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
Madness Psychosis
Insanity, delusion, hallucination, raving, loss of reason (non-drug).
Works
A Midsummer Night's Dream begins in Athens with a legal crisis: Egeus demands that Hermia marry Demetrius, while Hermia loves Lysander and faces punishment under Theseus's law. The lovers flee into the wood, followed by Demetrius and Helena, and the play transfers civic conflict into a night world governed by Oberon, Titania, Puck, and the flower whose juice alters desire.
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.
Pinel presents insanity as a medical and moral problem rather than a condition to be met chiefly with chains, spectacle, or punishment. The treatise moves between nosology, institutional observation, and therapeutic counsel.
Frank O'Neal Addington had been hospitalized in Texas state mental hospitals many times between 1969 and 1975. In December 1975, after he was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of assault by threat against his mother, she petitioned for his indefinite commitment.
On a hot summer afternoon Alice, bored beside her sister on a riverbank, sees a White Rabbit in a waistcoat take a watch out of its pocket and hurry down a rabbit-hole. She follows, falls slowly down a long well past cupboards and bookshelves, and lands in a hall of locked doors.
Hume first published this book in 1748 as Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, and gave it its present title in 1758. It is his deliberate second attempt at the material of Book I of the Treatise, written, he said, so that the argument would no longer fail through its manner.
Locke says in the Epistle to the Reader that the Essay began when five or six friends meeting in his rooms found themselves at a standstill over questions of morality and revealed religion, and he proposed that they first examine what objects human understanding is fitted to deal with. Nearly twenty years later the result was a long, patient survey of where ideas come from, how they combine, how words signify them and how far knowledge and probable belief can reach.
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.
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.
This collection pairs Melville's posthumous novella Billy Budd, Sailor with the best of the short fiction he published in magazines in the 1850s, usually including Bartleby, the Scrivener, Benito Cereno and The Encantadas (contents vary by edition). Bartleby (1853) is narrated by a comfortable Wall Street lawyer who hires a pale, quiet copyist.
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.
Chess (Schachnovelle, also translated as The Royal Game or Chess Story) is narrated by a passenger on a liner sailing from New York to Buenos Aires shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. Aboard is the world chess champion Mirko Czentovic, a stolid, almost illiterate son of a poor Danube boatman who was raised by a village priest, revealed an uncanny talent for chess, and now plays mechanically and greedily for money, showing no curiosity about anything else.
Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, published at Oxford by the Clarendon Press in four volumes between 1765 and 1769, grew out of the lectures he gave at Oxford from 1753 and as first Vinerian Professor from 1758. It was the first full account of English law written for educated readers rather than for practising lawyers, arranged as a reasoned system instead of a collection of cases.
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.
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.
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.
David Copperfield is the first-person autobiography of a novelist looking back on his life. David is born at Blunderstone in Suffolk six months after his father's death, on a night when his formidable great-aunt Betsey Trotwood storms out on learning he is not a girl.
Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem covers the last twenty-four hours or so of Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old travelling salesman, interwoven with his memories and imaginings of the past. Willy returns early to his small Brooklyn house, now hemmed in by apartment buildings, because he can no longer keep the car on the road: his mind keeps drifting.
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.
Tuke describes the York Retreat, a Quaker institution founded after scandals in local madhouse care, as an alternative to fear, neglect, and routine coercion. The book gives the Retreat a history, an architecture, a daily rhythm, and a theory of treatment.
Modelled on Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, Hume's Dialogues are narrated by Pamphilus, a young man, to his friend Hermippus, and report a conversation at the house of Pamphilus's tutor, Cleanthes. Three speakers debate not whether God exists, which all profess to accept, but what can be known of God's nature by reason.
The 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.
Early Christian Lives gathers late antique biographies of saints, monks and holy figures, often including Athanasius’ Life of Antony and Jerome’s lives of Paul, Hilarion and Malchus. These works do not present biography as neutral chronology.
This volume joins Robert Frost's first three books of poems, all written about New England farm country and published between 1913 and 1916. A Boy's Will (London, 1913) is a book of short lyrics arranged in three parts, and the library text keeps the original contents page, where each title is followed by an italic gloss in the third person describing what the youth of the book is feeling: in Into My Own he imagines stealing away into dark trees and believes those who follow will find him only more sure of all he thought was true; in Storm Fear he is afraid of his own isolation; in The Tuft of Flowers a mower finds a patch of butterfly weed spared by the man who scythed the field before him and decides that men work together whether they work together or apart; and in Mowing a scythe whispers in the hay while the speaker concludes that fact is the sweetest dream labor knows.
Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order is set out like Euclid: definitions, axioms, numbered propositions, proofs, corollaries and the discursive notes (scholia) where Spinoza speaks most freely. Its five parts lead from God to human blessedness.
Gabriel Oak, a young shepherd farming his own small flock on Norcombe Hill, falls in love with Bathsheba Everdene, a proud, lively girl staying with her aunt nearby. She saves his life when he nearly suffocates in his smoky hut, but refuses his plain proposal, saying she wants somebody to tame her.
Faust, Part One opens with three frames: a verse Dedication, a Prelude at the Theatre in which a Manager, a Poet and a comic actor argue about what a play should be, and a Prologue in Heaven modelled on the Book of Job. There Mephistopheles mocks mankind, and the Lord permits him to tempt Doctor Faust, saying that man errs as long as he strives but that a good man keeps an instinct of the right way.
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.
Hamlet opens on the battlements of Elsinore, where sentries and the scholar Horatio see the ghost of the late King Hamlet of Denmark. Prince Hamlet, called home from university at Wittenberg for his father's funeral, is grieving and disgusted that his mother Gertrude has married his uncle Claudius, now king, within two months.
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.
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.
Humboldt's Gift is narrated by Charlie Citrine, a successful middle-aged Chicago writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and made a fortune from a Broadway hit about the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron von Trenck, which was also made into a film. Now in his fifties, Charlie is distracted, spiritually restless and steadily losing his money.
This volume completes the library's surviving plays of Euripides with eleven works in Edward P. Coleridge's prose translation of 1891. Iphigenia in Aulis, produced after the poet's death in 405 BC, opens at night on the shore of Aulis, where the Greek fleet is held back by windless weather.
Jane Eyre is the life story, told by Jane herself, of an orphan girl who grows into a governess and finally a wife, keeping her conscience and her self-respect through poverty, temptation and grief. At ten Jane lives at Gateshead Hall with her aunt by marriage, Mrs. Reed, who resents her, and her bullying cousin John.
Johnny Tremain follows a Boston apprentice from the summer of 1773 to the first day of the American Revolution in April 1775. Johnny, fourteen, is the most gifted of the three apprentices in the silversmith shop of old Ephraim Lapham, a pious man who warns him about pride by having him read Leviticus 26:19; the next two chapters take their titles from that verse.
King Lear begins with a political and familial error: Lear divides Britain according to a public love test, accepts the fluent flattery of Goneril and Regan, rejects Cordelia's plain truth, and banishes Kent for trying to correct him. The abdication leaves Lear with the name of king but without the substance of rule, and the tragedy strips away retinue, shelter, authority, sanity, and finally family.
The Laws is Plato's last and longest dialogue, twelve books of conversation in which three elderly men design the constitution and legal code of a new city. On a midsummer day an unnamed Athenian Stranger walks from Knossos toward the cave and shrine of Zeus with Cleinias, a Cretan, and Megillus, a Spartan.
Le Morte d'Arthur is Thomas Malory's English prose gathering of the Arthurian legend, from the hero's conception to the death of the last knights of the Round Table. Uther Pendragon, with Merlin's help, begets Arthur on Igraine, and the child is raised secretly by Sir Ector.
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.
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.
Lepanto is G. K. Chesterton's ballad of the naval battle fought on 7 October 1571 in the Gulf of Patras, off western Greece, where the galleys of the Holy League, assembled by Pope Pius V and led by Don John of Austria, defeated the Ottoman fleet. Chesterton published it in The Eye-Witness in October 1911 and collected it in his Poems of 1915.
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.
Lex, Rex: The Law and the Prince is Samuel Rutherford's answer, printed in London in October 1644, to Sacro-sancta Regum Majestas, a defence of royal absolutism by John Maxwell, the deposed bishop of Ross whom the Glasgow Assembly of 1638 had excommunicated. Rutherford wrote while Scotland and the English Parliament were allied against Charles I under the Solemn League and Covenant, and his long subtitle presents the book as a justification of Scotland's defensive wars and of its army's march to help its brethren in England.
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.
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.
This volume gathers comic pieces that Jane Austen wrote as a teenager at Steventon rectory, between about 1790 and 1793, and copied into the notebook she called Volume the Second. The title work, 'Love and Freindship', dated 13 June 1790 when she was fourteen, is a novel in fifteen letters parodying the sentimental fiction of the day.
Macbeth opens on a Scottish heath where three witches plan to meet Macbeth. Returning from victory over rebels and Norwegian invaders, Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo meet the witches, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and future king, and tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings.
Medea and Other Plays centers on Euripides’ art of making the socially powerless terrifyingly articulate. Medea begins after Jason has abandoned his foreign wife and children to marry the Corinthian princess.
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.
Meditationes de prima philosophia, published in Paris in 1641, compresses Descartes's metaphysics into six meditations, each imagined as a day's reflection by a solitary thinker seated by the fire in a dressing gown. The book was issued with six sets of Objections from learned readers (Caterus, Mersenne's circle, Hobbes, Arnauld, Gassendi and others) and Descartes's Replies, which are longer than the Meditations themselves; a second edition (Amsterdam, 1642) added the Jesuit Bourdin's Seventh Objections.
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.
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.
Esquirol expands Pinelian alienism into a more elaborate clinical and institutional system. Mental Maladies surveys insanity as a family of disorders marked by disturbances of perception, judgment, passion, volition, and bodily function.
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.
Mere Christianity is C. S. Lewis's case for, and plain explanation of, the beliefs held in common by Christians of most denominations. In the preface Lewis borrows the phrase "mere Christianity" from the Puritan writer Richard Baxter and compares the shared faith to a hall from which doors open into the rooms of the separate churches; he says he is describing the hall, not recommending a room, and that people must eventually live in a room rather than in the hall.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin poem in fifteen books of dactylic hexameter, about 12,000 lines, that strings together some 250 myths of transformation from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus. Its unifying thread is change of form: gods, humans and nymphs become animals, plants, stones, stars and springs, usually at moments of extreme passion, violence or divine punishment.
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.
Mourning Becomes Electra is a trilogy of plays that moves Aeschylus's Oresteia to a New England seaport town in 1865-1866, at the end of the American Civil War. The Greek house of Atreus becomes the Mannons, a proud Puritan family of shipowners and judges whose white-columned mansion, built like a Greek temple, stands apart from the town.
Mrs. Dalloway follows a single day in the middle of June 1923 in London, from a bright morning to the small hours of a party. Clarissa Dalloway, fifty-one, wife of the Conservative Member of Parliament Richard Dalloway, walks from Westminster up to Bond Street to buy flowers for the party she is giving that evening.
In January 1957 Kenneth Donaldson was committed to the Florida State Hospital at Chattahoochee after his father sought a hearing before a Pinellas County judge, who found him mentally ill. He remained there against his will for nearly fifteen years.
The two respondents, identified in the case as L. C. and E. W., were Georgia women with intellectual disabilities who also had psychiatric diagnoses, schizophrenia in one case and a personality disorder in the other. Both were voluntarily admitted to Georgia Regional Hospital in Atlanta.
On Liberty asks what limits there are on the power society may legitimately exercise over the individual. Mill opens by observing that the old struggle between subjects and rulers has been transformed by democracy.
Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, is Isaac Newton's experimental account of light and colour, written in English and published in London in 1704. Newton opens by announcing that his design is not to explain the properties of light by hypotheses but to propose and prove them by reason and experiments, and the three books carry out that plan.
Orthodoxy (1908) is G. K. Chesterton's account of how he came to believe the Christian creed. It answers a challenge from the critic G. S. Street, who, after Chesterton's Heretics (1905) had criticized the philosophies of his contemporaries, said he would begin to worry about his own philosophy when Chesterton had given his.
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.
This volume pairs one of Plato's most literary dialogues with two letters attributed to him. The Phaedrus takes place outside the walls of Athens, where Socrates, who rarely leaves the city, walks with the young Phaedrus along the river Ilissus and sits under a plane tree on a hot summer day.
This volume gathers the three books that first introduced Emily Dickinson's poetry to the public, all published in Boston in the decade after her death in 1886. Poems (1890) was edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, a young Amherst neighbor, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the man of letters with whom Dickinson had corresponded since 1862; Poems: Second Series followed in 1891 under the same two editors, and Poems: Third Series in 1896, edited by Todd alone.
Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in London in November 1790, is cast as a long letter to a young Frenchman, Charles-Jean-François Depont, who had asked Burke's opinion of events in Paris. Its immediate occasion was the sermon A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, preached by the Dissenting minister Richard Price on 4 November 1789 to the Revolution Society at the meeting-house in the Old Jewry, and the society's address of congratulation to the French National Assembly.
Saint Joan is Shaw's chronicle play in six scenes and an epilogue about Joan of Arc, the peasant girl from Domrémy who led the French against the English in the Hundred Years' War. In Scene I, set in 1429 at the castle of Vaucouleurs, the blustering squire Robert de Baudricourt is talked by Joan, and by his own officer Poulengey, into giving her a horse and an escort to the Dauphin; when she leaves, the hens that had stopped laying begin again.
The Second Treatise, subtitled 'An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government', is the constructive half of Locke's Two Treatises. The First Treatise demolishes Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, which derived the absolute power of kings from Adam's fatherly dominion.
Maupassant's stories, written mostly between 1880 and 1890, are compact, ironic and often brutal studies of French life: Norman peasants, Parisian clerks, prostitutes, bourgeois families, soldiers and the provincial gentry. This selection gathers many of the best known, which typically include the following.
This volume, published in New York in 1922 as Three Plays, brought Pirandello's theatre to English readers. It contains Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Henry IV (1922), both translated by Edward Storer, and Right You Are!
Sixty Stories is Donald Barthelme's own selection of his short fiction from roughly two decades, drawn from collections such as Come Back, Dr. Caligari, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, City Life, Sadness, Amateurs and Great Days, together with some previously uncollected pieces. The stories are short, often only a few pages, and are among the defining works of American postmodern fiction.
St. Dymphna and the Geel Colony is less a single book than a layered dossier: a thirteenth-century Latin Vita by Pierre of Cambrai, a medieval shrine in the Brabant town of Geel, and a centuries-long practice of boarding mentally ill people with local families. The legend tells of an Irish princess whose widowed father, deranged by grief and desire, attempts to marry his daughter because she resembles her dead mother.
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.
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.
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.
Tales from Shakespeare retells twenty of Shakespeare's plays as prose stories for children. A short preface explains the method: the authors keep Shakespeare's own words wherever they can, avoid words that came into English after his time, and hope the tales will send young readers on to the plays themselves when they are older.
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 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 Arabian Nights Entertainments is Andrew Lang's 1898 selection of the Thousand and One Nights for children, retold in English from Antoine Galland's early eighteenth-century French version. The frame story comes first.
The 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 Bacchae and Other Plays presents Euripides at his most dangerous: gods are real, but that does not make them gentle. The Bacchae begins when Dionysus arrives at Thebes in disguise to punish the royal house for denying his divinity and slandering his mother Semele.
The Bible is the sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity, and the reference edition presents the King James Version of 1611, the most influential translation in English. It is a library rather than a single book.
The Brothers Karamazov centers on the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a sensual, neglectful father whose sons embody conflicting responses to desire, faith, reason, and guilt. Dmitri is passionate, impulsive, indebted, and publicly at war with his father over inheritance and Grushenka.
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 Call of the Wild follows Buck, a huge St. Bernard and Scotch shepherd cross, through one terrible and transforming year of the Klondike gold rush. Buck lives as the lord of Judge Miller's estate in the Santa Clara Valley of California until Manuel, a gardener's helper who needs money for his lottery gambling, sells him to dog traders.
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 Commonwealth of Oceana, published in London in 1656 during Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, is a model constitution for a republic set in an island called Oceana, which is England under a thin disguise. Scotland is Marpesia, Ireland Panopea, London Emporium, and Cromwell himself appears as Olphaus Megaletor, the Lord Archon or sole legislator who founds the commonwealth and then gives up his power.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a vast novel of injustice and revenge. In 1815 Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseilles, returns from a voyage on which he carried a letter from Napoleon's island of Elba as a dying captain requested.
The 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 Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles is Padraic Colum's retelling for young readers of the voyage of the Argo, with many other Greek myths woven into it as stories told by the heroes on the way. It was published in New York by Macmillan in 1921, with illustrations by Willy Pogány, and was named a Newbery Honor book in 1922.
The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children is Charles Kingsley's retelling of three Greek hero legends, Perseus, the Argonauts and Theseus, written for his children Rose, Maurice and Mary. The preface is signed from Farley Court in Advent 1855, and the book was published by Macmillan in 1856.
The Histories is the first great work of prose history in the Western tradition, an inquiry (historia) into the causes and course of the wars between the Greeks and the Persian Empire. Herodotus states his purpose in the opening: to preserve the memory of great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and barbarians, and especially the reason why they fought one another.
The Institutes of Justinian is a short official textbook of Roman law, issued at Constantinople on 21 November 533 and given the force of law, together with the Digest, from 30 December of that year. It was written for first-year law students: the preface, addressed to the youth desirous of studying the law, explains that the emperor, having reconquered Africa and set in order both the imperial constitutions and the writings of the old jurists, has commissioned Tribonian, Theophilus and Dorotheus to compose an elementary book so that beginners may learn the law as it is actually in force.
The 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.
The Lais of Marie de France are twelve short narrative poems in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, preserved together in one manuscript (British Library, Harley 978) with a general prologue in which Marie dedicates them to a 'noble king', probably Henry II. She says she has heard Breton lais, songs commemorating adventures, and has put them into verse so they will not be forgotten.
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 is set in the wilderness of northern New York during the French and Indian War. Colonel Munro, the Scottish commander of Fort William Henry on Lake George, which the scout calls the Horican, is threatened by the French general Montcalm and his Native allies.
The Library is the only complete handbook of Greek mythology to survive from antiquity. In plain, compressed prose it tells the traditional stories of the gods and heroes in order, from the beginning of the world to the death of Odysseus, organized chiefly by family lines.
The Mabinogion is the name given to eleven medieval Welsh prose tales, preserved mainly in the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest, together with the Tale of Taliesin, which Lady Charlotte Guest added from a later source. The library text is Guest's translation in the one-volume form, with her introduction and a few of her notes; it follows her order, opening with the three Arthurian romances.
The Master and Margarita interweaves two stories: the visit of the Devil to Soviet Moscow in the 1930s and a novel about Pontius Pilate written by an unnamed author known as the Master. On a hot spring evening at Patriarch's Ponds, the literary bureaucrat Mikhail Berlioz and the young poet Ivan Bezdomny are discussing the non-existence of Jesus when a mysterious foreigner joins them.
The New York Trilogy gathers three linked short novels: City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room. Each begins from the materials of detective fiction and then dissolves the detective plot into questions of identity, authorship, language and mental disintegration.
The Oresteia follows the House of Atreus from inherited blood guilt to the foundation of civic justice. Agamemnon opens at Argos, where a watchman sees the beacon announcing Troy’s fall.
The Prince and the Pauper opens in London in October 1537, when two boys are born on the same day: Edward Tudor, longed-for son of Henry VIII, and Tom Canty, unwanted son of a thief in Offal Court, off Pudding Lane. Tom is beaten by his father John and his grandmother, but his gentle mother and sisters Nan and Bet love him, and the old priest Father Andrew teaches him reading, a little Latin, and tales of kings.
The Princess and Curdie is George MacDonald's sequel to The Princess and the Goblin, set about a year after the goblins were defeated. Curdie, the miner's son, now nearly thirteen, has grown dull and doubtful; he half believes that Princess Irene's great-great-grandmother was only a child's dream.
The Principles of Psychology is a two-volume, 1,400-page textbook that William James spent twelve years writing for Henry Holt's American Science Series. It sets out to treat psychology as a natural science of mental life, studying feelings, desires, cognitions and decisions together with their bodily conditions, while refusing to reduce the mind to physiology or to dissolve it into atoms of sensation.
The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, published by Duckworth in London in late 1914, is D. H. Lawrence's first collection of short fiction: twelve stories, most of them revised from magazine versions written between about 1907 and 1914. Two are set among German soldiers, the rest in the colliery villages and farms of the English Midlands where Lawrence grew up.
Jung's Psychology of Dementia Praecox attempts to make psychotic speech and behavior psychologically intelligible. Working from the Burgholzli clinic, word-association studies, Bleuler's dementia praecox, and Freud's ideas about complexes, Jung argues that seemingly senseless symptoms may express emotionally charged complexes.
The Secret History, in Greek the Anekdota or unpublished things, is a short work in thirty chapters in which Procopius sets out to tell what he says he could not safely write in his Wars while its subjects were alive: the hidden causes of events and the private conduct of the emperor Justinian, the empress Theodora, the general Belisarius and his wife Antonina. It is usually dated to about 550, though some scholars place it later in the 550s, and it was not circulated in Procopius's lifetime.
The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening was published in Copenhagen on 30 July 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, with Kierkegaard named as editor. Its title comes from Jesus' words about Lazarus in John 11:4, 'This sickness is not unto death.' The introduction argues that for the Christian even death is not the sickness unto death, since there is hope beyond it; the true sickness unto death is despair, a condition in which one cannot die and cannot live, a perpetual dying without end.
The Silver Chair begins behind the gym at Experiment House, a muddled modern boarding school where bullies rule. Jill Pole is crying there when Eustace Scrubb, much changed since his voyage on the Dawn Treader, tells her about Narnia.
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 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.
The Tempest opens with a ship breaking apart in a storm off a remote island. On shore, the magician Prospero tells his fifteen-year-old daughter Miranda that he was once Duke of Milan.
The Theban Plays collects Sophocles’ tragedies about Oedipus and his children: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. They were not written as a trilogy, but together they form the most influential family disaster in Western drama.
This is the first of three volumes of Edward William Lane's translation of The Thousand and One Nights, made directly from the Arabic of the Cairo (Bulaq) printed edition and published in parts from 1838. The library text is the 1859 revision edited by his nephew Edward Stanley Poole, in the 1912 Chatto & Windus reissue with a preface by Stanley Lane-Poole.
The trial records of Joan of Arc are not a saint's life in the ordinary devotional sense. They are hostile legal documents that accidentally preserve one of the most vivid medieval voices.
Olivia Coolidge's The Trojan War retells the whole legend of Troy, from its cause in heaven to the homecomings of the Greek kings, in 33 short chapters that can each be read as a story on its own. It begins with the golden apple thrown among the goddesses, the judgment of Paris, and the beauty of Helen, whom Paris carries off from her husband Menelaus of Sparta.
This volume gathers three Euripides plays about what the Trojan War left behind: The Trojan Women and Iphigenia in Tauris in Gilbert Murray's rhyming verse, and Hecuba in Michael Wodhull's blank verse of 1782. The Trojan Women opens on the smoking ruins of Troy.
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.
This volume pairs two of Henry James's most intense short fictions about possession, interpretation and moral trespass. The Turn of the Screw is framed as a manuscript read aloud during a country-house gathering.
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 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 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.
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.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, translated by Haldane and Kemp as The World as Will and Idea, is Arthur Schopenhauer's single, systematic statement of a philosophy that he claimed expressed one thought from four sides. It appeared in December 1818 (dated 1819) in four books with an appendix criticising Kant, and in 1844 he added a second volume of fifty supplementary chapters keyed to the first.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a philosophical prose-poem in four parts, written in the cadences of Luther's Bible. Its hero borrows the name of the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, whom Nietzsche chose because the first moralist should be the one to overturn morality.
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.
Twelfth Night begins with shipwreck, loss, and disguise. Viola believes her brother Sebastian drowned, enters Illyria as Cesario, and serves Duke Orsino, who sends her to woo Olivia.
We is presented as the diary or record of D-503, mathematician and builder of the spaceship Integral in the OneState, a glass-walled totalitarian society ruled by the Benefactor. Citizens, called Numbers, live by tables of hours, regulated labor, monitored sex, prescribed walks and transparent architecture.
Passages
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, Ghosts, Act 3
Osvald's mental collapse at sunrise; his mother stands with the morphine he made her promise to give him.
- A Midsummer Night's Dream, The wedding play
A Midsummer Night's Dream gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens is early modern psychology: love-melancholy, altered perception, sleep, dreams, and the boundary between enchantment and madness
- 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 on Insanity, Introduction and Ch. 1
Pinel frames mental alienation as a medical subject requiring observation, classification, and reform of custodial habits.
- A Treatise on Insanity, Nosology chapters
The divisions of mania, melancholia, dementia, and idiotism show early nineteenth-century diagnostic language before modern mood and psychotic categories.
- Addington v. Texas, Opinion of the Court, Part III-A, paragraph beginning: At one time or another every person exhibits some abnormal behavior
The Court distinguishes ordinary unusual conduct from mental illness warranting confinement and warns against commitment based on isolated episodes.
- Addington v. Texas, Opinion of the Court, Part III-B, paragraph beginning: The subtleties and nuances of psychiatric diagnosis render certainties virtually beyond reach in most situations.
Burger describes psychiatric diagnosis as based on medical impressions filtered through the diagnostician's experience, explaining why certainty about dangerousness is rarely attainable.
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapters VI–VII
The Cheshire Cat's argument that everyone in Wonderland is mad, and the Mad Tea-Party with the Hatter, March Hare and ever-sleeping Dormouse.
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section II
Ideas can approach the vividness of sensations only when the mind is disordered by disease or madness.
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. XI, §12–13
Difference between 'naturals' (intellectual disability) and madmen; delusions such as believing oneself a king or made of glass; partial madness in otherwise sober people.
- As You Like It, Act 3, Scene 2
Rosalind calls love a madness deserving the dark house and whip, and claims to have cured a lover by counsel.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Four, §§68, 154, 156, 157
Memory yielding to pride; health versus pathology of thought; collective insanity; the thought of suicide as consolation through bad nights.
- Billy Budd and Other Stories, Billy Budd, after Claggart's death
The surgeon examines Claggart and silently questions Vere's sanity as Vere moves toward a drumhead court.
- Chess, Dr B.'s narrative (chess against himself)
He splits into a white self and a black self and is consumed by compulsive play, losing sleep and appetite.
- Chess, Dr B.'s narrative (breakdown and release)
He attacks a guard and wakes in hospital; a doctor's diagnosis secures his release from Gestapo custody.
- Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book I, ch. 8 (eighteenth branch of the king's ordinary revenue)
Idiots and natural fools distinguished from lunatics; the writ de idiota inquirendo and the jury test of a person's understanding.
- Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book I, ch. 8
Non compos mentis caused by disease, grief or accident; lucid intervals; persons under frenzies or losing intellect by disease; the crown as trustee for their recovery.
- Confessions, Books IX–XII
The growing conviction of a plot by Diderot, Grimm, d'Épinay and others, culminating in the narrative of flight and persecution.
- Crime and Punishment, The theory and the murder
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
- Critique of Pure Reason, Refutation of Idealism (B 274–279)
Inner experience requires outer objects; representations in dreams and madness are acknowledged but said to derive from earlier real perceptions.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 14
Betsey explains that she rescued Mr Dick from an asylum his brother intended for him, and defends his sanity.
- Death of a Salesman, Act One, memory scenes
Willy talks aloud to people from the past, including his dead brother Ben, while others watch.
- Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, Opening conceptual chapters
Bleuler revises dementia praecox and introduces schizophrenia as a group concept.
- Description of the Retreat, Case statements
The case material records mania, melancholy, relapse, recovery, and chronic illness in early asylum language.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10
Demea quotes Milton's lazar-house (stone, ulcer, colic, frenzy, melancholy, madness, atrophy, marasmus, pestilence) and catalogues disorders of the mind; a hospital full of diseases as a specimen of the world's ills.
- Don Quixote, Part I, Ch. 1
Little sleep and much reading dry Alonso Quixano's brain until he loses his wits.
- Don Quixote, Part I, Ch. 8
The windmills taken for giants, the most famous image of delusion in literature.
- Don Quixote, Part II, Ch. 22–23
Descent into the Cave of Montesinos and Quixote's report of dream-like visions.
- Dracula, Ch. 5–6, 8–9 (Seward's diary)
Seward's observations of Renfield: flies, spiders, sparrows, and his classification as a zoophagous maniac; Renfield's escape attempts toward Carfax.
- Early Christian Lives, Life of Antony, tomb and fortress episodes
Demonic assaults, terrifying visions and endurance under attack structure ascetic combat.
- Early Poems: A Boy's Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval, North of Boston, A Servant to Servants
The farm wife describes her exhaustion, her doctor's prescription of rest, her stay in the State Asylum, and her family's earlier practice of keeping a mad uncle caged in the house.
- Ethics, Part III, Prop. XXVI, Note
Pride described as a species of madness in which a man dreams with his eyes open, imagining he can accomplish all things.
- Far from the Madding Crowd, Vol. II, Ch. XXV
Discovery of Boldwood's locked closet of gifts, the petition on his mental state, and the reprieve to confinement during Her Majesty's pleasure.
- Faust, Part One, Scene XXV, Dungeon
Gretchen, awaiting execution, speaks in broken, wandering verse of her drowned infant and dead mother and does not at first know Faust.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part III, Ch. 6
Political projectors propose physicians to diagnose senators and a surgical swap of half-brains between party leaders.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part IV, Ch. 11–12
Gulliver's return home, his revulsion at his family and his daily conversations with his horses.
- Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2
Hamlet describes the loss of mirth and pleasure in exercise, and Polonius diagnoses love-madness.
- Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 5
Ophelia's madness after her father's death: songs, flowers and broken speech.
- 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.
- Heart of Darkness, Part III
Kurtz's emaciation and illness, his midnight crawl toward the forest, and his death.
- Hippocratic Writings, On the Sacred Disease 14–17
The brain is presented as the organ through which people think, perceive, rejoice, grieve, become mad and suffer terrors.
- Hippocratic Writings, Aphorisms, Book 6
Aphoristic remarks classify melancholic and phrenitic states within bodily illness and prognosis.
- History of the Wars, Books I-II (The Persian War), Book II, ch. 22
Coma and delirium, the exhaustion of attendants, observation that carers and buriers did not catch the disease by contact.
- Humboldt's Gift, Middle sections
Humboldt's paranoid accusations, violence toward his wife, use of drink and pills, and commitment to Bellevue.
- Iphigenia in Aulis and Other Plays, Heracles, Iris and Madness scene and messenger speech
Madness is sent into Heracles; the messenger describes his eyes, foaming and delusions as he kills his sons and wife.
- Iphigenia in Aulis and Other Plays, Orestes, opening scenes
Electra describes her brother's six days without food or bathing, tends him in sleep, and watches a fit in which he sees the Furies.
- Iphigenia in Aulis and Other Plays, Orestes, Menelaus scene
Orestes names his conscience as his sickness and describes his grief and the visions of the avenging goddesses.
- 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.
- Johnny Tremain, Chapter 8
James Otis appears at the Observers' meeting, feared as unbalanced yet lucid in his speech.
- King Lear, The love test
King Lear gives this tag concrete force through lear is central for psychiatry and aging: cognitive vulnerability, rage, delirium, homelessness, trauma, blindness, caregiving, and unbearable grief
- Laws, Book VII
Infants rocked to sleep and the Corybantic cure of frenzy by music and dance, explained as outer motion calming inner agitation.
- Laws, Book IX
Offences committed in madness, disease or extreme old age, and the mocking doctor who says the gentle physician only educates his patient.
- Laws, Book XI
The law that the mad must be kept at home by their relatives, the kinds of madness, the sale of a slave with epilepsy, and the law on poisoning and sorcery.
- Le Morte d'Arthur, Book XI, Ch. X - Book XII, Ch. IV
Launcelot, out of his mind, wanders the forest and is finally recognized by Elaine and healed by the Sangreal.
- Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry, Clinical demonstrations
Kraepelin models diagnosis as observation of patient presentation joined to disease course and prognosis.
- Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry, Dementia praecox lectures
Psychotic symptoms are interpreted through deterioration, age of onset, and expected outcome.
- Legends of Charlemagne, Orlando Mad
Orlando reads Angelica and Medoro's names in the grotto, wanders all night, lies insensible three days and nights, then strips off his armour and rages through the countryside uprooting trees and attacking shepherds and flocks.
- Legends of Charlemagne, Astolpho in Abyssinia
St. John explains Orlando's madness as a punishment of fixed duration and leads Astolpho to the moon, where lost wits are kept as liquor in sealed, labelled vials.
- Legends of Charlemagne, The War in Africa
Orlando is seized, washed and bound; Astolpho stops his mouth so that he must breathe through his nose and holds the vial beneath his nostrils, and Orlando wakes as if from a terrible dream.
- Lepanto, Stanza 8
Christian captives below the Ottoman decks, sick and sunless, some grown witless in their cells, before Don John breaks the line and frees them.
- 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 IV, Ch. XLV, 'Of Daemonology'
Critique of belief in demons and possession, reinterpreting biblical demoniacs as madmen and lunatics.
- Lex, Rex, Question XIX
The analogy of taking a sword from a madman's hand is used to justify withdrawing fiduciary power from a ruler who abuses it.
- Life of St. Martin, Life and Dialogues: demons and possession
Demonic encounters frame mental and behavioral disturbance through spiritual agency and episcopal authority rather than modern psychiatric categories.
- Lord Jim, Ch. 5
Marlow visits the Patna's chief engineer in hospital, raving in delirium tremens about pink toads under the bed; the hospital doctor comments on the case.
- Love and Freindship and Other Early Works, Love and Freindship, Letter the 13th
Finding their husbands dying by the overturned phaeton, Sophia faints and Laura runs mad, alternately, for over an hour.
- Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 1–2
The hallucinated dagger; the voice crying 'Sleep no more'; the drugged possets given to the grooms.
- Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4
Banquo's ghost at the banquet, seen only by Macbeth.
- Medea and Other Plays, Heracles, madness episode
In a related Euripidean tragedy, Heracles kills his family under divinely imposed madness and awakens to horror.
- Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind, Opening chapters on causes and seats of mental disease
Rush links mental disorder to bodily and brain processes, marking a medicalizing account of mind.
- Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation I
The meditator considers madmen whose brains are disturbed by black bile, who believe they are kings, or that their heads are earthenware or their bodies glass.
- Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. IX (Kentucky, autumn 1861)
Cameron's memorandum, newspaper reports that Sherman was insane, his relief from command and his sense that his position was unbearable.
- 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.
- Mental Maladies, Hallucinations and illusions
Esquirol distinguishes false perception from false judgment and makes hallucination a key psychiatric sign.
- Mere Christianity, Book II, Ch. 3, "The Shocking Alternative"
The trilemma offers lunacy as one explanation for Jesus' claims, using the image of a man who thinks he is a poached egg.
- Metamorphoses, Book VIII
Erysichthon, cursed with Hunger by Ceres, eats everything and finally devours his own body.
- Moby-Dick, Chapter 93
Pip is left alone in the sea and goes about the deck thereafter so changed that his shipmates call him mad, though his speech holds strange wisdom.
- Mourning Becomes Electra, The Haunted, Acts Two and Three
Orin's guilt-ridden manuscript, his obsessive possessiveness toward Lavinia and his suicide.
- Mrs. Dalloway, Morning, Regent's Park
Septimus sees Evans behind the railings, hears the sparrows sing in Greek and believes he must not cut down trees, while Rezia tries to follow Dr. Holmes's advice to make him notice real things.
- O'Connor v. Donaldson, Opinion of the Court, Part II, paragraph beginning: A finding of "mental illness" alone cannot justify a State's locking a person up against his will
The Court's holding that a diagnosis by itself does not justify confinement of the harmless, with a caution about whether the term mentally ill can be given reasonably precise content.
- Olmstead v. L. C., Opinion of Justice Kennedy, paragraph beginning Beginning in the 1950's, many victims of severe mental illness
Summarizes the history and consequences of deinstitutionalization, relying on an American Psychiatric Association brief and a psychiatrist's critical assessment.
- On Liberty, Ch. III, Of Individuality (with footnote 13)
Eccentric people risk a commission de lunatico; the footnote condemns trials in which ordinary peculiarities are paraded before juries as proof of insanity and imagines atheists placed in madhouses as a 'humane' persecution.
- Opticks, Book I, Part II, Prop. VII
Colours seen in dreams and by a madman, or by pressing or striking the eye, set aside as arising from causes other than light.
- Orthodoxy, Chapter II, The Maniac (opening)
Conversation with a publisher about self-confidence, prompted by an omnibus marked Hanwell; belief in oneself as a sign of insanity.
- Orthodoxy, Chapter II, The Maniac
The madman's argument described as a perfect but narrow circle that cannot be broken by reasoning, with examples of the man who thinks himself Christ or the target of a conspiracy.
- Orthodoxy, Chapter II, The Maniac
Remarks on doctors and psychologists who must treat a madman's system intolerantly, and the comparison of cure to casting out a devil.
- Paradise Lost, Book XI
Michael's vision of the lazar-house lists the diseases, madness and melancholy that will afflict Adam's descendants.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 244a–245c
The four kinds of divine madness, contrasted with madness arising from human disease.
- Poems: First, Second and Third Series, Third Series, Time and Eternity XXX
Mourners tread and a service beats like a drum inside the speaker's brain until her mind goes numb and she is left wrecked and solitary in a silence where all the heavens toll like a bell; the 1896 printing ends there, without the manuscript's final stanza.
- Reflections on the Revolution in France, Opening pages, on congratulating France
Burke asks whether he should felicitate a madman escaped from the protecting restraint of his cell on his restoration to light and liberty.
- Saint Joan, Preface, Joan's Voices and Visions; Joan a Galtonic Visualizer
Shaw argues that Joan's voices were the form her own reasoning took and distinguishes her from patients who act on commanding voices.
- Second Treatise of Government, Ch. VI, §§57–61
Freedom tied to the age of reason; guardians must 'understand for' those without understanding; lunatics, 'ideots' and madmen remain under others' government.
- Selected Short Stories, 'The Horla', later entries
Water and milk vanish from the carafe; the narrator's reflection fails to appear in the mirror; he reads of an epidemic of madness in São Paulo.
- Selected Short Stories, 'The Horla', final entries
He sets fire to his house to destroy the Horla and resolves that he must kill himself.
- Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays, Henry IV, Act I
Belcredi and Matilda recall the cavalcade, the rearing horse and the blow to the head after which the young man believed himself the emperor.
- Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays, Henry IV, Act III
Henry recounts waking after about twelve years, choosing to keep the role, and describes madness as a condition others live without knowing it.
- Sixty Stories, 'Game'
Two officers confined in a missile bunker, each watching the other, deteriorate psychologically under rigid protocol.
- St. Dymphna and the Geel Colony, Vita tradition: flight from the father
The legendary incestuous threat and flight invite trauma-informed reading, while remaining a folktale-shaped hagiographic motif rather than secure biography.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Tales (Selection), The Tell-Tale Heart, opening and conclusion
The narrator offers his acute hearing and careful planning as proof that he is not mad, and finally hears a beating he attributes to the dead man's heart.
- Tales from Shakespeare, King Lear, after the storm
Cordelia's physicians put off her meeting with her father until sleep and herbal medicine restore some composure to his mind.
- Testament of Youth, Part III
Postwar Oxford: estrangement, numbness, nightmares and a period of distressing perceptions about her own face, followed by gradual recovery.
- 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 Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 1, Sect. 2, Memb. 3, Subs. 15
Overmuch study as a cause of madness, with the digression on the misery of scholars and why the Muses are melancholy.
- 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 Arabian Nights Entertainments, The Adventures of Prince Camaralzaman and the Princess Badoura
Badoura is shut up as insane for refusing to marry, with a cure promised to any suitor; Marzavan, posing as an astrologer, brings the lovers together.
- The Arabian Nights Entertainments, The Seven Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, Fourth Voyage
Sindbad's companions are given a herb that drives them mad before they are fattened to be eaten; later he is buried alive with his dead wife by local custom.
- The Arabian Nights Entertainments, The Enchanted Horse
The Princess of Bengal feigns madness; doctors are summoned from far and wide, and the prince gains access to her disguised as a physician.
- 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 Bacchae and Other Plays, The Bacchae, first messenger speech
The bacchants nurse animals, strike the ground for water and wine, and tear cattle apart.
- The Bacchae and Other Plays, The Bacchae, sparagmos
Agave and the bacchants dismember Pentheus while misrecognizing him as an animal.
- The Bible, 1 Samuel 16:14–23; 18:10–11
Saul's evil spirit, David's harp, and Saul's later violent episodes.
- The Bible, Daniel 4
Nebuchadnezzar is driven from men and eats grass like oxen until his reason returns.
- The Bible, Mark 5:1–20
The Gadarene demoniac, bound with chains among the tombs, healed by Jesus.
- The Brothers Karamazov, Murder and trial
The Brothers Karamazov gives this tag concrete force through its medical material includes epilepsy, hysteria, alcoholism, trauma, patricidal obsession, suicidal despair, and the contagious psychology of families
- 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 Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'The Call of Cthulhu', Section I
Wilcox's fevered dreams and delirium; reports of worldwide nightmares, panic and asylum admissions among sensitives.
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'The Colour Out of Space'
The Gardner family sicken, grow grey and brittle, and lose their minds as the colour poisons the land.
- The Call of the Wild, Chapter III
Dolly goes suddenly mad on the trail, chases Buck in a frenzy, and is killed by François with an axe.
- The Comedy of Errors, Act 2, Scene 2 and Act 4, Scene 3
Antipholus of Syracuse wonders whether he is mad or dreaming and concludes that Ephesus is full of sorcerers; the Courtesan decides the Ephesian brother is mad.
- The Commonwealth of Oceana, Morley's Introduction
Harrington's imprisonment, scurvy, mental breakdown, later gout and palsy.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Final chapters
Madame de Villefort poisons herself and her son; Villefort loses his reason.
- The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Life of Marius 45
Marius, aged and drinking heavily, falls ill with pleurisy and in delirium imagines himself fighting Mithridates.
- The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles, Part III, IV: The Life and Labors of Heracles
A madness sent by a goddess drives the young Heracles to kill his brother's children; afterwards sleep and rest leave him, and he goes to Delphi to be purified.
- The Histories, Book 3.29–38
Cambyses' madness, his killing of the Apis bull, and Herodotus' suggestion that he had the 'sacred disease'.
- The Histories, Book 6.75, 84
Cleomenes goes mad and mutilates himself with a knife; the Spartans blame his habit of drinking unmixed wine.
- The Institutes of Justinian, Book I, Title 23.3-4
Curators appointed for lunatics and prodigals, and for persons of weak mind, the deaf, the dumb and those with chronic disease.
- The Institutes of Justinian, Book II, Title 12.1-3
Lunatics cannot make wills except in a lucid interval; the rules for the deaf and dumb, and for those who lose hearing or speech through illness.
- The Institutes of Justinian, Book III, Title 19.7-8
The dumb and the stone-deaf cannot make a stipulation, and a lunatic cannot make any contract because he does not understand what he is doing.
- The 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 Lais of Marie de France, 'Bisclavret'
The baron's periodic transformation into a werewolf and his confession to his wife.
- The Last of the Mohicans, Chapter XXII
David explains that he passes freely among the Hurons, and Hawkeye attributes it to their sparing of those touched in mind.
- The Library (Bibliotheca), Book II.2.2
The daughters of Proetus go mad and roam the land; Melampus demands a share of the kingdom, then cures them by a pursuit and purification, though the eldest dies.
- The Library (Bibliotheca), Book II.4.12
Heracles, driven mad by Hera, throws his own children into the fire and goes into exile for purification.
- The Mabinogion, The Lady of the Fountain
After a damsel takes back his ring, Owain wanders the mountains until his clothes wear out and he lives among wild beasts; a widowed Countess's maiden revives him with a flask of balsam.
- The Mabinogion, Kilhwch and Olwen, opening
Queen Goleuddydd becomes wild and wanders without a home during her pregnancy; her reason returns as her delivery nears, and she gives birth in fear near a swineherd's herd.
- The Master and Margarita, Part One, Ch. 6–8
Ivan's arrival at the clinic in his underwear, his sedation, and his interview with Professor Stravinsky.
- The New York Trilogy, City of Glass, Peter Stillman's history
Peter Stillman's childhood confinement by his father links language deprivation, abuse and religious theory.
- The Oresteia, Agamemnon, Cassandra scene
Cassandra foresees murder, ancestral crimes and her own death while the chorus struggles to understand her.
- The Oresteia, Libation Bearers, ending
Orestes sees the Furies immediately after killing Clytemnestra and flees in terror.
- The Prince and the Pauper, Chapter V
The court and physicians examine Tom in Latin and French and Henry VIII declares him mad from over-study.
- The Prince and the Pauper, Chapter X
Mrs. Canty tests whether the boy is really Tom by startling him awake and watching for his old gesture.
- The Prince and the Pauper, Chapter XX
The mad hermit, believing himself an archangel, binds the sleeping king and sharpens a knife.
- The Princess and Curdie, Chapter 28, The Preacher
The first priest, carried off by the legserpent, is found a lunatic whose madness, the narrator says, jabbered sense.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter X: The Consciousness of Self
Mutations of the self: insane delusions, alternating personalities, Janet's patient Lucie, the boy Louis V., the fugue of the Rev. Ansel Bourne, and mediumship.
- The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, A Sick Collier
Willy Horsepool's pit injury, six weeks of pain, and his raving outburst during the strike; his wife's fear for the compensation.
- The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, The Shadow in the Rose Garden
The former lover, deranged after sunstroke, recognised by the wife in the garden where his keeper watches him.
- The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, Clinical interpretation chapters
Delusions, stereotypies, and neologisms are read as meaningful products of disturbed complexes.
- The Secret History, Chapter 12
Procopius reports stories from courtiers that Justinian was a demon in human form, whose head seemed to vanish as he paced at night.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Part One, C (forms of the synthesis)
Despair of infinitude lost in fantasy and despair of possibility, set against fatalistic and philistine despair of necessity; descriptions often compared to grandiosity and to depressive hopelessness.
- The Silver Chair, Chapter 11: In the Dark Castle
The knight explains that the Queen has told him he suffers a nightly fit of madness and must be tied to the silver chair until it passes.
- The Sword in the Stone, The hawks' mews episode
The Wart, changed into a merlin, keeps a night vigil beside the dangerous old goshawk Cully as an ordeal of courage set by the other hawks.
- 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 Tempest, Act 3, Scene 3; Act 5, Scene 1
Ariel's harpy speech leaves the three men of sin distracted; Prospero restores them with solemn music, and Alonso says a madness held him.
- The Thousand and One Nights (Lane's translation, Volume I), Chapter III, Story of the Envier and the Envied, with Note 63 (On Muslim Saints, or Devotees)
A king's daughter, possessed by a love-struck Márid, is cured by fumigation; Lane's note discusses insanity regarded as sanctity and confinement in the Máristán.
- The Trial of Joan of Arc, Condemnation trial, first voice testimony
Joan describes onset, fear, time of day, location, light, and auditory experience, giving material often cited in medical speculation.
- The Trojan War, Chapter 3, The madness of Odysseus
Odysseus pretends to be mad to avoid going to war, and the pretense is exposed.
- The Trojan War, Chapter 21, The armor of Achilles
Ajax and Odysseus contend for the dead hero's armor; in the tradition Ajax's defeat ends in madness and suicide.
- The Trojan Women and Other Plays, Iphigenia in Tauris, herdsman's speech
A herdsman reports how one stranger trembled, cried out at Furies no one else could see, attacked the cattle, and fell foaming while his friend tended him.
- The True Story of My Life, Chapter I
The asylum garden, the harmless patients in the court, and the raving woman who reaches for the boy through her cell door.
- The True Story of My Life, Chapter I
His weak-minded grandfather carving fantastic figures and the boy's fear of sharing his blood.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, early Bly chapters
The governess's isolation, attraction to the absent employer and first apparition establish an anxious perceptual field.
- The Twelve Caesars, Caligula
The biography uses illness, sleeplessness and behavioral excess to frame tyranny as madness or monstrous disorder.
- The Vampyre, Aubrey's return to England
Aubrey suffers fever, terror and apparent mental disorder after Ruthven returns and the oath prevents disclosure.
- The War of the Worlds, Book One, Chapter XIII (How I Fell In with the Curate)
The curate, sitting by the Thames, asks why such things are permitted and breaks into apocalyptic cries; the narrator judges that the disaster has driven him to the edge of his reason.
- The War of the Worlds, Book Two, Chapters III-IV (The Days of Imprisonment; The Death of the Curate)
Hunger and thirst in the ruined house at Sheen, the curate's drinking and loud raving, and the narrator's struggle to keep his own self-command.
- The Woman in White, First Epoch, Hartright, IV
The escaped asylum patient on the Hampstead road and the two men who pursue her by chaise.
- The World as Will and Representation, Third Book, §36
Genius and madness compared; theory of insanity as a broken thread of memory filled with fictions, giving rise to monomania, melancholy or folly; the difficulty of obtaining histories from asylum patients; madness as a refuge from unbearable grief.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Discourse VI: The Pale Criminal
A murderer whose reason misinterprets his own impulses; 'madness before the deed' and 'madness after the deed'; a plea to judges to say 'invalid' rather than 'wretch'.
- 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
- Twelfth Night, Illyrian love plots
Twelfth Night gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes melancholy, love-sickness, feigned madness, confinement, and the social power to declare someone disordered
- We, Great Operation records
The surgical removal of imagination turns medicine into political pacification.
Quotes
Frequently cited
“Mother, give me the sun”
“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”
Frequently cited
“I was not a little surprized to find many maniacs who at no period gave evidence of any lesion of the understanding, but who were under the dominion of instinctive and ab- stract fury”
“we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation”
“For they do not appear to me to have lost the faculty of reasoning, but having joined together some ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for truths; and they err as men do that argue right from wrong principles”
“a man who is very sober, and of a right understanding in all other things, may in one particular be as frantic as any in Bedlam”
“A friend of mine knew one perfectly cured of madness by a very harsh and offensive operation”
Frequently cited
“Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do”
Frequently cited
“Insanity in individuals is something rare--but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule”
“A lunatic is indeed properly one that hath lucid intervals; sometimes enjoying his senses, and sometimes not, and that frequently depending upon the change of the moon.”
“their representations may very well be the mere products of the imagination (in dreams as well as in madness”
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”
Frequently cited
“Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves”
“My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar kind. I shall have to invent a new classification for him, and call him a zoöphagous (life-eating) maniac”
Frequently cited
“The blood is the life! The blood is the life”
“But, in reality, Avarice, Ambition, Lust, &c., are species of madness, though they may not be reckoned among diseases”
“These somewhat pathetic evidences of a mind crazed with care and love”
Frequently cited
“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance”
“the changes take place inside, you know”
“he was no longer himself; his eyes were rolling; he was quite distraught; his eyeballs were bloodshot”
Frequently cited
“Sweet charm of sleep, savior in sickness, how sweetly you came to me, how needed!”
Frequently cited
“My conscience; I know that I am guilty of a dreadful crime.”
Frequently cited
“This infirmity is the incurable outcome of a very common history of disease, to which we will provisionally give the name of Dementia Prcecox”
Frequently cited
“But he also saw among so many lost things a great abundance of one thing which men are apt to think they all possess, and do not think it necessary to pray for,--good sense.”
“Ah, how easy it is to lose one's reason! Some lose theirs by yielding to the sway of the passions;”
“He felt like one who had awakened from a painful dream, in which he had believed that monsters were about to tear him to pieces.”
“Dejection, subjects a man to causelesse fears; which is a Madnesse commonly called MELANCHOLY, apparent also in divers manners; as in haunting of solitudes, and graves; in superstitious behaviour; and in fearing some one, some another particular thing”
“If some man in Bedlam should entertaine you with sober discourse; and you desire in taking leave, to know what he were, that you might another time requite his civility; and he should tell you, he were God the Father; I think you need expect no extravagant action for argument of his Madnesse”
“For the effect of the wine, does but remove Dissimulation; and take from them the sight of the deformity of their Passions”
Frequently cited
“Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint—”
“Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand”
Frequently cited
“Out, damned spot! out, I say”
“the report that I was "crazy, insane, and mad," that "I had demanded two hundred thousand men for the defense of Kentucky”
Frequently cited
“Insanity, or mental alienation, is a cerebral affection, ordinarily chronic, and without fever ; characterized by disorders of sensibility, understanding, in- telligence, and will”
“There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.”
“Sir William said he never spoke of “madness”; he called it not having a sense of proportion.”
“the specious meditations, speculations, and theories of mankind are but a kind of insanity, only there is no one to stand by and observe it”
“they are in peril of a commission _de lunatico_, and of having their property taken from them and given to their relations”
Frequently cited
“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”
“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
“And so lunatics and ideots are never set free from the government of their parents”
“I am cured, gentlemen: because I can act the mad man to perfection, here; and I do it very quietly”
“For when the act of the imagination is hindered by a lesion of the corporeal organ, for instance in a case of frenzy; or when the act of the memory is hindered, as in the case of lethargy, we see that a man is hindered from actually understanding things of which he had a previous knowledge”
“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”
“Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!”
Frequently cited
“True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”
“by the help of sleep and medicine, she and her physicians at length succeeded in winding up the untuned and jarring senses which the cruelty of his other daughters had so violently shaken.”
“puts study, contemplation, and continual meditation, as an especial cause of madness”
“one supposeth himself to be a dog, cock, bear, horse, glass, butter, &c”
“the cure depended neither on them nor their skill, but only on the princess herself.”
“And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him”
“My name is Legion: for we are many”
Frequently cited
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents”
Frequently cited
“Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell? Sleeping or waking, mad, or well-advis’d?”
“Peace, doting wizard, peace; I am not mad.”
Frequently cited
“The venom clamours of a jealous woman Poisons more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth.”
“Unquiet meals make ill digestions; Thereof the raging fire of fever bred, And what’s a fever but a fit of madness?”
“The Indians never harm a non-composser.”
“being a seer and the first to devise the cure by means of drugs and purifications”
“A small dose produced a condition not unlike violent drunkenness, a large one an attack very like a fit of madness, and some dropped down, apparently at death's door”
“If it gets about as he’s out of his mind, they’ll stop his compensation, I know they will.”
“Seeing too much sadness hath congeal’d your blood, And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy”
“A solemn air, and the best comforter To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains”
“Pass that by. I was thirteen when I had a Voice from God for my help and guidance. The first time that I heard this Voice, I was very much frightened; it was mid-day, in the summer, in my father's garden”
“delirium falsifies perception, madness the thoughts”
“the thread of memory is broken, the continuity of its connection destroyed, and no uniformly connected recollection of the past is possible”
“The streak of chalk bewitcheth the hen; the stroke he struck bewitched his weak reason. Madness AFTER the deed, I call this”
Frequently cited
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em”
Frequently cited
“Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad”