Frederic Henry, an American serving as a lieutenant in the ambulance service of the Italian army, tells the story of his war and his love in plain, retrospective first-person prose. In 1915-16 his unit is quartered in Gorizia, near the Isonzo front.
Medical tag
Nursing Caregiving
Nursing, sickbed care, home care of the ill.
Works
A Little Princess opens on a foggy London day as seven-year-old Sara Crewe rides in a cab with her adoring father, Captain Ralph Crewe, a young officer who has brought her from India to Miss Minchin's Select Seminary for Young Ladies. Because her father is rich, Sara is given a private sitting room, a French maid, a pony and a doll named Emily whom she half believes can walk and talk when no one is looking.
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.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man follows Stephen Dedalus, a boy from a Catholic Dublin family, from his earliest memories to the eve of his departure from Ireland at about twenty. Its five chapters are written in a style that grows with him, from the nursery language of the opening, in which his father tells him a story about a moocow and baby tuckoo, to the abstract arguments and private diary of the last chapter.
A Tale of Two Cities moves between London and Paris from 1775 to the Reign of Terror in 1793-94. In Book the First, Recalled to Life, Jarvis Lorry, a clerk of Tellson's Bank, travels by the Dover mail and sends back the cryptic message Recalled to life by the porter Jerry Cruncher.
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in about six weeks in the autumn of 1791, and Joseph Johnson published it in London early in 1792. Two years earlier she had answered Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France with A Vindication of the Rights of Men.
Meg Murry is a stubborn, clumsy, unhappy girl with glasses and braces who is doing badly at school, and whose physicist father has been missing for more than a year on secret government work. On a stormy night she comes down to the kitchen of the family's country house to find her mother, a scientist, and her five-year-old brother Charles Wallace, an uncannily gifted child the village thinks is slow.
Across Five Aprils follows the Creighton family of Jasper County in southern Illinois through the Civil War, from April 1861 to April 1865, as seen by the youngest son, Jethro, who is nine when the story opens. The family farm is worked by Matt and Ellen Creighton and their grown and growing children: John, a married son with a family of his own nearby; Bill, thoughtful and gentle, the brother Jethro loves best; Tom, eager for adventure; Jenny, close to Jethro in spirit; and their cousin Eb Carron, raised in the household.
Adam of the Road follows eleven-year-old Adam Quartermayne through a year of wandering in the England of Edward I, beginning in June 1294. Adam is boarding at the abbey school of St. Albans, learning his letters with his friend Perkin, a ploughman's son who longs to study at Oxford, while his red spaniel Nick lodges with an old woman, Dame Malkin, because dogs are not allowed at school.
Huckleberry Finn tells his own story in the speech of a half-schooled Missouri boy, some forty or fifty years before the book appeared. After the treasure found at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the Widow Douglas has taken Huck in to civilize him, while her sister Miss Watson drills him in manners and spelling.
Paul Bäumer, a young German infantryman not yet twenty, tells in the present tense of his last two years in the Great War. He and his classmates Albert Kropp, Müller and Leer enlisted together, urged on by their schoolmaster Kantorek, and now serve in a company that has just come out of the line with eighty men left of a hundred and fifty.
Amos Fortune, Free Man is a biographical novel about a real man who was born in Africa around 1710, enslaved in Massachusetts, and died free in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in 1801. Its ten chapters carry dates.
Anne of Green Gables opens in Avonlea, a farming village on Prince Edward Island, where the elderly brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert have arranged to adopt a boy from a Nova Scotia orphan asylum to help on their farm. Through a mistake the child sent is Anne Shirley, an eleven-year-old red-haired girl who talks without stopping, renames everything she loves and has survived a hard childhood by imagination.
Apologia Pro Vita Sua is John Henry Newman's defence of his honesty, written in 1864 in reply to the novelist and clergyman Charles Kingsley, who had written in Macmillan's Magazine that truth for its own sake had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy and that Father Newman taught it need not be. After an exchange of letters and a pamphlet by Kingsley, Newman decided that the only adequate answer was a history of his own mind.
Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, subtitled 'The Autobiography of a Horse', is narrated by a handsome black horse with a white star and one white foot. He grows up in a pleasant meadow under a kind master, Farmer Grey, and his mother Duchess teaches him to be gentle and good and to work willingly.
Bleak House is built around Jarndyce and Jarndyce, an endless lawsuit over a disputed will in the Court of Chancery, and around a secret that links a great lady to an orphan girl. Dickens tells it in two voices: an unnamed narrator in the present tense who surveys London's fog, the lawcourts, fashionable society and the slum called Tom-all-Alone's, and Esther Summerson, who writes her own story modestly in the past tense.
Bliss and Other Stories, Katherine Mansfield's second collection, gathers fourteen stories written between about 1915 and 1920. It opens with Prelude, her longest work, and moves between New Zealand childhood, Bohemian London, Paris cafés and the hotels of the French Riviera.
Cannery Row is a loosely plotted, affectionate portrait of the sardine-cannery district of Monterey, California, during the Depression, built from short narrative chapters alternating with self-contained vignettes or 'inter-chapters'. Its centre is Doc, a gentle, learned marine biologist who runs the Western Biological Laboratory, collects specimens from the tide pools, listens to Gregorian chant and Bach, reads poetry, and is trusted by everyone on the Row.
Cranford is a small English country town, twenty miles by railway from the busy commercial city of Drumble, where nearly every householder of the better sort is a single lady or a widow. The narrator, Mary Smith, a young woman from Drumble, visits often and describes their code: calls of exactly fifteen minutes, card parties with wafer bread-and-butter, and an 'elegant economy' that treats spending as vulgar and never names poverty.
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.
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.
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.
Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers gathers short texts from Christianity’s formative generations after the apostles. The collection usually includes 1 Clement, the letters of Ignatius, Polycarp’s letter, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, 2 Clement and fragments such as Papias or the Epistle to Diognetus, depending on edition.
Cyril, Anthea, Robert, and Jane, with their baby brother the Lamb, have come from two years in Camden Town to a white house in the Kent countryside near Rochester, between a chalk-quarry and a gravel-pit. Their father is called away on business and their mother goes to nurse their sick grandmother, leaving them in the care of the nursemaid Martha and the other servants.
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.
Frog and Toad Are Friends is a book of five short stories about two friends who live near each other by a meadow and a stream. In "Spring," Frog runs to Toad's house in April to wake him from his winter sleep, but Toad, who has been in bed since November, will not get up and asks Frog to come back at about half past May.
Great Expectations is the first-person story of Philip Pirrip, called Pip, an orphan brought up by hand by his harsh elder sister and her gentle husband Joe Gargery, the village blacksmith on the Kent marshes. On Christmas Eve, in the churchyard where his parents lie, an escaped convict seizes Pip and makes him bring a file and food; Pip steals both from his sister's house, and the convict is later recaptured struggling with another fugitive.
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.
Hard Times, subtitled For These Times, is Dickens's shortest and most concentrated novel, set in Coketown, a smoky northern mill town of red brick, black canals, and identical streets. Thomas Gradgrind, a retired hardware merchant and later a member of Parliament, runs a model school and his own household on a single principle: children must be taught Facts and nothing else.
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.
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.
Island of the Blue Dolphins is narrated by Karana, a girl of about twelve who lives in the village of Ghalas-at on a small island off the California coast in the early nineteenth century; her people call it the Island of the Blue Dolphins. A red-sailed ship brings Captain Orlov, a Russian, and a crew of Aleut hunters, who ask Karana's father, Chief Chowig, to let them take sea otter in exchange for goods.
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.
Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie is a short easy-reader history book about Abbie Burgess, the teenage daughter of the lighthouse keeper on Matinicus Rock, a bare island far out in the sea off the coast of Maine. In January 1856 Abbie's mother is sick, the family is running low on food and on oil for the lamps, and Captain Burgess must sail his small boat to the mainland town of Rockland for supplies and medicine.
Kokoro, a word meaning heart, mind or the core of things, is in three parts. In the first, 'Sensei and I', a young university student in Tokyo meets an older man at the seaside resort of Kamakura and is drawn to him, calling him Sensei, 'teacher'.
Lassie Come-Home is the story of a tricolour collie who crosses hundreds of miles of Scottish and English country to return to the boy she loves. In the Yorkshire mining village of Greenall Bridge, Lassie belongs to Sam Carraclough, and every man in the village agrees she is the finest collie he has ever seen.
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.
Les Misérables follows the convict Jean Valjean from his release in 1815 to his death in 1833, and through him a whole society of the poor, the lawful and the rebellious in Restoration and July Monarchy France. Valjean has served nineteen years in the galleys at Toulon, five for stealing a loaf of bread for his sister's hungry children and the rest for attempts to escape.
Letters and Papers from Prison was assembled after the war by Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer's closest friend, former student and nephew by marriage, and published in 1951 as Widerstand und Ergebung ('Resistance and Submission'). It gathers what Bonhoeffer wrote during two years of imprisonment by the Nazi state, together with the essay 'After Ten Years', composed at Christmas 1942 as a stocktaking for fellow conspirators.
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.
Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain's book about the great river in two eras: the steamboat age of his youth and the changed river he revisited in 1882. It opens with three chapters of history and lore, from De Soto and La Salle to the keelboat and raft men, including a long raft episode with the boy Huck Finn borrowed from the novel Twain was then writing.
Little House in the Big Woods follows one year in the life of a pioneer family in a log house in the forests of Wisconsin, seen through the eyes of Laura, who is about five. She lives with Pa, who hunts, traps and farms; Ma, who keeps the house; her older sister Mary; baby Carrie; and Jack, the brindle bulldog.
Little House on the Prairie follows the Ingalls family through roughly a year in Kansas, on land the book calls Indian Territory, around 1869 and 1870. Pa sells the little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin because the woods are filling with people and the game is growing scarce.
Little Women follows the four March sisters growing up in a New England town during and after the American Civil War, while their father serves as an army chaplain. Meg, the eldest, is pretty and longs for fine things; Jo, a tomboyish aspiring writer with a quick temper, is the heart of the book; Beth is shy, gentle and musical; and Amy, the youngest, is artistic and vain.
Mansfield Park follows Fanny Price, the timid daughter of a poor, overburdened family in Portsmouth, who at ten is taken in by her wealthy aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, at Mansfield Park in Northamptonshire. Her other aunt, the officious and mean Mrs Norris, never lets her forget her dependent status, and her cousins Tom, Maria and Julia treat her with indifference.
Mr. Popper's Penguins is a comic novel in twenty short chapters about a house painter in the small town of Stillwater who dreams of the polar regions. Mr. Popper is a gentle, rather untidy man with a patient wife and two children, Bill and Janie.
My Father's Dragon is told by a narrator about the boyhood adventure of their father, Elmer Elevator. One cold rainy day Elmer brings home a drippy old alley cat; his mother hates cats, whips him when she finds the saucer in the cellar, and throws the cat out.
Napoleon's Maxims of War is not a book Napoleon wrote but a compilation made by a French officer, General Burnod, who in 1827 published Maximes de guerre de Napoléon, drawn from the emperor's memoirs dictated on St Helena and other sources. The British officer George Charles D'Aguilar translated it into English in 1831, adding explanatory notes with examples from the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne, Montecuccoli, Frederick the Great and Napoleon himself.
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.
Old Yeller is narrated by Travis Coates, who looks back on the year he was fourteen, in the late 1860s, on his family's homestead near the settlement of Salt Licks in the Texas Hill Country. After the Civil War cattle money is scarce, so Papa joins the other men of the settlement on a long drive to sell cattle in Kansas, leaving Travis as the man of the place with Mama and his little brother, Arliss.
Oliver Twist, subtitled The Parish Boy's Progress, follows an orphan from a workhouse cradle to a safe home, passing on the way through the criminal underworld of 1830s London. Oliver is born in a workhouse in an unnamed town; his mother dies within minutes, leaving only a locket and a ring that later prove who she was.
On the Road is narrated by Sal Paradise, a young writer living with his aunt in New Jersey, and records a series of journeys back and forth across the United States and into Mexico between 1947 and 1950. The engine of the book is Dean Moriarty, a fast-talking, car-stealing, endlessly restless young man from Denver who seems to Sal the embodiment of a wild, joyous American energy.
Persuasion is Austen's last completed novel, a story of second chances. Anne Elliot is the overlooked middle daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, a vain and extravagant baronet of Kellynch Hall in Somerset.
Peter and Wendy, the 1911 novel that grew out of J. M. Barrie's play Peter Pan, opens in the London nursery of the Darling family: Mr. Darling, a clerk anxious about money and dignity; Mrs. Darling, who tidies her children's minds each night; Wendy, John and Michael; and Nana, a Newfoundland dog who serves as their nurse. Mrs. Darling finds the name Peter in her children's thoughts and later sees a strange boy at the nursery window; Nana snaps the window shut on his shadow.
Pollyanna Whittier, eleven years old, is the orphaned daughter of a poor missionary minister in the American West. Her mother, Jennie, had long ago disappointed her proud New England family by marrying the young minister instead of a wealthy suitor.
Prince Caspian begins a year after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie are waiting on a railway platform on their way back to school when they are pulled out of England and set down on a wooded island beside a ruined castle.
Ruth is Gaskell's novel about a 'fallen woman', written to challenge the Victorian assumption that an unmarried mother and her child were beyond redemption. Ruth Hilton is a beautiful, innocent orphan of fifteen, apprenticed to a dressmaker, Mrs Mason, in a country town, where she works long hours in a cold workroom.
Abraham Lincoln took the oath for his second term on 4 March 1865 on the East Portico of the Capitol, under a newly finished dome, before a crowd standing in mud after a morning of rain. The war was nearly won: Sherman had marched through Georgia and the Carolinas, Grant held Lee at Petersburg, and Congress had sent the Thirteenth Amendment to the states five weeks earlier.
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.
Sense and Sensibility follows two sisters whose temperaments represent the opposed values of its title. When Henry Dashwood dies, Norland Park in Sussex passes to John, his son by a first marriage, who promises to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters but is talked out of any real generosity by his grasping wife Fanny.
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.
Sts. Roch and Sebastian became plague saints through two different imaginative routes. Sebastian is an older martyr of the Roman persecution tradition.
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.
In a Tuscan village the carpenter Mastro Cherry finds a log that cries out when he strikes it, and gladly hands it to his poor friend Geppetto, who carves it into a marionette and names him Pinocchio. The puppet runs off before his feet are finished, gets Geppetto taken to jail, and kills the Talking Cricket with a hammer when it warns him that disobedient boys come to grief.
The Alexiad is the life and reign of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos (ruled 1081–1118), written by his daughter Anna in fifteen books. In her preface Anna introduces herself as born in the purple and trained in Aristotle and Plato, explains that her husband, the Caesar Nikephoros Bryennios, had begun a history of her father but died of an illness brought home from campaign, and promises to praise or blame as the facts require.
The Boxcar Children follows four orphaned brothers and sisters: Henry, fourteen; Jessie, twelve; Violet, ten; and Benny, six. After their parents die, the children set out on their own rather than go to their grandfather, whom they have never met and believe to be a hard man who disliked their mother.
The Bronze Bow is set in Galilee in the years of Jesus' public ministry, under Roman rule. Its hero, Daniel bar Jamin, is eighteen and has lived for five years with an outlaw band in the hills above his village of Ketzah, near Capernaum.
Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Civili, in three books, narrate the first two years of the war he fought against Pompey and the senatorial party, from January 49 BCE to the beginning of the Alexandrian war in late 48. The work is unfinished, breaking off in Alexandria, and it is the most openly political of his writings: its constant task is to show that Caesar was forced into war by a faction of personal enemies, that he repeatedly sought peace, and that he treated defeated fellow citizens with a mercy his opponents never showed.
The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman gathers the evolving work of a poet who made the self expansive enough to contain a democracy. The center is Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised across multiple editions until Whitman's death.
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 Door in the Wall is set in England in the fourteenth century, in the reign of Edward III, during the years of the Black Death. Robin, the ten-year-old son of the knight Sir John de Bureford and his wife Lady Maud, has been raised to expect the life of a nobleman's son: he is to go as a page to the household of Sir Peter de Lindsay, learn the arts of chivalry and one day become a knight like his father.
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 Hiding Place is Corrie ten Boom's memoir, written with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, of her family's life in Haarlem, their work hiding Jews during the German occupation of the Netherlands, and her imprisonment with her sister Betsie in Nazi prisons and camps. It opens in January 1937 with the hundredth anniversary of the watch shop in the narrow old house called the Beje, where Corrie, then in her forties and unmarried, lives with her father Casper and her older sister Betsie.
The History of the Church tells the story of Christianity from the apostles to Eusebius’ own fourth-century world, where persecution gives way to imperial favor. Eusebius organizes the past through succession: bishops, teachers, heresies, writings, persecutions and martyrs.
The Homeric Hymns are a collection of thirty-three anonymous Greek poems addressed to the gods, composed in the same dactylic hexameter and formulaic language as the Iliad and Odyssey. Ancient audiences treated many of them as Homer's own; most scholars now see them as the work of different singers over a long period, with the four great narrative hymns usually dated to the archaic age and some short pieces much later.
The Horse and His Boy takes place during the golden age of Narnia, while the four Pevensie children reign at Cair Paravel, and it happens mostly in Calormen, the hot, crowded empire far to the south. Shasta, a boy of about eleven, lives in a fishing village with Arsheesh, a hard man who works him like a servant.
The House at Pooh Corner (1928) is the second and last book of A. A. Milne's stories about Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends in the Forest. It opens with a short verse dedication to Milne's wife and a mock-introduction called a Contradiction, in which the narrator explains that Christopher Robin and his friends, already introduced in the first book, are now going to say good-bye.
The Iliad tells of a few weeks in the tenth year of the Greek siege of Troy, and its subject, announced in the first line, is the wrath of Achilles. A plague sent by Apollo ravages the Greek camp because Agamemnon, commander of the Achaeans, has refused to return the captive daughter of Apollo's priest Chryses.
The Journal of John Woolman is the spiritual autobiography of a New Jersey Quaker tailor and minister, begun in his thirty-sixth year and continued until a few days before his death. He opens in Northampton, Burlington County, where as a child he reads the twenty-second chapter of Revelation by the roadside and, soon after, kills a mother robin with a stone and then her nestlings, an act whose horror teaches him that God has placed in every mind a principle of goodness toward all creatures.
Izaak Walton's Lives are short, affectionate biographies of English churchmen, written by a London tradesman and angler who loved the Church of England and the men who served it. The library text is the second volume of the Cassell's National Library edition of 1898, based on John Major's 1825 edition with Austin Dobson's notes, and contains three of the five lives: Richard Hooker (first published 1665), George Herbert (1670) and Robert Sanderson (1678); the lives of Donne and Wotton belong to the first volume and are not included.
The Lord of the Rings continues the story begun in The Hobbit. Sixty years after his adventure, Bilbo Baggins leaves the Shire on his eleventy-first birthday and, at Gandalf's urging, leaves his magic ring to his young cousin and heir Frodo.
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 Meek One (Krotkaya), also translated as A Gentle Creature, is a long short story that Dostoevsky published in his one-man journal A Writer's Diary in November 1876, prompted by newspaper reports of suicides, including that of a young seamstress who leapt from a window holding an icon. In a short preface Dostoevsky calls it a 'fantastic' story, explaining that it is realistic in every respect except its form: it imagines the inner monologue of a man as though a stenographer could record his chaotic thoughts.
The Metamorphosis is a novella in three parts about Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman in cloth who supports his parents and his seventeen-year-old sister Grete, and who wakes one morning in his room to find that he has been changed into a monstrous insect. Kafka tells the story plainly, in the third person and almost entirely from Gregor's point of view, never explaining the transformation and never letting it become a dream.
The Moffats follows a year in the life of a family with little money and a great deal of fun in the small Connecticut town of Cranbury, around the time of the First World War. Mama, a widow, earns their living as a dressmaker in the rented yellow house on New Dollar Street, where she lives with her four children: Sylvie, the eldest, gentle and grown-up; Joey, the steady older brother who does the heavy chores; Jane, the imaginative middle girl through whose eyes much of the book is seen; and Rufus, five and a half and always in the middle of something.
Captain Arthur Hastings, invalided home from the Western Front in 1916, meets his old friend John Cavendish and is invited to Styles Court, the Cavendish family's country house in Essex. The house belongs for her lifetime to John's stepmother, the generous and domineering Emily Inglethorp, who has recently married Alfred Inglethorp, a bearded man about twenty years younger whom the family suspect of wanting her money.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's long return from Troy to Ithaca and of the household that must survive his absence. The poem opens not with Odysseus but with disorder: his son Telemachus is growing up under the pressure of suitors who consume the estate and demand that Penelope choose a new husband.
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 Portrait of a Lady follows Isabel Archer, a young American woman brought to Europe by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, and admired for her intelligence, independence and hunger for experience. At Gardencourt, the English estate of her uncle, Isabel meets her invalid cousin Ralph Touchett, who loves her imaginatively and persuades his dying father to leave her a fortune so that she can live freely.
The Railway Children tells how Roberta (Bobbie), Peter and Phyllis lose their comfortable London life and find friends, work and courage beside a country railway line. One evening, just after Peter's birthday, two men call, Father goes away with them, and Mother will say only that he has gone on business and that the children must not ask.
The Red Badge of Courage follows Henry Fleming, a young private of the 304th New York, through two days of fighting in an unnamed Civil War battle that readers have long identified with Chancellorsville in May 1863. Crane calls him almost always simply the youth.
The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan is the young Winston Churchill's history of the Anglo-Egyptian campaigns of 1896–1899 that destroyed the Mahdist state in the Sudan. Churchill begins with geography and the Nile, which he presents as the thread on which the whole story hangs, and then with the rebellion of Muhammad Ahmad, a Dongolawi boat-builder's son and Sufi ascetic who proclaimed himself the Mahdi in 1881.
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 Secret Garden begins in imperial India, where Mary Lennox is a sickly, spoiled and emotionally neglected child. A cholera outbreak kills her parents and household, and Mary is sent to Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire to live with her reclusive uncle Archibald Craven.
The Sign of the Beaver takes place in the Maine woods in 1768. Matt Hallowell, twelve years old and about to turn thirteen, has helped his father clear land and build a log cabin on a new claim.
The Story of King Arthur and His Knights is the first of Howard Pyle's four Arthurian volumes, drawn chiefly from Malory and told in a deliberately antique English with Pyle's own illustrations. It has two books.
The Swiss Family Robinson is told by a Swiss pastor who, with his wife and four sons, emigrates by sea toward a new settlement and is shipwrecked after a week-long storm. The crew abandons the ship in the boats, leaving the family alone on a wreck lodged among rocks near an unknown tropical coast.
Richard Hannay, a thirty-seven-year-old Scottish-born mining engineer who has made his money in Rhodesia, has come home to London in the spring of 1914 and finds himself bored almost to despair. One May evening a neighbor from the top floor of his building, an American named Franklin P. Scudder, begs to be taken in.
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 Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the third Chronicle of Narnia to be published. Edmund and Lucy Pevensie are spending the summer holidays with their aunt and uncle in Cambridge, where their cousin Eustace Clarence Scrubb, a priggish, bullying boy raised on modern notions, makes them miserable.
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.
The Wise Woman is George MacDonald's fairy-tale parable of two spoiled little girls in an odd country where everyone wants what he has not got. Princess Rosamond, whose name means Rose of the World, has been given everything she cried for, including a silver disc to stand in for the moon, and has grown into a raging, greedy child who beats her pets and has nearly killed her nurse.
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.
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.
To the Lighthouse, published by the Hogarth Press in May 1927, follows the Ramsay family and their guests at a holiday house on the Isle of Skye in the Hebrides, across one evening before the First World War and one morning ten years later. Virginia Woolf tells it almost entirely through the passing thoughts of her characters, so that small events, a remark about the weather, a dinner, a brushstroke, carry the weight of a lifetime.
Twenty Years at Hull-House is Jane Addams's account of her early life and of the settlement house she founded on Chicago's West Side in 1889. The first four chapters are autobiographical.
Uncle Tom's Cabin follows two lines of story that begin on the Kentucky farm of Arthur Shelby, a kindly but indebted master who agrees to sell two slaves to the trader Haley: Uncle Tom, his faithful and devout manager, and Harry, the small son of Eliza, Mrs. Shelby's maid. Overhearing the bargain, Eliza flees north with Harry that night, and with the slave-catchers close behind she crosses the Ohio River by leaping from one floating cake of ice to another.
Up from Slavery is Booker T. Washington's account of his rise from a slave cabin in Virginia to the leadership of Tuskegee Institute. He begins with what he does not know: the exact date of his birth, about 1858 or 1859 as he gives it, and the name of his white father.
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.
Lucy Snowe tells her own story, years after the events, in a reserved voice that often withholds what she feels and sometimes what she knows. As a girl she stays with her godmother Mrs. Bretton in the old town of Bretton, where she watches the tiny, intense Paulina Home attach herself to Mrs. Bretton's teenage son Graham.
Where the Red Fern Grows is narrated by Billy Colman, now a grown man in a town far from the Ozarks. Walking home from work one evening, he rescues an old redbone hound from a pack of town dogs, feeds it and lets it go home, and the encounter brings back the story of his boyhood.
White Fang follows a wolf-dog from his birth in a cave in the frozen North to a sunny estate in California. The novel opens with two men, Bill and Henry, hauling a coffin across the Yukon wilderness while a starving wolf pack trails them.
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands is the lively autobiography of a Jamaican doctress, nurse and businesswoman. Mary Seacole begins in Kingston, where she was born to a Scottish soldier and a Creole mother who kept a boarding house and was famous for her cures; she declines to give the year, saying only that she and the century were young together.
Wuthering Heights is a violent family romance told through layered narration. Mr. Lockwood, a tenant at Thrushcross Grange, becomes curious about his landlord Heathcliff and the strange household at Wuthering Heights.
Passages
- A Farewell to Arms, Book II, Chapters XIV-XVI
The Milan hospital: X-rays, the three doctors who advise waiting six months, and Dr. Valentini's decision to operate on the knee at once.
- A Little Princess, Chapters 15–16, The Magic and The Visitor
Ram Dass's fire, food and blankets restore the two girls, and Carrisford's own health improves as he takes an interest in the child next door.
- A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, Defense of Black caregivers
Allen and Jones describe dangerous care work performed by Black residents during the epidemic.
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chapter I
Stephen's fever after the ditch, the infirmary with Brother Michael, and his imagined death and the news of Parnell's death.
- A Tale of Two Cities, Book I, Chapter 6
Manette at his shoemaker's bench in Defarge's garret, answering to his cell number and slowly recognizing Lucie's hair.
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Ch. 9
Women as physicians, nurses and midwives, and the replacement of the midwife by the accoucheur.
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Ch. 12
Ignorant child-rearing blamed for infant deaths, and women mocked for following physicians' advice on the care of infants.
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Ch. 13, sect. 5
The rearing of children as laying a foundation of sound health of body and mind, and the cost of ignorance in nurseries.
- A Wrinkle in Time, Chapters 10–11
Meg, half frozen after passing through the Black Thing, is carried and nursed back to health by Aunt Beast on Ixchel.
- Across Five Aprils, Early chapters, 1861
Matt suffers a heart attack and cannot work; Jethro and Jenny take over the farm.
- Across Five Aprils, 1863
Shad is badly wounded at Gettysburg and Jenny travels east to nurse him.
- Adam of the Road, Winchester and Master Walter's house
Adam's fall while watching a play at St. Giles's Fair and his convalescence under the care of Master Walter and Dame Prudence.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapters XL-XLII
Tom is shot in the calf during the escape; the doctor treats him and testifies that Jim stayed to help nurse him at the risk of his freedom.
- All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter X
The surgeons' table, Paul's fear of chloroform and amputation, the nuns' ward, the Dying Room, tetanus deaths, traction, X-rays, and Albert's amputation.
- Amos Fortune, Free Man, Woburn, 1740-1779
Amos buys the sick Lily's freedom, marries her and nurses her until her death.
- Amos Fortune, Free Man, Auctioned for Freedom
Polly Burdoo is taken into the Fortune home after the vendue and dies there.
- Anne of Green Gables, Chapter II and V
Anne's account of the orphan asylum and her years as unpaid help in two households caring for children.
- Anne of Green Gables, Chapter XVIII
With the doctor away, Anne treats Minnie May's croup with ipecac through the night; the doctor later says she saved the child's life.
- Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Part III
Fever at Leonforte in Sicily in 1833, his servant's nursing, and his recovery with a sense of mission.
- Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Ullathorne letter (end of volume)
Newman and Ambrose St. John go to Bilston to minister during a cholera outbreak in place of other priests.
- Black Beauty, Part I (Birtwick chapters)
Joe Green gives the overheated Beauty cold water and no blanket; Beauty falls seriously ill and is treated by the horse doctor and nursed by John.
- Black Beauty, Part IV (London)
Jerry Barker falls ill with bronchitis from exposure and must give up cab work.
- Bleak House, Chapters XXXI and XXXV
Esther nurses Charley through the fever, falls ill herself, loses her sight for a time, and recovers with a changed face.
- Bliss and Other Stories, The Man without a Temperament
Robert Salesby's routine of shawls, medicines and walks for his invalid wife Jinnie, and his silent memories of England.
- Cannery Row, Interchapter on the epidemic
Influenza hits the Row; Dora's girls and Doc care for sick families.
- Cranford, Ch. II
Mr Hoggins says Miss Brown cannot live many days; her sister nurses her through her last illness after their father's death.
- Cranford, Ch. XI
The injured conjuror is moved to lodgings and nursed under Mr Hoggins, whose verdict Cranford treats as infallible.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 14
Betsey explains that she rescued Mr Dick from an asylum his brother intended for him, and defends his sanity.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 48–53
Dora's illness and death, and David's grief.
- Death of a Salesman, Act One, Linda's speech to her sons
Linda reveals Willy's deliberate car crashes and the rubber hose she found by the gas pipe.
- Description of the Retreat, Chs. 2-3
The institutional description makes architecture, air, garden access, and household order central to care.
- Early Christian Lives, Life of Antony, visitors and healings
Antony counsels, consoles and participates in healing while resisting fame.
- Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, 1 Clement
Conflict in Corinth is treated through humility, order and restoration of communal health.
- Five Children and It, Chapter 3
When the Lamb gets sand and then ginger-beer in his eyes, Jane cleans them with her tongue, which the narrator calls the only safe way.
- Frankenstein, Vol. I, Ch. I–II (1818) / Ch. 2–3 (1831)
Victor's youthful reading of Agrippa, Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus; his mother dies of scarlet fever caught while nursing Elizabeth.
- Frog and Toad Are Friends, "The Story"
Frog, feeling unwell, is put to bed by Toad, who exhausts himself trying to think of a story; Frog then cares for Toad.
- Great Expectations, Chapter LVII
Pip's fever and delirium, and Joe's nursing.
- Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, Chapter 5, Shadows in the Home
Dame Brinker tells how Raff was brought home from the flooded dike with his head bruised and cut, and how the fever passed but the dullness grew.
- Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, Chapter 14, Hans
Hans tells Peter how his father held his mother to the fire and afterward slept in a fever with his hands pressed to his head.
- Hard Times, Book the First, Chapter XIII
Rachael nurses Stephen's drunken wife through the night; Stephen watches in a half-dream as his wife reaches toward the bottle marked poison, and Rachael wakes and takes it from her.
- 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.
- 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.
- Island of the Blue Dolphins, Chapters 13-14
Karana carries the wounded leader of the wild dogs home and tends the arrow wound until he recovers.
- Ivanhoe, Chapter XXVIII
Scott's account of Jewish physicians in medieval England, Rebecca's training under Miriam, her balsam for Ivanhoe's wound and her sedative draught.
- Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie, Opening pages
Abbie's mother is sick, and her father sets out for the mainland partly to bring back medicine.
- Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie, Middle of the book, during the storm
Abbie nurses her mother and cares for her sisters while also tending the lamps through the night.
- Kokoro, Part Two
The father's slow decline from kidney disease, the doctor's visits and the family's vigil.
- Lassie Come-Home, Journey chapters
Dan'l and Dally Fadden take the starved, sick collie into their cottage and nurse her until she is strong enough to go on.
- Lassie Come-Home, Final chapters
Lassie reaches Greenall Bridge thin, lame and nearly spent, and the Carracloughs nurse her back.
- Le Morte d'Arthur, Book IX, Ch. XXXVI
Malory's reflection on sickness as the greatest pain a prisoner may have, as Tristram nearly kills himself in despair.
- Les Misérables, Volume I, Books 6-8
Fantine in the infirmary under Sister Simplice, waiting for Cosette, and her death when Javert arrests Madeleine.
- Letters and Papers from Prison, Letters to Bethge, late November 1943
Heavy air raids on Berlin; prisoners screaming in locked cells, Bonhoeffer assisting in the sick bay, and his reflections on fear.
- Life of St. Martin, Life, Ch. 3: cloak at Amiens
Martin responds to exposure and cold by sharing clothing, an act of basic bodily care before formal office.
- Life of St. Martin, Dialogue tradition: leper at Paris
Martin's kiss of a leper reverses stigma through touch, making the leper's isolation and bodily revulsion part of the healing scene.
- Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 20
The Memphis hall used as a hospital: wounded wrapped in raw cotton and linseed oil, physicians and medical students on watch, women of the city as nurses, and the death-room for the dying.
- Little House in the Big Woods, Chapter 11, "Harvest"
Charley, stung all over by yellow jackets, is packed in mud and sheets and given herb tea for his fever by Ma and Aunt Polly.
- Little House on the Prairie, Chapter 15, "Fever 'n' Ague"
The whole family falls ill with chills and fever; Dr. Tan arrives, gives medicine, and Mrs. Scott nurses them; the watermelon and night-air theories of the illness are debated.
- Little House on the Prairie, Chapter 5, "The House on the Prairie"
Ma's foot is crushed when a wall log slips, and she treats the sprain with bandages and rest while Pa finishes the walls.
- Little Women, Part One, Ch. 15
A telegram reports Mr March seriously ill in Washington; Marmee leaves to nurse him and Jo sells her hair.
- Little Women, Part One, Ch. 16–18
Beth nurses the poor Hummel family's sick baby, who dies of scarlet fever; Beth catches it; Amy is sent away; Dr Bangs attends.
- Little Women, Part One, Ch. 19–20
The crisis of Beth's fever passes; Marmee returns.
- Little Women, Part Two, Ch. 36 and 40
Beth's slow decline at the seaside and at home; her death nursed by Jo.
- Mansfield Park, Vol. III, Ch. 13–14 (Ch. 44–45)
News that Tom has fallen dangerously ill with fever after a drinking bout and a fall; his return home and nursing.
- Mr. Popper's Penguins, Middle chapters (Captain Cook's illness and Greta's arrival)
Captain Cook declines, the aquarium curator suggests loneliness, and the penguins recover once Greta comes.
- My Father's Dragon, Chapter Six, My Father Meets a Rhinoceros
The rhinoceros weeps constantly and cannot sleep over his yellowed tusk until Elmer shows him how to brush it.
- Napoleon's Maxims of War, Maxim XXI
Convoys of sick and wounded require the shortest possible line to depots.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 1
George describes the incident at Weed and Lennie's compulsion to stroke soft things; he rehearses what Lennie must do if in trouble.
- Old Yeller, The hog fight
Travis is gashed by wild hogs and Old Yeller is ripped open; Mama stitches the dog and tends Travis through weeks of recovery.
- Oliver Twist, Chapters XXVIII-XXX
Oliver, shot in the arm during the burglary, lies feverish at the Maylies' house; Mr. Losberne treats him and protects him from the Bow Street officers.
- Oliver Twist, Chapter XXXIII
Rose Maylie's sudden, dangerous fever and the anxious watch kept by Mrs. Maylie and Oliver until she recovers.
- On the Road, Part Four (Mexico City)
Sal falls ill with fever and dysentery and is left behind by Dean.
- Persuasion, Vol. I, Ch. 6–7
Mary's complaints of illness at Uppercross; her son's dislocated collarbone after a fall and the household's response.
- Persuasion, Vol. I, Ch. 12
Louisa's fall from the Cobb; Anne directs restoratives and calls for a surgeon while others panic.
- Persuasion, Vol. II, Ch. 5
Anne visits Mrs Smith, disabled by illness and attended by Nurse Rooke, a sick-nurse of the Bath lodging-house world.
- Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy), Chapter II
Mr. Darling's medicine trick: he dodges his own dose by pouring it into Nana's bowl, and the quarrel ends with Nana chained outside.
- Pollyanna, Chapters VIII and X
Pollyanna's visits to the bedridden Mrs. Snow, who wants whatever she has not been brought, until Pollyanna arranges her hair and shows her a mirror.
- Pollyanna, Chapters XXXI-XXXII
Pollyanna is sent to a sanitarium run by a friend of Dr. Chilton and, after nearly ten months, writes that she has walked.
- Prince Caspian, Chapter 14
Aslan finds Caspian's old nurse on her deathbed and restores her with a cup of water turned to wine.
- Ruth, Ch. 5–7
Bellingham's fever in Wales; his mother takes over the sickroom and excludes Ruth.
- Ruth, Ch. 32–33
Typhus epidemic in Eccleston; Ruth volunteers as matron-nurse in the fever ward of the hospital.
- Second Inaugural Address, Paragraph 4
The charge to bind up the nation's wounds and care for the wounded soldier, his widow, and his orphan, later the motto of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
- 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.
- Sense and Sensibility, Vol. III, Ch. 6–7
Marianne's fever at Cleveland after walks in the wet; Mr Harris the apothecary attends, fears of infection send the Palmers' baby away, and Elinor nurses her through the crisis.
- 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.
- Sts. Roch and Sebastian: Plague Saints, Roch at Aquapendente and Piacenza
Roch tends plague victims and then contracts plague himself, making the healer's exposure central to the legend.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Camberwell)
First experiences as a VAD at the First London General Hospital, learning to dress wounds and confronting the realities of injury.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Malta)
Nursing in Malta, including her own illness during service there.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Étaples)
Nursing German prisoners and, in spring 1918, gassed and badly wounded British soldiers in overwhelmed wards.
- The Adventures of Pinocchio, Chapter 36
Pinocchio draws water each dawn to earn milk for his weak father, builds him a wheeled chair, and finds his friend Lamp-Wick dying as an overworked donkey.
- The Alexiad, Book XII
Irene accompanies Alexios on campaign partly because only her careful rubbing can ease his gout.
- The Alexiad, Book XV, the Orphanage
The charitable city for orphans, the aged, the blind and the lame, with servants assigned to the disabled.
- The Boxcar Children, Chapters 11-12
Violet falls ill in the boxcar; Henry runs for Dr. Moore, who takes the children to his own house and nurses her back to health.
- The Bronze Bow, Middle chapters, Ketzah
Daniel returns to nurse his failing grandmother and look after Leah, and his grandmother dies.
- The Civil War, Book III.75–78
After the defeat at Dyrrachium Caesar delays only to care for the sick and wounded and sends them to Apollonia before retreating.
- The Complete Poems, Drum-Taps
The Civil War poems move through camps, hospitals, wounds, deathbeds and nursing care.
- 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 Door in the Wall, St. Mark's hospice chapters
Brother Luke nurses Robin and sets him to whittling, reading and swimming to restore strength and hope.
- The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children, The Argonauts, Part I (introduction)
Kingsley praises the ladies who went the year before to work in the hospitals of the East, alongside explorers and soldiers.
- The Hiding Place, Chapters 3-4
Deaths of the aunts from tuberculosis and diabetes and the mother's stroke, nursed at home by the ten Boom daughters.
- The Hiding Place, Chapter 15
Corrie's release is delayed for swelling of the legs; afterwards she opens homes where survivors and others damaged by the war recover.
- The Homeric Hymns, Hymn II, To Demeter, ll. 224-230
Demeter, disguised as an old nurse, promises Metaneira to guard the baby from the Undercutter and from witchcraft.
- The Horse and His Boy, Chapter 10
The Hermit tends the lion's scratches on Aravis's back and rests the horses.
- The House at Pooh Corner, Chapter II
At Kanga's house Roo is given his Extract of Malt, called his Strengthening Medicine, and Tigger swallows it with pleasure.
- The Iliad, Book 11.828–848
Patroclus cuts the arrow from Eurypylus' thigh, washes the wound, and applies a bitter, pain-killing root.
- The Journal of John Woolman, Journal, Chapter II
The account of his sister Elizabeth, her care for the sick, and her death of smallpox.
- The Journal of John Woolman, Journal, Chapter III
Woolman watches by night with his father, dying of a fever in 1750, who speaks of his concern for the enslaved.
- The Lives of Richard Hooker, George Herbert and Robert Sanderson, Life of Hooker, parish duties
Hooker's diligence in enquiring after and visiting the sick of his parish.
- The Lord of the Rings, Book V, Chapter 8: The Houses of Healing
Aragorn treats Faramir, Éowyn and Merry for the Black Breath with athelas, while Ioreth and the herb-master look on.
- The Lord of the Rings, Book VI, Chapters 2-3
Frodo and Sam cross Mordor short of water and food, Sam rationing what is left and finally carrying his master.
- The Magician's Nephew, Chapter 12: Strawberry's Adventure
Digory asks Aslan for something to cure his mother and sees great tears in the Lion's eyes.
- The Magician's Nephew, Chapter 15
Digory's mother eats the apple, sleeps naturally, and begins to recover.
- The Meek One, Part Two, Ch. 1
Her prolonged fever; the narrator arranges a doctor and nursing care; her silent withdrawal afterwards.
- The Metamorphosis, Part II
Grete's home nursing: food left out, the room cleaned, the decision to remove furniture, and the mother's fainting at the sight of her son.
- The Moffats, Chapter 7, Another Sign on the Yellow House
Rufus has scarlet fever, the house is quarantined, and Mama nurses him while the older children keep house.
- The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Chapters II and IX
Hastings visits Cynthia's dispensary at the Tadminster hospital with its poison cupboard, and later arranges for Poirot to see it.
- The Odyssey, Book 5
Odysseus is shipwrecked, battered and washed ashore exhausted, showing exposure, pain and recovery at the edge of death.
- The Plague, Part II
Tarrou's proposal of volunteer sanitary squads and the discussion with Rieux and Rambert about duty, decency and the doctor's job.
- The Plague, Part V
Tarrou's death in Rieux's home, nursed by Rieux and his mother, and the telegram announcing the death of Rieux's wife at the sanatorium.
- The Portrait of a Lady, Mr. Touchett's final illness
Inheritance is decided at a sickbed, linking money, care, mortality and Ralph's experiment in enabling Isabel.
- The Portrait of a Lady, Ralph's deathbed
Isabel's return to the dying Ralph concentrates grief, confession, forgiveness and the bodily end of one of the novel's moral witnesses.
- The Railway Children, Chapters XII-XIII
Jim, injured in the tunnel, is brought to Three Chimneys; the doctor sets the leg and Mother nurses him.
- The Red Badge of Courage, Chapter XIII
Wilson nurses Henry by the fire with coffee, a wet handkerchief bandage and his own blankets.
- The River War, Chapters IV–V
Reforms of the Egyptian army include hospital care for the sick (Ch. IV); the Suakin garrison (Ch. V) suffers malaria, liver abscess, bursati sores in animals and invaliding of a quarter of British officers.
- 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, Chapter 64
The abbot is warned to adapt to many temperaments and not crush the bruised reed.
- The Secret Garden, Early Misselthwaite chapters
Mary's sourness, poor appetite and lack of affection are linked to neglect, environment and bodily habits.
- The Secret Garden, Garden recovery chapters
Fresh air, exercise, food, friendship and belief become a child-centered therapeutic regimen.
- The Sign of the Beaver, Chapter 5
Matt is stung by a swarm at the bee tree, plunges into the pond, and wakes in his cabin with Saknis and Attean tending his swollen stings.
- The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, Book I, Part II, Chapter Second
Arthur, sorely wounded by the Sable Knight, is carried by Merlin to a forest hermit who tends his wounds.
- The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, Book II, Part II, Chapter Sixth
Pellias, wounded in the forest, is brought to a hermit and then healed by the Lady of the Lake.
- The Swiss Family Robinson, Chapter XVIII
Mr. Wolston, an invalid passenger from the Unicorn, rests at Rockburg and revives in the island's air and quiet.
- The Thirty-Nine Steps, Chapter VII
A bout of malaria lays Hannay low at Turnbull's cottage, and the roadman nurses him for about ten days.
- 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 Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Chapters 5-6
Eustace's diary records seasickness, the storm, and the rationing of fresh water; he is caught stealing extra water at night.
- The Warden, Opening chapters
Hiram's Hospital is described as a charitable home for elderly men, establishing dependency, routine and institutional paternalism.
- The Wise Woman (A Double Story), Chapter VII
Agnes in the bluish sphere loses all sense of time and is nursed and fed by the wise woman each night while she sleeps.
- The Wise Woman (A Double Story), Chapter XI
The poor woman feels Rosamond's joints, finds the sprain, and strokes and presses the ankle until the girl can walk.
- 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.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part III, Discourse LVII: The Convalescent
Zarathustra falls 'as one dead', lies seven days without eating, is fed and watched by his animals, and recovers to describe his 'great disgust at man'.
- To the Lighthouse, Part I, The Window
Mrs Ramsay knits the stocking for the lighthouse keeper's boy, who is threatened with a tuberculous hip.
- Twenty Years at Hull-House, Chapter XIV, Civic Cooperation
The smallpox epidemic after the World's Fair, garments finished in infected houses, and Julia Lathrop's visits to the pest house.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin, Chapter XVII; Chapter XXXVII
George's shot wounds the slave-hunter Tom Loker, and the Quakers take him in and nurse him back to health.
- Up from Slavery, Chapter VIII
Olivia Davidson's earlier service nursing a smallpox patient in Mississippi and offering herself as a yellow fever nurse in Memphis.
- Utopia, Book II, Of Their Traffic
The four public hospitals outside each city, isolation of infectious patients, attendance by physicians, and the steward's priority in the market.
- Villette, Ch. IV
Lucy nurses the rheumatic invalid Miss Marchmont, hears her story on her last night, and finds her dead in the morning.
- Where the Red Fern Grows, The championship hunt
In a blizzard Grandpa falls and sprains his ankle and is lost for a time; the dogs are found coated in ice and are thawed and rubbed by the fire.
- White Fang, Part V, Chapter V
The surgeon's examination and verdict after the fight with Jim Hall, the call for an X-ray and a San Francisco doctor, and the weeks of nursing in plaster casts and bandages.
- Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Chapter I
Childhood practice of medicine on her doll and pets, learned by watching her mother's patients.
- Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Chapter VII
Nursing army officers and their families through the yellow fever epidemic in Kingston in 1853, with many death-bed scenes.
- Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Chapter IX
A visit to the Barrack Hospital at Scutari and her meeting with Florence Nightingale.
- Wuthering Heights, Linton Heathcliff chapters
Linton's chronic frailty and manipulation by Heathcliff link invalidism to inheritance and coercion.
Quotes
“Women might certainly study the art of healing, and be physicians as well as nurses.”
“It is in their person that we become aware of human misery; we are filled with sympathy; and the result of this mood is general benevolence, philanthropy”
“there is only one safe way of taking things out of little children's eyes, and that is with your own soft wet tongue.”
“This was the commencement of a nervous fever which confined me for several months”
“all who had the good fortune to be in health were sitting in their houses, either attending the sick or mourning the dead.”
Frequently cited
“Sweet charm of sleep, savior in sickness, how sweetly you came to me, how needed!”
“tending the sick, feeding the hungry, and relieving the distressed”
“Taking, therefore, his sword with which he was girt, he divided his cloak into two equal parts, and gave one part to the poor man, while he again clothed himself with the remainder”
“When an army carries with it a battering train, or large convoys of sick and wounded, it cannot march by too short a line upon its depôts”
“I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you”
“There was no wound, no blood, no visible bruise; but her eyes were closed, she breathed not, her face was like death”
“And so lunatics and ideots are never set free from the government of their parents”
“The insane are treated in a peculiar manner; it is only in the beginning that they are placed in an institution for observation; later they are given shelter in the homes of the inhabitants, take part in their agricultural labours, and are treated very kindly”
“Boys ought to know, after all, that medicine, taken in time, can save them from much pain and even from death.”
“Oh, what useful things flannel petticoats are!”
“He had the bustling ways of an amateur nurse.”
“When they fell sick, they were sent to hospital instead of being flogged”
“He was a true friend in need, that old roadman.”
“For singing is for the convalescent; the sound ones may talk”
“But they take more care of their sick than of any others; these are lodged and provided for in public hospitals.”
“I had from early youth a yearning for medical knowledge and practice which has never deserted me.”
“Willingly, had they accepted me, I would have worked for the wounded, in return for bread and water.”
“And the grateful words and smile which rewarded me for binding up a wound or giving cooling drink was a pleasure worth risking life for at any time.”