness at Uppercross; her son's dislocated collarbone after a fall and the household's response.
- Pollyanna, Chapters VIII and X
Pollyanna's visits to the bedridden Mrs. Snow, who wants whatever she has not been brought, until Pollyanna arranges her hair and shows her a mirror.
- Pride and Prejudice, Letters and reversals
Pride and Prejudice gives this tag concrete force through its medical angle is modest but present in nerves, hypochondriacal comedy, domestic stress, and the social management of women's bodies and futures
- Swann's Way, Combray, Aunt Léonie
Léonie's sickroom regimen, her pepsin and Vichy water, and her conversations with Françoise and Eulalie about her health.
- Tales (Selection), The Fall of the House of Usher, the narrator's first interview
Roderick describes his constitutional and family evil: food, clothing, flowers, light and sound all oppress his senses, and he fears the effect of fear itself.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 1, Sect. 3, Memb. 1, Subs. 2; Memb. 2
Symptoms in the mind: fear, sorrow, suspicion, jealousy, fixed delusions such as believing oneself made of glass, and the windy hypochondriacal melancholy.
- The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Book I, Chapter CVII
The castellan's yearly delusions that he is an oil-jar, a frog, dead, or a bat, and the doctors' attempts to distract him.
- The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1729 (the Oxford years)
The first great attack of morbid melancholy, Johnson's long walks to fight it, and the Latin case history he gave Dr. Swinfen.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Imaginary Invalid, Act 1, Scene 1
Argan audits his apothecary's bill for enemas, purges and draughts.
- The Secret Garden, Colin's room
Colin's confinement, fear of deformity and expectation of death show hypochondriacal and disability-anxiety themes.
- The Woman in White, Second Epoch, Frederick Fairlie's narrative
Mr. Fairlie's elaborate account of his nerves and his sufferings from noise and light, interrupted by visitors he cannot refuse.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin, Chapter XV
Marie St. Clare's sick-headaches and complaints, and Miss Ophelia's offer of juniper-berry tea.
- Villette, Ch. XVII
Dr. John questions Lucy about her nervous system and prescribes cheerful society and exercise, conceding the limits of medicine.
Quotes
“I saw something nasty in the woodshed!”
“It is certain my disorder was in a great measure hypochondriacal”
“I could not read the description of any malady without thinking it mine, and, had I not been already indisposed, I am certain I should have become so from this study”
“These gentlemen understood nothing of my illness, therefore concluded I could not be ill”
“She makes men happy and sad, healthy and sick, rich and poor”
“I am nothing but a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man.”
Frequently cited
“Medicine can give nobody good spirits. My art halts at the threshold of Hypochondria: she just looks in and sees a chamber of torture, but can neither say nor do much.”