12 Years a Slave narrates Solomon Northup's kidnapping from freedom into slavery and his eventual restoration to his family. Northup is a literate, skilled violinist and laborer living as a free Black man in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Medical tag
Medical Ethics
Consent, responsibility of creator/healer, experimentation, duty of care.
Works
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.
A Letter Concerning Toleration is John Locke's argument that the civil government and the church are two distinct societies with different ends, and that the magistrate has no authority to compel belief or worship. Locke wrote it in Latin, as Epistola de Tolerantia, during the winter of 1685–86 while living in exile in the Dutch Republic, addressing it to his friend the Remonstrant theologian Philipp van Limborch.
A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity is a short paper with a long afterlife. McCulloch and Pitts propose an idealized model of neurons that fire or do not fire according to logical relations among their inputs.
This entry joins Claude Shannon's 1938 master's thesis on relay and switching circuits with his 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. The thesis made a decisive engineering move: it showed that Boolean algebra could describe and simplify relay circuits.
A Modest Proposal is Swift's savage 1729 pamphlet on Irish poverty under British rule, written in the voice of a projector who treats hunger, tenancy, children, and mothers as items in a national account. The speaker begins with beggars and starving children in Dublin streets, then adopts the language of calculation: numbers of infants, costs of nursing, market value, culinary uses, and benefits to landlords.
A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia is one of the most important public-health and Black-authored documents of the early United States. Written by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones after the devastating yellow fever epidemic of 1793, it answers Mathew Carey's published accusations that Black Philadelphians profited from disaster or behaved badly during the crisis.
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.
Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge was published in London in 1975 by New Left Books. It began as a long essay of 1970 and was meant to be one half of a joint book with Feyerabend's friend Imre Lakatos, For and Against Method, in which Lakatos would defend scientific rationality and Feyerabend attack it; Lakatos died in 1974, and Feyerabend dedicated the book to him.
Claude Bernard published this book in Paris in 1865 as the opening of a larger treatise on experimental medicine that he never completed. It sets out, for physicians, the method by which he had made his own discoveries, and argues that medicine must become a science grounded in physiology and the laboratory.
Animal Farm is a short beast fable about a revolution that turns into a tyranny. On Manor Farm near Willingdon in England, the old prize boar Major gathers the animals one night and describes a dream of a world without Man, who takes their milk, eggs and labour and sends them to the knacker when they are old.
As We May Think is a speculative essay about the problem of intellectual abundance. Written at the end of World War II, it asks what scientists should do when their wartime energies turn toward peace and when the record of human knowledge has grown too large for traditional methods of indexing, filing, and retrieval.
In the 1990s scientists at Myriad Genetics, a Salt Lake City company, determined the location and nucleotide sequence of two human genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. Certain mutations in these genes greatly raise a woman's risk of breast and ovarian cancer, and knowledge of the sequences allowed Myriad to build tests that detect those mutations.
Franklin's Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack present the founding era through self-fashioning, practical wisdom, and the culture of improvement. The Autobiography narrates Franklin's movement from Boston apprentice to Philadelphia printer, civic organizer, scientist, and public man.
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.
Eric Metaxas's Bonhoeffer is a full-length popular biography of the German Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), written for a general Christian readership. It begins with the large, cultured Bonhoeffer family of Breslau and Berlin: his father Karl, a leading professor of psychiatry and neurology; his devout mother Paula, who schooled her children at home in their early years; his twin sister Sabine; and the death of his brother Walter in the First World War, which marked the family deeply.
This record concerns compulsory sterilization and is best read with a teacher's guidance. In March 1924 Virginia enacted a statute permitting the superintendents of certain state institutions to have inmates sterilized if, after a hearing, they were found to be afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity or what the law called imbecility.
Centesimus Annus marks the hundredth anniversary of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum and reads the social question through the upheavals of the twentieth century. John Paul II returns first to 1891: industrial labor, socialist agitation, private property, wages, association, and the rights of workers.
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.
On the night of 11 January 1983 Nancy Beth Cruzan, a young Missouri woman, lost control of her car on a county road in Jasper County. Paramedics restored her breathing and heartbeat, but she never regained consciousness, and the trial court later found her to be in a persistent vegetative state, kept alive by a surgically implanted feeding tube in a state hospital.
Cybernetics presents one of the twentieth century's boldest attempts to unite machines, organisms, and societies under a single vocabulary of control, communication, feedback, and information. Wiener begins from wartime problems of prediction, especially the effort to anticipate the path of aircraft quickly enough for anti-aircraft fire.
De Materia Medica is an ancient pharmacopoeia: a systematic guide to plants, animals, minerals, wines, oils and manufactured preparations used as medicines. Dioscorides does not write a narrative.
De Regno is Aquinas's unfinished treatise on kingship, addressed to the king of Cyprus and concerned with why political rule exists, how it can serve the common good, and how it can decay into tyranny. Aquinas begins from the social nature of human beings.
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.
Destruction and Creation and the OODA Loop Briefings gather John Boyd's strategic thought from thermodynamics and epistemology to conflict, command, and adaptation. Destruction and Creation argues that organisms and organizations must break apart old mental concepts and rebuild new ones in order to cope with a changing reality.
In 1972 Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty, a microbiologist working for the General Electric Company, applied for a patent on a bacterium of the genus Pseudomonas into which he had introduced plasmids, hereditary units outside the chromosome, that allowed it to break down several components of crude oil. No natural bacterium had this combined capacity.
Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council's declaration on religious freedom, argues that the human person has a right not to be coerced by individuals, groups, or the state in religious matters. The document grounds that right in dignity, conscience, and the nature of truth, while insisting that the right concerns immunity from coercion rather than indifference about religious truth.
The Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences was published anonymously in Leiden in 1637 as a preface to three scientific essays, the Dioptrics, the Meteors and the Geometry. Descartes wrote it in French rather than Latin so that readers using their natural reason, including women, could judge it without scholastic training, and he presented it not as a treatise but as a history or fable of his own mind.
Early Black Church Sermons and Addresses is an anthology concept rather than one single-author book: it gathers public religious speech from Black Christian leaders before 1950, using only public-domain sermons, convention addresses, ordination sermons, and printed appeals. Its center is the Black church as pulpit, school, refuge, protest platform, mutual-aid network, and political institution.
Francis of Assisi reaches modern popular culture through birds, wolves, poverty, brown robes, garden statues, animal blessings, Christmas cribs, and an almost ecological tenderness. The early sources are more demanding.
Bacon's Essays, or Counsels, Civil and Moral, grew over almost thirty years from a slim volume of ten pieces in 1597 to fifty-eight in the final edition of 1625, the text used here. Bacon borrowed the name essay from Montaigne, but where Montaigne explored himself at leisure, Bacon compressed observation into dense, balanced sentences meant for men of business and government.
Evangelium Vitae is John Paul II's 1995 encyclical on the dignity and inviolability of human life. It opens with biblical meditation, especially the story of Cain and Abel, and then develops a moral analysis of what the pope calls threats to life in modern law, medicine, family life, and political culture.
Fahrenheit 451 is set in an American city of an unspecified future where houses are fireproof and firemen no longer put out fires but start them, burning books and the houses of people who hide them. Guy Montag, a fireman of ten years, loves the work.
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.
Fathers and Sons is set in the Russian countryside in the spring and summer of 1859, two years before the emancipation of the serfs. Arkady Kirsanov, a newly graduated student, returns to his father's modest, poorly run estate, Maryino, bringing his friend and mentor Yevgeny Bazarov, a brusque, brilliant medical student of humble origins who calls himself a nihilist: he accepts no principle on authority and values only what is useful, especially natural science.
Fides et Ratio is John Paul II's 1998 encyclical on the relation between faith and reason. Its governing image is that the human spirit rises toward contemplation of truth by two wings, and the whole argument defends the compatibility and mutual need of revelation and philosophical inquiry.
First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC is not a polished monograph but a technical memorandum whose influence exceeds its form. Written in 1945 for the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer project, it describes a general-purpose electronic digital computer in which numerical data and operating instructions occupy the same high-speed memory.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a frame narrative told through the letters of Robert Walton, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice. Walton rescues a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing a gigantic figure across the frozen sea, and who tells his story as a warning to a man whose ambition resembles his own.
Galen: Selected Works introduces a physician whose ambition was encyclopedic. The surviving Galenic corpus ranges from technical anatomy and pulse lore to philosophical defenses of method, from therapeutics and compound drugs to autobiography and polemic against rivals.
In 1996 California voters approved Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, which exempted from state prosecution seriously ill patients and their caregivers who possessed or grew marijuana for medical use on a physician's recommendation. Angel Raich and Diane Monson, two California residents with serious medical conditions, used marijuana on the advice of their doctors.
Because it concerns contraception and marriage, the case is best studied with a teacher's guidance. Since 1879 Connecticut law had made it a crime for any person to use a drug or device to prevent conception, and a general accessory statute allowed anyone who assisted or counseled such use to be punished as a principal.
Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), translated by Abbott as Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, is a short book with a narrow and ambitious aim: to identify and establish the supreme principle of morality. It does not offer a full ethical system, which Kant postponed to the Metaphysics of Morals of 1797, but clears the ground by asking what must be true of moral obligation if it is to bind every rational being without exception.
On a cold December morning in Holland, fifteen-year-old Hans Brinker and his twelve-year-old sister Gretel skate on the canal near the village of Broek on wooden runners Hans has carved himself. Their family is very poor.
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.
I Am Prepared to Die is Nelson Mandela's statement from the dock during the Rivonia Trial in 1964. Facing charges that could lead to death, Mandela uses the courtroom not primarily to plead for mercy but to explain the political history and moral logic of resistance to apartheid.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is Harriet Jacobs's account of her life in slavery and escape, told under the name Linda Brent with the names of people and places changed. Linda grows up in a North Carolina town believing herself free until, at six, her mother dies and she learns she is a slave.
Ivanhoe is set in England in 1194, when King Richard the Lion-Hearted is making his way home in secret after captivity in Austria and his brother Prince John is scheming to take the crown. More than a century after the Norman Conquest, Saxons and Normans are still bitterly divided.
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.
Lectures on Revivals of Religion is Finney's manual of revival as method. Where Edwards treats awakening as a surprising work to be interpreted cautiously, Finney argues that revivals are not miracles in the sense of being beyond means.
Charcot's lectures show clinical neurology becoming a public method: observe signs, localize lesions, correlate symptoms with anatomy, and teach by cases. The English volumes gather Salpetriere lectures on spinal cord disease, paralysis, tremor, sclerosis, locomotor ataxia, hysteria, epilepsy, and related nervous disorders.
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.
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.
Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance and Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention show him as both principled advocate and institutional anatomist. Memorial and Remonstrance, written in 1785 against a Virginia religious assessment bill, argues that religion must be free from state coercion because conscience is prior to civil society and cannot be surrendered to government.
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.
Middlemarch, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, follows several households in and around a Midlands market town from 1829 to 1832, the years leading to the first Reform Act. Its Prelude recalls Saint Teresa of Ávila and asks what becomes of women with a similar longing for a great life who are born into an age that gives it no outlet.
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.
Ada Lovelace's Notes on Menabrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine begin as an act of translation and become a theory of computation. Luigi Menabrea had published a French account of Charles Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine after hearing Babbage lecture in Turin.
Jefferson's selected writings show the range and tensions of the revolutionary Enlightenment in America. Notes on the State of Virginia began as answers to questions from a French diplomat, but it became Jefferson's most sustained book: a survey of Virginia's geography, natural history, laws, economy, population, slavery, Indigenous peoples, education, religion, and politics.
The Novum Organum ('new instrument') is the second and only substantially completed part of Bacon's projected Instauratio Magna, a six-part plan to rebuild human knowledge from its foundations. Its title throws down a challenge to the Organon, the collection of Aristotle's logical works that had governed university teaching for centuries.
Of Mice and Men takes place over a few days on a ranch near Soledad in California's Salinas Valley during the Depression. George Milton, small and sharp, and Lennie Small, a huge, immensely strong man with an intellectual disability and the mind of a child, are itinerant ranch hands who travel together, unusual among solitary migrant workers.
This paired entry brings together Alan Turing's 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem and his 1950 essay Computing Machinery and Intelligence. The first paper attacks a precise mathematical problem: what does it mean for a number or function to be computable?
On Formally Undecidable Propositions is one of the decisive works in the history of logic. Godel addresses the dream that mathematics might be placed on a complete and consistent formal foundation, a dream associated with Hilbert's program.
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.
On Medicine, or De Medicina, is the most important surviving Latin medical work before late antiquity. Celsus organizes medicine into diet, drugs and surgery, giving Roman readers a lucid account of Greek medical learning without the dense polemic of specialist schools.
De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Seven Books on the Fabric of the Human Body) was printed at Basel by Johannes Oporinus in 1543, when its author, Andreas Vesalius, professor at Padua, was twenty-eight. Its seven books describe the bones and cartilages, the ligaments and muscles, the veins and arteries, the nerves, the organs of nutrition and generation, the heart and the organs of the chest, and the brain and the senses.
Psychopathia Sexualis is a medico-forensic taxonomy of sexual behavior written for physicians and lawyers. Krafft-Ebing organizes case histories under categories such as hyperaesthesia, anaesthesia, paraesthesia, sadism, masochism, fetishism, and contrary sexual feeling, using the language of degeneration, neuropathic heredity, and criminal responsibility.
The Regensburg Lecture, delivered by Benedict XVI in 2006 at the University of Regensburg, argues that Christian faith is intrinsically bound to reason and that the modern narrowing of reason endangers both theology and culture. Benedict begins with a contested quotation from a dialogue between the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and a Persian interlocutor, then uses the controversy over faith and violence to introduce his larger claim: acting against reason is contrary to the nature of God.
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.
Sermons and Letter from Birmingham Jail brings together Martin Luther King Jr.'s public theology and civil-rights argument at their most concentrated. The sermon tradition behind King includes the Black church, biblical prophecy, social gospel, liberal theology, and the cadences of African American sacred speech.
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 Statesman (Politikos) is one of Plato's late dialogues, usually dated to the 360s or 350s BC. It continues the conversation of the Sophist, held the day before: a visitor from Elea, a follower of Parmenides, has defined the sophist, and now, at Socrates' request, he undertakes to define the statesman or king.
Mr. Utterson, a reserved and loyal London lawyer, takes his Sunday walk with his kinsman Richard Enfield, who points out a shabby door in a by-street and tells how, at three one winter morning, he saw a small man trample a little girl and walk on. Caught and threatened, the man paid close to a hundred pounds in compensation with a cheque signed by a respected gentleman.
Sts. Cosmas and Damian are the physician saints par excellence: twin or paired martyrs, healers without payment, patrons of doctors and surgeons, and subjects of one of medieval art's strangest surgical miracles. The historical core is modest.
Studies on Hysteria is the classic collaborative text from which psychoanalysis narrates much of its beginning. It opens with the preliminary communication on hysterical symptoms, then presents case histories including Anna O., Emmy von N., Lucy R., Katharina, and Elisabeth von R., followed by theoretical and therapeutic reflections.
That Hideous Strength, subtitled A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups, completes the trilogy that began with Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, though it moves the action from other planets to an English university town. Mark Studdock, a young sociologist and fellow of Bracton College in Edgestow, longs to belong to the inner circle of the college's Progressive Element.
The Abolition of Man is the text of three lectures C. S. Lewis gave as the Riddell Memorial Lectures at King's College, Newcastle upon Tyne, then part of the University of Durham, in February 1943, and published that year by Oxford University Press with the subtitle Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. The first lecture, Men without Chests, begins with a small English textbook for schoolchildren, which Lewis calls The Green Book and whose authors he names Gaius and Titius out of courtesy.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collects the first twelve short stories about the consulting detective of 221B Baker Street, each narrated by his friend Dr. John Watson. In A Scandal in Bohemia the King of Bohemia hires Holmes to recover a compromising photograph from the singer Irene Adler; Holmes, disguised first as a groom and then as a clergyman, tricks her into revealing its hiding place, but she sees through him and escapes with her new husband, leaving Holmes the admiring loser.
The Annals of Imperial Rome narrates the Julio-Claudian empire from the death of Augustus through Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, though parts are lost. Tacitus writes history as the psychology of autocracy.
The Anti-Federalist Papers are not a single coordinated book but a body of pamphlets, essays, speeches, and newspaper pieces opposing or demanding amendments to the proposed Constitution. Their writers differed among themselves, but they shared alarm about the scale and power of the new federal government.
The Art of the Commonplace gathers Wendell Berry's agrarian essays on land, household, work, food, technology, economy, conservation, and the moral scale of community. The collection's title points to Berry's method: he resists abstraction by returning arguments to farms, watersheds, kitchens, tools, soil, neighbors, and inherited obligations.
The Arthashastra, the 'science of material gain' or of statecraft, is a vast Sanskrit treatise on how a king should acquire, protect and govern territory. Written mostly in prose with occasional verses, it is divided into fifteen books and some 150 chapters, and covers almost every aspect of administration with remarkable detail and an unsentimental realism that has led to comparisons with Machiavelli.
The Communist Manifesto presents modern history as the history of class struggle and casts the bourgeoisie as both revolutionary and exploitative. Marx and Engels argue that capitalism has dissolved feudal relations, expanded world markets, concentrated production, remade family and nation, and subjected older loyalties to cash exchange.
The Conquest of Gaul is a common English title for Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, seven books narrating his campaigns of 58 to 52 BCE, completed by an eighth book written after his death by his officer Aulus Hirtius. Each book covers one campaigning year, and Caesar speaks of himself throughout in the third person, a device that makes political self-advertisement read like a dispatch.
Published in Munich in 1937 under the one-word title Nachfolge (following, or discipleship), The Cost of Discipleship is Bonhoeffer's attempt to recover the plain command of Jesus to follow him from a Lutheran church that had, he believed, turned grace into a doctrine requiring nothing. Its first chapter sets the terms for the whole book with the contrast between cheap and costly grace.
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 Death of Ivan Ilyich begins at the end. In the law courts, colleagues of Ivan Ilyich Golovin read in the newspaper of his death, and each thinks first of the promotions and transfers it will bring.
The Early Christian Creeds gathers short doctrinal texts that became durable summaries of Christian identity: baptismal symbols, conciliar formulas and later Western confessions. The Old Roman Symbol and the Apostles' Creed preserve the shape of early baptismal confession: belief in God the Father, Jesus Christ his Son, the Spirit, the church, forgiveness, resurrection and life.
The Founding Documents gathers the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights as one civic anthology. The Declaration, adopted by the Continental Congress in July 1776, announces separation from Britain by appealing to the laws of nature and of nature’s God, to the self-evident truths that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, and to government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed.
Jonas is eleven and lives with his father, a Nurturer who cares for newborns, his mother, who holds an important post in the Department of Justice, and his younger sister Lily in a tidy, enclosed Community where nearly everything is decided for its citizens. Families are assigned, each with one son and one daughter; babies are born to Birthmothers and given out at the yearly December Ceremony; children receive bicycles at Nine and jobs at Twelve; precise language is enforced with public apologies; everyone takes a daily pill once the Stirrings of adolescent desire begin; and those who break the rules three times, the old, and newborns who fail to thrive are "released" to a vague Elsewhere.
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's history of the Soviet system of prisons, labour camps and exile, which he likened to an archipelago of islands scattered across the country, visible only to those taken there. Written in secret between 1958 and 1968, it draws on Solzhenitsyn's own eight years as a prisoner and on the testimony of some two hundred and twenty-seven other former prisoners, together with published Soviet sources.
The Innocence of Father Brown collects the first twelve stories about Father Brown, a short, round-faced Roman Catholic priest from Essex with a shabby umbrella and an armful of brown-paper parcels, who solves crimes by understanding the sinners who commit them. In "The Blue Cross" Aristide Valentin, head of the Paris police, lands at Harwich hunting the giant French thief Flambeau and follows a trail of absurdities across London: salt in a sugar bowl, soup thrown at a wall, a window broken and paid for in advance, price labels swapped on a fruit stall.
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.
Die Traumdeutung appeared in November 1899 with the date 1900 on its title page, and Freud regarded it as his most important book. Its central claim is that dreams are meaningful psychic acts that can be interpreted, and that every dream, properly analysed, proves to be the fulfilment of a wish.
The Magician's Nephew is the story of how Narnia began and how a wardrobe came to lead into it. In London around 1900, Digory Kirke has been sent to live with his Uncle Andrew and Aunt Letty because his father is in India and his mother is gravely ill.
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 Moonstone, subtitled A Romance, tells the story of a great yellow diamond taken from India and the year of suspicion that follows its disappearance from an English country house. A Prologue, drawn from a family paper, describes the storming of Seringapatam in 1799, when the officer John Herncastle seizes the jewel from Tipu Sultan's treasury, killing its guardians; one dying Indian warns that the Moonstone will have its vengeance.
The Pearl is a short novella in six chapters, framed as a folk tale retold in the Gulf town of La Paz, on the coast of Baja California. Kino, a poor pearl diver, lives in a brush house by the shore with his wife, Juana, and their infant son, Coyotito.
The Persian Expedition, known in Greek as the Anabasis or 'march up-country', is Xenophon's account of the campaign of 401–399 BCE in which about ten thousand Greek mercenaries followed Cyrus the Younger into Mesopotamia and then fought their way home. Cyrus, younger son of Darius II, gathers an army in Sardis on the pretext of a war against Pisidian raiders, while his real aim is to unseat his brother, King Artaxerxes II.
The Plague is a chronicle of an epidemic of bubonic and then pneumonic plague in Oran, a commercial port on the Algerian coast, in an unspecified year of the 1940s. The narrator, who reveals himself only at the end as the physician Bernard Rieux, writes as an impartial witness, drawing also on the notebooks of his friend Jean Tarrou.
The Power and the Glory is set in an unnamed Mexican state during an anticlerical campaign that has outlawed or driven out Catholic priests. Its central figure is the last active priest in the region, a fugitive known as the whisky priest because of his alcoholism and moral failures.
The Prince 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 Quiet American is narrated by Thomas Fowler, a weary British journalist in French-controlled Vietnam during the First Indochina War. The novel begins after the death of Alden Pyle, a young American official whose innocence, confidence and political theories have made him dangerous.
The Republic begins with a question that never stays small: what is justice, and is the just life happier than the unjust? Socrates meets Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Piraeus.
The Rule of St Benedict is a concise manual for forming a stable monastic community. It opens by calling the monastery a school for the Lord’s service and asks what kind of person desires life.
The Scarlet Letter is set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston but begins with a nineteenth-century frame, The Custom-House, in which a narrator claims to discover an embroidered letter A and the story of Hester Prynne. Hester appears on the scaffold with her infant Pearl, condemned to wear the scarlet letter for adultery while refusing to name the child's father.
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.
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 Underdogs follows Demetrio Macias, a peasant from Juchipila who joins the Mexican Revolution after conflict with federal soldiers makes ordinary life impossible. At first Demetrio's rebellion is local and personal: he flees with a band of men into the hills, fights effectively and becomes a leader because of courage, terrain knowledge and charisma.
The Warden is a quiet institutional novel about conscience, reform and the human cost of public righteousness. Septimus Harding is the gentle precentor of Barchester Cathedral and warden of Hiram's Hospital, a charitable almshouse for twelve elderly men.
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.
Twelve Angry Men takes place almost entirely in a jury room after a murder trial. Twelve male jurors must decide whether a young defendant is guilty of killing his father; a guilty verdict will mean death.
Utilitarianism is a short defence of the ethical theory Mill inherited from Jeremy Bentham and his own father. It was first published in three instalments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and as a book in 1863.
Utopia is a dialogue in two books, written in Latin and presented as a true report. In Book I More, writing in his own person, recalls his embassy to Flanders in 1515 with Cuthbert Tunstall.
Washington Square is a compact novel about an heiress, a suitor and a father whose intelligence becomes a weapon. Catherine Sloper is the plain, shy and dutiful daughter of Dr. Austin Sloper, a wealthy New York physician still grieving his brilliant dead wife and disappointed that Catherine lacks her mother's beauty and charm.
Washington had made it a crime to aid a suicide since its first territorial legislature acted in 1854. In January 1994 four physicians who treat terminally ill patients, led by Dr. Harold Glucksberg, joined three gravely ill patients (who died while the case was pending) and the nonprofit group Compassion in Dying in a suit in federal court.
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.
We Hold These Truths collects John Courtney Murray's essays on the American constitutional experiment, natural law, religious liberty, pluralism, and the conditions of civil conversation. Murray argues that the American order depends on moral truths that public argument must continue to articulate, not merely procedural agreement or private preference.
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 Doll's House and Other Plays, An Enemy of the People, Acts 1–4
Dr Stockmann's laboratory analysis of the spa water, suppression of his report, and the public meeting that brands him an enemy of the people.
- A Letter Concerning Toleration, Letter, definition of the commonwealth
Health and indolency of body listed among the civil interests the magistrate protects.
- A Letter Concerning Toleration, Letter, on the magistrate's care of souls
The analogy of a prince compelling subjects to consult only Roman physicians and take remedies from the Vatican or a Geneva shop; no one forced to be rich or healthful.
- A Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1948 paper, treatment of noise and redundancy
The formal handling of uncertainty and error has clear implications for diagnostic systems and medical decision support.
- A Modest Proposal, Rejected remedies
A Modest Proposal gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes starvation, infant mortality, public health, reproductive exploitation, and the dehumanizing language of population management
- A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, Response to accusations and immunity assumptions
The pamphlet exposes how false medical claims about race shaped risk and blame.
- A Treatise on Insanity, Treatment chapters
The discussion of regimen, baths, restraint, and moral management captures the therapeutic hopes and limits of asylum reform.
- Against Method, Closing chapters (science in a free society)
Argument that laymen, not experts alone, should decide which traditions are taught and supported, including in matters of health.
- An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, Part Two, Chapter II
Bernard sets out which experiments on human beings are forbidden, permitted or obligatory, and defends vivisection while discussing the pain of animals and the objections of its critics.
- Animal Farm, Chapter 9
Boxer's split hoof and failing lungs, his collapse at the windmill, and his removal in the horse slaughterer's van while Squealer describes a hospital.
- As We May Think, Opening postwar frame
The redirection of wartime research toward peaceful knowledge raises questions about scientific responsibility.
- Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., Opinion of the Court, Part I–C, at the sentence beginning After learning of GDL
The opinion recounts how Myriad's letters led the University of Pennsylvania laboratory to stop testing and to refuse a physician's patient samples, the factual basis for the challengers' claim that patents restricted clinical access.
- Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., Opinion of the Court, Part III, at the sentence beginning First, there are no method claims
Thomas notes that patents on methods of testing and on new applications of BRCA knowledge were not before the Court, leaving room for diagnostic innovation to be patented in other forms.
- Body and Mind, Responsibility chapters
The legal and moral reflections ask how disease, habit, and brain function alter blame.
- Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, Chapters on the war years
The Nazi euthanasia program and Bonhoeffer's ethical writing on the protection of innocent life.
- Buck v. Bell, Opinion of the Court, review of procedure: The superintendent first presents a petition to the special board of directors of his hospital or colony
The procedure by which an institution's superintendent initiated the operation and the board, courts and guardian reviewed it, a window on the authority of asylum administrators in the 1920s.
- Centesimus Annus, Market, culture, person
Centesimus Annus gives this tag concrete force through its medical lens is social: work, poverty, family wages, consumerism, and solidarity all shape health before clinical care begins
- Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book I, ch. 1
Personal security defined to include health; life protected from the time an infant can stir in the womb; harms to health and limbs as injuries to the person.
- Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book I, ch. 8
The Lord Chancellor's commission of lunacy and the rule that the next heir may not be committee of the person.
- Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, Opinion of the Court, paragraph beginning The logical corollary of the doctrine of informed consent
Traces how the right to refuse treatment grew out of informed consent and how Quinlan in 1976 began the line of state end-of-life decisions.
- Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, Concurrence of Justice O'Connor, paragraph beginning The State's artificial provision of nutrition and hydration
Relies on statements of the American Medical Association and the Hastings Center to treat artificial feeding as medical treatment rather than ordinary care.
- Cybernetics, Wartime prediction background
The anti-aircraft context ties theories of cognition and control to the injuries and decisions of modern war.
- De Materia Medica, Antidote and poison entries
Descriptions of toxic substances and countermeasures form an early practical toxicology.
- De Regno, Kingship and tyranny
De Regno gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens is analogical: tyranny appears as a disorder of the body politic, and prudent rule resembles care ordered toward communal health
- Description of the Retreat, Treatment chapters
Moral treatment is presented as calm authority, respect, occupation, and minimized restraint.
- Diamond v. Chakrabarty, Opinion of the Court, Part IV-B, paragraph beginning To buttress his argument, the petitioner
Summarizes warnings by scientists, including Nobel laureates, that genetic research might threaten human health or diversity, and the Court's view that patent law would not determine whether such research continued.
- Diamond v. Chakrabarty, Note appended to the opinion, paragraph beginning We are not to be understood as suggesting that the political branches have been laggard
Points to the National Institutes of Health guidelines of 1976 as an example of the political branches already regulating recombinant DNA research.
- Diamond v. Chakrabarty, Note appended to the opinion, paragraph beginning In 1873, the Patent Office granted Louis Pasteur a patent
Records that Pasteur received a patent on purified yeast in 1873 and that the Patent Office issued patents claiming micro-organisms in the late 1960s.
- Dignitatis Humanae, Human dignity
Dignitatis Humanae gives this tag concrete force through its medical relevance is bioethical and institutional: conscience, coercion, dignity, and religious liberty matter in hospitals and public health policy
- Discourse on Method, Part V
Animal spirits, nerves, muscles and the brain explained mechanically; animals as automata; speech and reason as signs of a rational soul, with remarks on deaf people's sign language.
- Early Black Church Sermons and Addresses, Addresses on education, temperance, and mutual aid
Institutional care appears as a response to excluded and endangered bodies.
- Early Franciscan Sources, Death narratives
Francis's final weakness, song, and ritual gestures make dying a communal and liturgical event.
- Essays, Essay XXX, Of Regiment of Health
Self-observation as physic, gradual change, Celsus's alternation of fasting and full eating, waking and sleep; passions to avoid; choosing a physician of middle temper.
- Evangelium Vitae, Threats to life
Evangelium Vitae gives this tag concrete force through this is one of the batch's most explicit medical-ethics texts, addressing abortion, euthanasia, suffering, conscience, and care for the vulnerable
- Fahrenheit 451, Part One, Clarisse's conversations
Clarisse explains that she has been sent to a psychiatrist because she is considered antisocial.
- Far from the Madding Crowd, Vol. I, Ch. XXI
Gabriel relieves the bloated sheep by puncturing their rumen with a trocar, saving most of Bathsheba's flock.
- Fathers and Sons, Ch. 27
Bazarov cuts himself during a post-mortem on a typhus victim; he describes his symptoms clinically, accepts his death and sends for Odintsova.
- Fides et Ratio, The two wings
Fides et Ratio gives this tag concrete force through the medical relevance is in bioethics and anthropology: a reduced account of reason weakens the defense of dignity, conscience, and persons
- First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, Memory and control sections
The treatment of memory and orders anticipates later clinical and cognitive uses of computational language.
- Galen: Selected Works, On the Passions and Errors of the Soul
Galen treats anger, error, self-knowledge and moral training as matters with therapeutic significance.
- Gonzales v. Raich, Opinion of the Court, Part I, paragraph beginning Respondents Angel Raich and Diane Monson are California residents
Describes the patients' physicians' conclusion, after trying conventional medicines, that marijuana was the only effective treatment available to them.
- Gonzales v. Raich, Opinion of the Court, Part V, at the sentence beginning As the Solicitor General confirmed during oral argument
Points to the statutory procedure for reclassifying a Schedule I drug as an avenue for those who believe it has medical value.
- Griswold v. Connecticut, Opinion of the Court, standing: We think that appellants have standing to raise the constitutional rights of the married people with whom they had a professional relationship.
Douglas holds that a convicted physician and clinic director may assert the rights of the patients they served, an important link between the doctor-patient relationship and constitutional litigation.
- Griswold v. Connecticut, Dissent of Justice Black, paragraph beginning: Had the doctor defendant here, or even the nondoctor defendant, been convicted for doing nothing more than expressing opinions
Black distinguishes a physician's protected advice from the clinic's examinations and supply of materials, which he treats as conduct the state may punish.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Second Section (imperatives of skill)
The physician's precepts for healing and the poisoner's for killing are equally valid as technical rules; morality must come from elsewhere.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Second Section (first example under the universal law of nature)
A man wearied of life asks whether suicide from self-love could be a universal law and concludes it could not.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Second Section (formula of humanity, duties to oneself)
One may not mutilate, damage or kill oneself; Kant defers the question of amputating limbs to preserve life to a future ethics.
- Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, Chapter 32, The Crisis
Dr. Boekman discusses the case with his assistant Vollenhoven, explains the risk to Hans, obtains the mother's consent and begins the operation.
- Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, Chapter 43, A Discovery
Dr. Boekman explains that his son prepared the wrong medicine, a deadly poison, which was never given.
- Hippocratic Writings, The Oath
The physician promises restraint with deadly drugs, confidentiality and disciplined conduct in the houses of patients.
- Ivanhoe, Chapter XXXVII
At Rebecca's trial a Saxon peasant she treated for palsy is dragged forward, and her cures and balms are offered as proof of witchcraft.
- Laws, Book IV
The slave doctor and the free doctor compared, introducing the persuasive preambles to the laws.
- Lectures on Revivals of Religion, Lectures on means and measures
Finney's claim that revival follows proper means frames conversion as something structured environments can promote.
- Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind, Treatment sections
Recommended bleeding, purging, restraint, and moral management raise major ethical issues.
- Memoirs of Usama ibn Munqidh, Section II, ch. 2 (Noteworthy Cures)
Cures by ibn-Butlan and others: dropsy, a dust-clogged throat, a feared leprosy, a cold in the head, a chill and a colic cured after a dream.
- Memorial and Remonstrance and Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention, Memorial and Remonstrance
The priority of conscience becomes relevant to later medical conflicts over professional duty and state compulsion.
- Mental Maladies, Asylum chapters
The institutional material treats space, classification, attendants, and medical authority as therapeutic instruments.
- Mental Pathology and Therapeutics, Therapeutics
The treatment chapters combine physical care, moral treatment, prognosis, and asylum organization.
- Middlemarch, Book VII, Chapters LXIX-LXX
Raffles's illness at Stone Court, Lydgate's instructions on opium dosage and no alcohol, and Bulstrode's fatal omissions.
- Middlemarch, Book VII, Chapter LXXI
The town debates Lydgate's certificate of delirium tremens; the public meeting on sanitary measures against cholera where Bulstrode is accused.
- Mrs. Dalloway, Midday, Dr. Holmes's visits
Holmes's cheerful prescriptions and his refusal to see illness, and Septimus's growing dread of him as the agent of human nature.
- Mrs. Dalloway, Noon, Harley Street
Sir William Bradshaw's consultation, the decision to send Septimus to a country home, and the narrator's long passage on proportion and conversion.
- Notes on Menabrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine, Concluding reflections on the Engine
The statement that the machine cannot originate anything frames the ethical boundary around claims made for artificial minds.
- Notes on the State of Virginia, Selected Letters, and The Jefferson Bible, Notes on Virginia, queries on population and race
Jefferson's racial claims show Enlightenment classification entering political arguments about slavery, bodily difference, and human equality.
- Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism LXXXVII
Impostors who promise prolongation of life, retarding of old age, relief of pain and the exaltation of the intellect discredit honest natural philosophy.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 3
Carlson shoots Candy's old dog; Candy later wishes he had done it himself.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 6
George kills Lennie to spare him the lynch mob.
- On Computable Numbers and Computing Machinery, 1950 essay, imitation game
The replacement of the thinking question by a behavioral test matters for psychiatric interviews and modern AI evaluation.
- On Formally Undecidable Propositions, Consistency theorem
The inability of a system to certify itself invites ethical caution about self-validating technical institutions.
- On Liberty, Ch. I, Introductory
The harm principle, sovereignty over one's own body and mind, and the explicit exclusion of children and those needing care from the doctrine.
- 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.
- On Liberty, Ch. V, Applications
Sale of poisons: labelling, a register of buyers, Bentham's 'preappointed evidence', and rejection of a universal prescription requirement; the unsafe-bridge example and its exceptions for the delirious or overexcited.
- On Medicine, Book 7
Operations for cataract, fistula, bladder stone and damaged body parts show technical Roman surgery.
- Psychopathia Sexualis, Medico-forensic introduction
Krafft-Ebing presents sexuality as an object of psychiatric and legal expertise.
- Psychopathia Sexualis, Forensic conclusions
The work links diagnosis to responsibility, punishment, and expert testimony.
- Regensburg Lecture, A contested citation
Regensburg Lecture gives this tag concrete force through the medical relevance is indirect: the lecture resists narrowed technical reason and thereby speaks to bioethics, human dignity, and clinical judgment
- Second Treatise of Government, Ch. II, §6
The law of nature forbids harming anyone in life, health, liberty or possessions; no one has liberty to destroy himself.
- Second Treatise of Government, Ch. IV, §23
No one can consent to absolute power over his own life, so self-enslavement is void.
- Sermons and Letter from Birmingham Jail, Sermons on love and beloved community
Love is framed as a social discipline capable of healing public hatred without denying danger.
- St. Dymphna and the Geel Colony, Geel shrine and colony
Mentally afflicted pilgrims and boarders are lodged first near the shrine and later in family homes, creating a premodern alternative to confinement.
- St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles, Water of St. Thomas
Blood mixed with water becomes a portable contact relic used externally and internally in healing stories.
- Statesman, 293a–c
The physician who heals with or against the patient's will, by cutting or burning, as the model of rule by knowledge.
- Statesman, 298a–299e
The thought experiment of an assembly of laymen legislating rules for medicine and navigation, with annual audits and penalties for inquiry beyond the written code.
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case
Jekyll wakes with Hyde's hand on the sheet, needs double doses to return, abstains for two months, then relapses into the Carew murder.
- Sts. Cosmas and Damian: Physician Saints, Anargyroi title
The saints are remembered as healers who do not take payment, making fees and charity central to the moral image of medicine.
- Sts. Cosmas and Damian: Physician Saints, Miracle of the black leg
The saints perform a miraculous limb replacement, making medieval viewers imagine diseased tissue, surgical instruments, donor bodies, and postoperative identity.
- That Hideous Strength, Chapter 8, Moonlight at Belbury, and Chapter 9
Mark is brought before the Head of Alcasan, sustained by pumps and tubes in Filostrato's laboratory.
- That Hideous Strength, Chapters 12-14
Frost conditions Mark in the Objective Room, a training meant to remove instinctive moral responses.
- The Abolition of Man, Lecture III
Power over nature analysed as power of some men over others, with contraception, eugenics and prenatal conditioning as examples of control by one generation over its successors.
- The Abolition of Man, Lecture III
The Conditioners, who use applied psychology to produce whatever consciences they choose in their pupils.
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Speckled Band
Dr. Grimesby Roylott, a physician who once practised in Calcutta, uses a trained swamp adder through a ventilator; Holmes reflects on doctors who become murderers and on poisons that escape chemical detection.
- The Annals of Imperial Rome, Book 15, Seneca’s death
Seneca’s forced suicide is narrated as philosophical performance and political coercion.
- The Anti-Federalist Papers, Federal Farmer on amendments
The insistence on explicit rights informs later arguments over bodily liberty and legal protection.
- The Art of the Commonplace, Economy and care
The Art of the Commonplace gives this tag concrete force through his medical relevance lies in public health broadly conceived: food systems, labor, ecological damage, loneliness, and the social conditions of flourishing
- The Arthashastra, Book 4 (protection against artisans and professionals)
Penalties for physicians whose treatment causes death or injury without notification to authorities.
- The Communist Manifesto, Rivals and conclusion
The Communist Manifesto gives this tag concrete force through its medical relevance lies in social medicine: labor conditions, poverty, urbanization, family disruption, and the political diagnosis of suffering
- The Conquest of Gaul, Book VII.77–78
Critognatus's speech proposing cannibalism, and the Mandubii, including old and sick people unfit for war, expelled from Alesia and refused food at the Roman lines.
- The Cost of Discipleship, Part Two, Matthew 5 (the enemy)
Love of enemies and refusal of retaliation are read as concrete commands, written amid persecution of Jews and dissenters.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Paris section (Saint-Méran and Barrois deaths)
Successive poisonings in the Villefort household; Dr d'Avrigny diagnoses poison and confronts Villefort.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 7
The lie that he is only ill torments him; Gerasim holds his legs on his shoulders for hours and speaks honestly of death.
- The Early Christian Creeds, Chalcedonian Definition (451), two natures
Chalcedon's insistence that Christ is fully human protects the reality of embodied suffering from being treated as merely apparent.
- The Founding Documents, Bill of Rights, due process and bodily protections
Rights language later shapes legal questions about bodily integrity, confinement, treatment, and punishment.
- The Giver, Chapter 19
The recorded release of a newborn twin by injection, performed by Jonas's father.
- The Giver, Chapter 20
The Giver tells how his daughter Rosemary, overwhelmed by painful memories, asked to be released, and how the people suffered when her memories returned.
- The Gulag Archipelago, Part III, chapters on camp life
Rations, work norms and the progressive wasting of prisoners; the camp medical unit and the role of doctors in certifying fitness for work.
- The Innocence of Father Brown, The Wrong Shape, Dr. Harris's letter
A physician explains how he drugged his patient, staged a suicide note and calculated the angle of the knife.
- The Institutes of Justinian, Book IV, Title 3.6-7
Liability of a surgeon who neglects aftercare, operates unskilfully or gives the wrong medicines.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter II, the dream of Irma's injection
A patient with hysterical symptoms, a throat examination revealing white patches, colleagues diagnosing infection and blaming an injection given with an unclean syringe; Freud's analysis of his own professional guilt.
- The Magician's Nephew, Chapter 2: Digory and His Uncle
Uncle Andrew explains that he tested the rings on guinea pigs and justifies sending a child into the unknown.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Imaginary Invalid, Act 3
Monsieur Purgon curses Argan with a cascade of diseases; Toinette, disguised as a doctor, prescribes absurd remedies; Argan feigns death to test his family.
- The Moonstone, First Period, Chapter X
At the birthday dinner Franklin Blake, sleepless after giving up tobacco, mocks medicine, and Mr. Candy takes offense; Betteredge notes Franklin's restless nights.
- The Pearl, Chapter 1
The scorpion stings Coyotito; Juana sucks the puncture; the family goes to the doctor's gate and is refused through his servant.
- The Pearl, Chapter 3
The doctor arrives uninvited, gives the child a white powder, and returns an hour later to treat the illness that follows, while watching Kino's eyes for the pearl's hiding place.
- The Persian Expedition, Book V, Chapter VIII
Xenophon's defence at the army's audit: he struck men who left the disabled behind or tried to bury a living comrade, and forced stragglers to keep moving to prevent freezing.
- The Plague, Part I
The health committee at the prefecture, where Rieux and Castel press officials to name the disease and adopt the regulations it requires.
- The Plague, Part IV
The death of Othon's young son after an injection of Castel's serum, watched at the bedside by Rieux, Castel, Tarrou and Paneloux.
- The Power and the Glory, Final return to the dying American
The call to attend a dying man forces the priest back into danger and frames sacramental care as a duty to the body at death.
- The Prince and the Pauper, Chapter XV
A man is condemned to be boiled alive for poisoning on the doctors' word about the symptoms; Tom examines the evidence and frees him.
- The Princess and Curdie, Chapter 23, Dr Kelman
The king tells of his despondency, sleeplessness, dreams and suspicion; the doctor fills the glass from a phial and takes out a lancet before Lina seizes him.
- The Quiet American, Place Garnier bombing
Civilian casualties after the bombing make Pyle's theory visible as wounds, blood and preventable death.
- The Republic, Book 5
Guardian reproduction and family arrangements treat politics as managed breeding and education.
- The Rule of St Benedict, Chapter 36
Care of the sick is placed before and above other duties, with service rendered as to Christ.
- The Rule of St Benedict, Chapters 23–30
Correction and excommunication regulate disruptive behavior within a closed institution.
- The Scarlet Letter, Ch. 2-3
Hester's postpartum public punishment makes sexuality, maternity and communal discipline visible on the scaffold.
- The Scarlet Letter, Ch. 9-10
Chillingworth becomes Dimmesdale's physician and investigates his secret through bodily symptoms and psychological pressure.
- The Trial of Joan of Arc, Condemnation trial, repeated interrogations
The court repeatedly pressures Joan to define the voices, creating a hostile setting unlike any modern diagnostic encounter.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, school expulsion and surveillance
Miles's unclear misconduct and the governess's scrutiny raise questions about child psychology, projection and moral panic.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, final scene
The confrontation with Miles joins possible exorcism, panic, coercion and child death.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Aspern Papers, Juliana Bordereau scenes
Juliana's extreme age, guarded privacy and bodily frailty become objects of the narrator's archival opportunism.
- The Underdogs, Luis Cervantes joins the band
A former medical student enters the revolutionary group, linking educated medicine to political opportunism.
- The Warden, Bold's reform campaign
The bedesmen become subjects of legal and journalistic advocacy, raising consent and representation issues.
- The Woman in White, Second Epoch, Marian Halcombe's diary and Mrs. Michelson's narrative
Marian's fever after the rain, the dispute in which Fosco calls the fever typhus against Mr. Dawson's opinion, Fosco's interference and Mrs. Rubelle's nursing.
- The Woman in White, Second Epoch, Hartright's narrative; Third Epoch
Laura's confinement in the asylum under Anne's name, her rescue by Marian through a bribed nurse, and the effects of the ordeal on her memory and spirits.
- Twelve Angry Men, Juror Ten's speech
The group confronts explicit prejudice as a contaminant of judgment.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter II (higher and lower pleasures)
The competent-judge test; the claim that pains, like pleasures, can only be ranked by the experienced; the 'tender plant' of the nobler feelings that dies for want of sustenance.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter V (justice and expediency)
A duty to steal medicine or compel the only qualified doctor to save a life; rights as protection of security; the injustice of sacrificing an individual without consent for others' benefit, raised in the discussion of punishment.
- Utopia, Book II, Of Their Slaves, and of Their Marriages
Care of the incurable, counselled voluntary death by fasting or opium, refusal of honours to unsanctioned suicide, and old age called a disease of itself.
- Washington Square, Morris courtship chapters
Sloper evaluates Morris like a case, using social evidence and diagnostic confidence to predict mercenary motives.
- Washington Square, Europe journey
Sloper attempts to cure Catherine's attachment through distance and pressure, treating emotion as a correctable error.
- Washington v. Glucksberg, Opinion of the Court, Part II, paragraph beginning Those who attempt suicide
Relies on the New York Task Force for the link between suicidal wishes and depression, and for the concern that depression in seriously ill patients is often missed.
- Washington v. Glucksberg, Opinion of the Court, Part II, paragraph beginning The State also has an interest in protecting the integrity and ethics of the medical profession
Sets the American Medical Association's opposition to physician-assisted suicide and testimony on patient trust against the Ninth Circuit's view that medicine's integrity was not at risk.
- We, O-90 pregnancy plot
O-90's illegal pregnancy exposes reproductive control and the state's claim over bodies.
- We, Great Operation records
The surgical removal of imagination turns medicine into political pacification.
- We Hold These Truths, Public consensus
We Hold These Truths gives this tag concrete force through its medical relevance appears where conscience, institutional freedom, public reason, and contested moral goods affect health law and care
Quotes
“Civil Interests I call Life, Liberty, Health, and Indolency of Body; and the Possession of outward things, such as Money, Lands, Houses, Furniture, and the like.”
“No man can be forced to be Rich or Healthful, whether he will or no. Nay, God himself will not save men against their wills.”
Frequently cited
“I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection”
“The principle of medical and surgical morality, therefore, consists in never performing on man an experiment which might be harmful to him to any extent, even though the result might be highly advantageous to science, i.e., to the health of others.”
“Have we the right to make experiments on animals and vivisect them? As for me, I think we have this right, wholly and absolutely.”
“THE right of personal security consists in a person's legal and uninterrupted enjoyment of his life, his limbs, his body, his health, and his reputation.”
“I followed this indication, and determined to cure myself or die without the aid of physicians and medicine”
“At length, notwithstanding all I could say and do, the physician triumphed, and the child died of hunger”
“Physicians are, some of them, so pleasing and conformable to the humor of the patient, as they press not the true cure of the disease; and some other are so regular, in proceeding according to art for the disease, as they respect not sufficiently the condition of the patient”
“It was a small tube or trochar, with a lance passing down the inside; and Gabriel began to use it with a dexterity that would have graced a hospital-surgeon.”
“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man? Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?”
“The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials”
“I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created”
“The precepts for the physician to make his patient thoroughly healthy, and for a poisoner to ensure certain death, are of equal value in this respect, that each serves to effect its purpose perfectly”
“A man reduced to despair by a series of misfortunes feels wearied of life, but is still so far in possession of his reason that he can ask himself whether it would not be contrary to his duty to himself to take his own life”
Frequently cited
“So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only”
“In the kingdom of ends everything has either value or dignity”
Frequently cited
“Say what God tells thee, Mother”
“It calls for wisdom, too, and a reverence for God’s work.”
“he will not prescribe for him until he has first convinced him”
Frequently cited
“Which wouldst thou prefer, living with one leg or dying with two?”
Frequently cited
“That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection”
“His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant”
Frequently cited
“Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign”
“The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free. It is not freedom, to be allowed to alienate his freedom”
“reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions”
“a man, not having the power of his own life, cannot, by compact, or his own consent, enslave himself to any one”
Frequently cited
“yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself”
“just as the physician, whether he cures us against our will or with our will, and whatever be his mode of treatment,--incision, burning, or the infliction of some other pain,--whether he practises out of a book or not out of a book”
“The physician saints were called anargyroi, unmercenaries, because their legends remember them as healers who did not take payment for medicine”
Frequently cited
“When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.”
“When you do not know the nature of a malady, leave it to Nature ; do not strive to hasten matters.”
“When these came to the Roman fortifications, weeping, they begged of the soldiers by every entreaty to receive them as slaves and relieve them with food. But Caesar, placing guards on the rampart, forbade them to be admitted”
Frequently cited
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”
“if a surgeon operates on your slave, and then neglects altogether to attend to his cure, so that the slave dies in consequence, he is liable for his carelessness”
“I say to her: “If you still have pains, it is really only your own fault”
“Zeus, fearing that men might acquire the healing art from him and so come to the rescue of each other, smote him with a thunderbolt.”
“by the same token we shall all one day be dead, but that is no reason why meantime we should all be buried alive”
Frequently cited
“there's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency.”
Frequently cited
“By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots”
“Thus, to save a life, it may not only be allowable, but a duty, to steal, or take by force, the necessary food or medicine, or to kidnap, and compel to officiate, the only qualified medical practitioner”