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
Pain
Physical pain, its expression, endurance and relief.
Works
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.
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories gathers Flannery O'Connor's early fiction around Southern households where manners, piety, resentment, and violence collide. In the title story, a grandmother's nostalgia and manipulations help divert a family trip toward the Misfit, whose murders expose both her shallow goodness and her final reach toward kinship.
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.
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.
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.
Alone in Berlin (Jeder stirbt für sich allein, 'Everyone dies for himself alone') opens in Berlin in 1940, as the postwoman Eva Kluge delivers to Otto and Anna Quangel the news that their only son has been killed in the invasion of France. The Quangels live in a tenement at 55 Jablonski Strasse with neighbours who represent the range of life under Nazism: the Persickes, a family of brutal Party loyalists; old Frau Rosenthal, a Jewish widow whose flat is looted and who is hounded until she jumps to her death; and retired judge Fromm, who quietly helps where he can.
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.
Subtitled 'Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future', Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche's attempt to restate in plain argumentative prose, divided into 296 numbered sections and a closing poem, the ideas that Thus Spoke Zarathustra had put in prophetic form. The preface opens by supposing that truth is a woman and that dogmatic philosophers, with their clumsy seriousness, have never known how to win her.
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.
Candide, ou l'Optimisme follows a guileless young man raised in the castle of the Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh in Westphalia, where the tutor Pangloss teaches that this is the best of all possible worlds and that everything is for the best. Candide is kicked out of the castle for kissing the Baron's daughter Cunégonde behind a screen, and the rest of the tale tests Pangloss's doctrine against an avalanche of catastrophe.
The Chronographia of Michael Psellos is a history of the Byzantine court across roughly a century, from the accession of Basil II in 976 to the reign of Michael VII Doukas in the 1070s. It is arranged by reign rather than by year and covers fourteen emperors and empresses.
Freud's late essay, in German Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ('the uneasiness in culture'), asks why civilized people, who have built so much for their own protection, are so often unhappy. It is written in eight short chapters in a conversational, self-questioning style.
The Confessions is a prayer in thirteen books addressed to God, in which Augustine recounts his life up to his mother's death and then turns to philosophical reflection on memory, time and the creation narrative of Genesis. Books I to IX are autobiographical.
Rousseau's Confessions is the founding text of modern autobiography. It promises to show 'a man in all the integrity of nature', the author himself, concealing nothing.
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.
Modelled on Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, Hume's Dialogues are narrated by Pamphilus, a young man, to his friend Hermippus, and report a conversation at the house of Pamphilus's tutor, Cleanthes. Three speakers debate not whether God exists, which all profess to accept, but what can be known of God's nature by reason.
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.
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.
East of Eden is a multigenerational saga set mainly in the Salinas Valley of California from the Civil War to the First World War, which retells the story of Cain and Abel through two families: the Trasks and the Hamiltons, the latter being the narrator's own maternal ancestors. Samuel Hamilton, a poor, inventive, generous Irish immigrant farmer and blacksmith, raises a large family on barren land.
Ecce Homo is Nietzsche's late self-interpretation, part autobiography, part literary self-defense, part philosophical performance. Its chapter headings are famously outrageous: why he is so wise, clever, and a destiny; why he writes such good books.
Montaigne called his pieces essais, 'trials' or 'attempts', and the word names both a method and a new literary genre. The book gathers 107 chapters in three books, ranging from one-page notes on thumbs, smells and names to the sprawling 'Apology for Raymond Sebond', which fills a sixth of the whole.
Essays and Aphorisms is the title of the selection translated by R. J. Hollingdale from Schopenhauer's Parerga and Paralipomena, the two volumes of 'appendices and omissions' he published in 1851 to make his system available to general readers. The book that resulted is the opposite of a treatise: short, sardonic, quotable pieces on suffering, death, religion, women, reading, noise, ethics and psychology, all resting on the metaphysics of his early masterpiece.
Essays on Education in a Republic gathers the six essays on schooling that open Benjamin Rush's Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical, published in Philadelphia in 1798. Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote them between 1786 and 1791 to ask what kind of education a free people needs once it has made itself a republic.
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.
This selection gathers fourteen of Hans Christian Andersen's most loved fairy tales, written between 1835 and 1845, in the English versions revised and partly newly translated by the Scottish scholar W. A. Craigie for Oxford University Press in 1914. In The Tinder-Box a returning soldier fetches a magic tinder-box from a hollow tree for a witch, keeps it, and with the help of three dogs with enormous eyes wins a princess and a kingdom.
Washington's Farewell Address and selected letters present leadership as restraint, reputation, and institutional precedent. The Farewell Address, published in 1796 near the end of his presidency, warns against sectional division, party spirit, foreign entanglement, public debt, and attacks on constitutional authority.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jewish Antiquities is Josephus' twenty-book retelling of Jewish history from creation to the outbreak of revolt against Rome in 66 CE. It is not simply a paraphrase of the Bible, though its first half follows Genesis through the monarchy, exile and restoration.
Johnny Tremain follows a Boston apprentice from the summer of 1773 to the first day of the American Revolution in April 1775. Johnny, fourteen, is the most gifted of the three apprentices in the silversmith shop of old Ephraim Lapham, a pious man who warns him about pride by having him read Leviticus 26:19; the next two chapters take their titles from that verse.
Just So Stories is Rudyard Kipling's collection of comic tales that explain, in the voice of a father talking to a child he calls O Best Beloved, how things in the world came to be the way they are. Each story is followed by a poem.
The Kalevala is the national epic of Finland, compiled by the physician and folklorist Elias Lönnrot from oral songs he and others gathered in Finnish and Russian Karelia. Its fifty runes, or cantos, follow the deeds of the people of Kalevala, chiefly the old singer and sage Väinämöinen, the smith Ilmarinen and the reckless Lemminkäinen, and their long rivalry with Louhi, mistress of the cold northern land of Pohjola.
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.
Letters from a Stoic selects from Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, a sequence of philosophical letters that turn daily life into training for freedom. Seneca writes as an older adviser to a younger friend, but the letters are also exercises for himself.
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 Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers is Ralph Moody's memoir of the four years, 1906 to 1910, that his family spent on a Colorado ranch, told from the point of view of the boy he was, eight years old when the story begins. His father, Charles, has a persistent cough from his work in a New Hampshire mill, and when a cousin, Phil, who sells gold stock in Denver, promises better prospects, the family leaves East Rochester for a run-down rented ranch near Fort Logan, southwest of Denver.
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.
Cedric Errol is a curly-haired American boy of seven, living with his widowed mother in a modest side street of New York. He calls her Dearest, as his father did, and his best friends are Mr. Hobbs, the corner grocer who rails against earls as grasping tyrants, and Dick Tipton, a bootblack.
Long Walk to Freedom is Mandela's memoir of childhood, political awakening, resistance, imprisonment, negotiation, and democratic transition. It begins in rural Transkei, with family, Thembu traditions, mission schooling, and the gradual widening of Mandela's world through education and urban life.
The Meditations, which Marcus Aurelius may have titled simply 'To Himself', is a private notebook of philosophical reflections written in Greek, probably during his military campaigns on the Danube in the 170s CE. It was not intended for publication and consists of twelve books of entries ranging from single sentences to short essays, often repeated and varied as exercises to fix principles in the mind.
Meditationes de prima philosophia, published in Paris in 1641, compresses Descartes's metaphysics into six meditations, each imagined as a day's reflection by a solitary thinker seated by the fire in a dressing gown. The book was issued with six sets of Objections from learned readers (Caterus, Mersenne's circle, Hobbes, Arnauld, Gassendi and others) and Descartes's Replies, which are longer than the Meditations themselves; a second edition (Amsterdam, 1642) added the Jesuit Bourdin's Seventh Objections.
Much Ado About Nothing is set in Messina, Sicily, where the governor Leonato welcomes Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon, and his officers home from a victorious war. With the Prince come the young Florentine lord Claudio and the witty Paduan soldier Benedick, and also the Prince's sullen half-brother Don John, lately reconciled after a rebellion.
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.
This Douglass entry pairs the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with the 1852 speech commonly known as What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? The Narrative tells Douglass's movement from enslaved childhood in Maryland through violence, literacy, skilled labor, resistance, escape, and public abolitionist identity.
Natural History: A Selection introduces one of antiquity’s great encyclopedic minds. Pliny wants to collect nature and human use together: stars, lands, peoples, animals, plants, metals, pigments, stones, medicines, marvels and technologies all belong to one vast inventory.
Notes from Underground is a short novel in two parts, presented as the private notes of an unnamed retired civil servant of forty who lives in a shabby room on the edge of St. Petersburg. A footnote signed by the author explains that the writer of the notes is imaginary but represents a type produced by Russian society of the time.
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.
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.
On the Genealogy of Morality is Nietzsche's most sustained inquiry into the historical and psychological origins of moral values. In three treatises he asks where good and evil came from, how guilt and bad conscience developed, and what ascetic ideals do for priests, philosophers, artists, scientists, and sufferers.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich follows a single winter day, from reveille at five in the morning to lights-out, in a Soviet special labour camp on the steppe of Kazakhstan in the early 1950s. Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a peasant from the village of Temgenyovo, was captured by the Germans in 1942, escaped back to his own lines, and was charged with treason as a supposed German spy; he signed a confession because refusing meant being shot.
The Pensées ('Thoughts') are the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, found after Pascal's death in 1662 as nearly a thousand notes, many on slips of paper threaded together in bundles. Pascal had planned a work that would first unsettle the complacent unbeliever (the honnête homme of polite society) by showing the misery and contradiction of the human condition, then show that Christianity alone explains that condition and offers its remedy.
The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant were written in a race against death. In the spring of 1884 the brokerage firm of Grant & Ward collapsed through his partner's fraud, leaving the former president living on borrowed money.
Philosophical Investigations is the major work of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy, published in 1953, two years after his death, in a bilingual German and English edition with a translation by his student G. E. M. Anscombe. It consists of numbered remarks, from a single sentence to a page long, in which Wittgenstein questions, imagines examples, answers an imaginary interlocutor and frequently turns against views he himself had held in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
This volume gathers the three books that first introduced Emily Dickinson's poetry to the public, all published in Boston in the decade after her death in 1886. Poems (1890) was edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, a young Amherst neighbor, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the man of letters with whom Dickinson had corresponded since 1862; Poems: Second Series followed in 1891 under the same two editors, and Poems: Third Series in 1896, edited by Todd alone.
Spurgeon's Selected Sermons show Victorian evangelical preaching at industrial scale. Week by week, his sermons moved from pulpit to print, reaching readers far beyond the Metropolitan Tabernacle.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence's account of his two years with the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, from his first visit to the Hejaz in October 1916 to the entry into Damascus in October 1918. It opens with an introductory chapter that admits the book's political bad conscience: Lawrence knew that Britain and France had already divided the Arab lands in the Sykes–Picot agreement while he encouraged the Arabs to fight for independence.
Shane is a short Western novel in sixteen chapters, told years afterward by Bob Starrett, who was about eleven in the summer of 1889 when a stranger rode into his family's Wyoming valley. The rider, dressed in dark, fine clothes and calling himself only Shane, stops at the homestead of Joe Starrett, Bob's father, and Joe's wife, Marian.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight opens at Arthur's Christmas court, where a green stranger interrupts the feast with a beheading game. Gawain accepts the challenge, cuts off the Green Knight's head, and must seek the Green Chapel a year later to receive the return blow.
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.
Sts. Roch and Sebastian became plague saints through two different imaginative routes. Sebastian is an older martyr of the Roman persecution tradition.
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 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.
Dell'arte della guerra, printed in Florence in 1521, is the only one of Machiavelli's political works published in his lifetime. It is a dialogue in seven books, set in 1516 in the Orti Oricellari, the shaded garden of Cosimo Rucellai, where the humanist circle that Machiavelli frequented met to discuss Livy and republican government.
The Call of the Wild follows Buck, a huge St. Bernard and Scotch shepherd cross, through one terrible and transforming year of the Klondike gold rush. Buck lives as the lord of Judge Miller's estate in the Santa Clara Valley of California until Manuel, a gardener's helper who needs money for his lottery gambling, sells him to dog traders.
The Canon of Medicine (al-Qanun fi al-Tibb) is Ibn Sina's encyclopedia of medicine in five books, and Book I, the subject of this record, sets out the general principles on which the rest depends. It opens with a definition: medicine is the science of the states of the human body in health and when not in health, and of how health is lost and restored, with a theoretical part that gives knowledge and a practical part that guides the physician's judgment.
The 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 Divine Comedy begins with Dante lost in a dark wood midway through life, unable to climb the sunlit hill because beasts block his way. Virgil comes as guide and leads him through Inferno, where punishments reveal the inner logic of disordered love, violence, fraud, and treachery.
Around AD 117 the Ninth Legion, the Hispana, marched north from Eboracum into Caledonia to put down a rising of the tribes and was never seen again; its bronze eagle standard was lost with it. Some years later Marcus Flavius Aquila, whose father commanded the legion's First Cohort and vanished with it, arrives as a young centurion to command a cohort of auxiliaries at the frontier fort of Isca Dumnoniorum in the far southwest of Britain.
Darwin's Expression of the Emotions is one of the founding works of comparative psychology. It asks how humans and animals express fear, anger, joy, grief, shame, disgust, attention, and other states through face, posture, voice, tears, hair, muscles, and involuntary action.
The Fall of the Roman Republic is a selection of six of Plutarch's Roman Lives, arranged to tell the story of the Republic's collapse in the century before Augustus: Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar and Cicero. Read in sequence, they show how military glory, personal ambition and civil war destroyed Rome's traditional government.
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 Golden Ass is a comic, erotic, violent and religious novel about curiosity transformed into degradation and salvation. Lucius, a young man fascinated by magic, travels in Thessaly, a region famous for witches.
The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles is Padraic Colum's retelling for young readers of the voyage of the Argo, with many other Greek myths woven into it as stories told by the heroes on the way. It was published in New York by Macmillan in 1921, with illustrations by Willy Pogány, and was named a Newbery Honor book in 1922.
This entry gathers the Golden Legend chapters and adjacent medieval traditions behind saints whose images still move through calendars, holidays, icons, hospitals, medals, advertising, and folklore. Jacobus de Voragine did not write critical biography in the modern sense.
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 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 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.
Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire runs in seventy-one chapters from the age of the Antonines in the second century to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the condition of the city of Rome in the fifteenth century. The library holds a selection from the Milman edition, with Gibbon's footnotes and the added notes of the editors: Chapters I to III, the General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West that close the third volume, and Chapter LXVIII on Mahomet the Second and the capture of Constantinople.
The Jewish War is Josephus' account of the revolt against Rome from its Hasmonean and Herodian prehistory to the destruction of Jerusalem and the last pockets of resistance. Written after Josephus had defected to the Romans, the work tries to explain a catastrophe to several audiences at once: Jews who had survived it, Romans who had conquered, and Greek-speaking readers who needed Judean politics translated into the language of civil war, faction and providence.
The Koran, or Quran ('recitation'), is the central scripture of Islam. It consists of 114 chapters called suras, of very unequal length, each made up of verses (ayat).
The Library is the only complete handbook of Greek mythology to survive from antiquity. In plain, compressed prose it tells the traditional stories of the gods and heroes in order, from the beginning of the world to the death of Odysseus, organized chiefly by family lines.
The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus is the spiritual autobiography that the Carmelite nun Teresa of Avila wrote at the command of her confessors, so that they could judge whether the extraordinary graces she reported came from God. It follows her from childhood in Avila to the founding of the convent of St. Joseph in 1562, and in its middle chapters becomes a treatise on prayer.
The Master and Margarita interweaves two stories: the visit of the Devil to Soviet Moscow in the 1930s and a novel about Pontius Pilate written by an unnamed author known as the Master. On a hot spring evening at Patriarch's Ponds, the literary bureaucrat Mikhail Berlioz and the young poet Ivan Bezdomny are discussing the non-existence of Jesus when a mysterious foreigner joins them.
The Metaphysical Poets is Helen Gardner's anthology of English poets of the seventeenth century who wrote in the style that Samuel Johnson, borrowing a phrase from Dryden, called 'metaphysical'. Johnson complained that in their verse the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked by violence together; T. S. Eliot, in his 1921 review of Herbert Grierson's earlier anthology, praised them for a unified sensibility in which thought and feeling were fused.
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 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket begins as a sea adventure told by a young Nantucketer whose craving for forbidden experience repeatedly overrides judgment. Pym and his friend Augustus Barnard first make a disastrous drunken voyage in the Ariel, a small boat nearly destroyed before rescue.
The Natural History of Selborne is a book of letters about one Hampshire parish, written by its curate over about twenty years to two learned correspondents: the zoologist Thomas Pennant and the lawyer and antiquary Daines Barrington. White opens with the place itself: its position among the chalk downs and sandy heaths of east Hampshire, its soils, springs and beech hanger, the deep hollow lanes worn into the rock, the forest of Wolmer and its decayed deer.
The Nibelungenlied is a medieval German epic of courtship, deception, insult and catastrophic revenge. Its first half centers on Siegfried, prince of Xanten, who comes to Worms hoping to win Kriemhild, sister of the Burgundian kings Gunther, Gernot and Giselher.
The Old Man and the Sea follows Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without taking a fish, as he sails far into the Gulf Stream and hooks a marlin larger than his skiff. Hemingway narrows the plot until skill, endurance, hunger, memory, prayer, and pain are concentrated in one body at sea.
The Old Regime and the Revolution (L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution), published in Paris in June 1856, is Alexis de Tocqueville's study of France before 1789. Its argument is that the Revolution, which its makers believed had broken French history in two, in fact completed a work the monarchy had long been doing: the concentration of power in a central administration and the levelling of the French into similar, separated individuals.
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 Popol Vuh, the Book of the Mat or Council Book, is the sacred and historical book of the K'iche' Maya of highland Guatemala, written in K'iche' by anonymous nobles in the 1550s and preserved in Francisco Ximénez's copy of about 1701. The library's text is not a full translation but Lewis Spence's 1908 English study, which retells and partly translates the first books from Brasseur de Bourbourg's French and Ximénez's Spanish and then comments on them.
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 Practice of the Presence of God gathers four conversations with, and fifteen letters by, Brother Lawrence, a lay brother of the Discalced Carmelites in Paris who spent his days in the friary kitchen. The conversations were written down by a visitor, traditionally identified as Joseph de Beaufort, who first met him on 3 August 1666.
The Prince is a short treatise in twenty-six chapters that Machiavelli wrote in 1513, shortly after losing his post in the Florentine chancery, and dedicated, in its final form, to Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino. In the dedication he offers the Medici what he calls his knowledge of the actions of great men, gained from long experience of modern affairs and continual reading of ancient ones.
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 Prussian Officer and Other Stories, published by Duckworth in London in late 1914, is D. H. Lawrence's first collection of short fiction: twelve stories, most of them revised from magazine versions written between about 1907 and 1914. Two are set among German soldiers, the rest in the colliery villages and farms of the English Midlands where Lawrence grew up.
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 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 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 Pimpernel opens in Paris in September 1792, at the height of the Revolution's Terror, where crowds gather at the city gates to watch aristocrats caught trying to flee. Sergeant Bibot boasts that no one will slip past him, yet the hideous old woman whose cart he waves through, after she hints that her grandson inside has smallpox, is the mysterious Englishman known as the Scarlet Pimpernel, and the Comtesse de Tournay and her children are hidden beneath the load.
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 Silver Chair begins behind the gym at Experiment House, a muddled modern boarding school where bullies rule. Jill Pole is crying there when Eustace Scrubb, much changed since his voyage on the Dawn Treader, tells her about Narnia.
The Story of a Soul is the autobiography of Thérèse Martin, a young Carmelite nun of Lisieux in Normandy, written at the request of her superiors in the last years of her short life and published a year after her death. In the library text, Thomas N. Taylor's 1912 translation, it is arranged in eleven chapters addressed to her sister Pauline, by then Mother Agnes of Jesus, and framed by a prologue on her parents and birth and an epilogue on her final illness.
The Tempest opens with a ship breaking apart in a storm off a remote island. On shore, the magician Prospero tells his fifteen-year-old daughter Miranda that he was once Duke of Milan.
The Trial follows Josef K., a respected chief clerk at a large bank in an unnamed city, from the morning of his thirtieth birthday, when two warders appear in his lodgings and tell him he is under arrest, to the eve of his thirty-first, when two men in frock coats lead him to a quarry and kill him. Neither K. nor the reader ever learns what he is accused of or what law he has broken.
The Twelve Caesars offers biographies of Julius Caesar and the first eleven Roman emperors from Augustus through Domitian. Suetonius does not write history as Tacitus does, with sustained analysis of institutions and causation.
The 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 Voyage of the Beagle is Darwin's account of his five-year journey around South America, the Pacific, Australia, and the Atlantic aboard HMS Beagle. It is a travel book before it is an evolutionary treatise: Darwin describes landscapes, fossils, earthquakes, volcanoes, coral reefs, animals, plants, Indigenous peoples, imperial violence, slavery, disease, and the practical hardships of field observation.
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.
Theodore Roosevelt's Autobiography, written at Sagamore Hill in 1913, is less a full life than a series of chapters on the work and convictions of a public man. A foreword dated 1 October 1913 calls for joining practical efficiency with lofty idealism.
Through the Looking-Glass is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. On a snowy afternoon, the day before a bonfire she hopes to see, Alice sits by the fire scolding her black kitten, wonders what the room behind the drawing-room mirror is like, climbs onto the mantelpiece and passes through the glass.
Treasure Island is narrated mainly by Jim Hawkins, the son of an innkeeper whose ordinary life is transformed when the old pirate Billy Bones comes to the Admiral Benbow inn. Bones brings a sea chest, a map and danger in the form of former shipmates, including Black Dog and the blind beggar Pew.
Two Lives of Charlemagne pairs Einhard's Life of Charlemagne with Notker the Stammerer's later anecdotes about the emperor. Einhard writes as a court insider shaped by classical biography, especially Suetonius.
Uncle Vanya, subtitled Scenes from Country Life, takes place over a few months on a provincial Russian estate. For twenty-five years Ivan Petrovich Voitski, Uncle Vanya, has managed the property with his niece Sonia, sending its income to her father, Professor Alexander Serebrakoff, the widower of Vanya's sister, whom Vanya once revered as a great scholar.
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.
Waiting for Godot is a play in two acts by Samuel Beckett, written in French as En attendant Godot between late 1948 and early 1949, published by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1952, and first staged at the small Théâtre de Babylone in Paris on 5 January 1953, directed by Roger Blin. Beckett's own English translation, subtitled a tragicomedy in two acts, was published by Grove Press in New York in 1954.
Washington: A Life is Ron Chernow's single-volume biography of George Washington, published in October 2010 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2011. Chernow's central aim is to replace the remote, marble figure of patriotic legend with a man of strong passions, ambition and a fierce temper, held in check by a lifelong discipline of self-command.
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.
Passages
- 12 Years a Slave, Ch. 2-3
Northup is drugged, imprisoned and beaten when he asserts that he is free.
- 12 Years a Slave, Tibeats episode
Northup is nearly hanged and left in prolonged bodily torment after resisting Tibeats.
- 12 Years a Slave, Epps plantation chapters
Cotton labor, quotas, whippings, hunger and surveillance show slavery as chronic bodily extraction.
- A Farewell to Arms, Book I, Chapters IX-X
The trench-mortar shell in the dugout, Passini's mortal wound, the dressing station and the haemorrhaging soldier on the stretcher above Frederic.
- A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Grace without softness
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes disability, chronic illness, trauma, violence, family care, and the charged symbolism of bodily affliction
- A Letter Concerning Toleration, Letter, definition of the commonwealth
Health and indolency of body listed among the civil interests the magistrate protects.
- 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.
- All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter IV
The gas attack in the graveyard, the struggle to get a mask onto a recruit, and the recruit with the smashed hip whom the veterans think it would be kinder to shoot.
- Alone in Berlin, Part IV
Interrogation and imprisonment of the Quangels; cyanide capsules offered as a means of choosing death.
- 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.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Seven, §225; Part Nine, §270
Defence of great suffering as a discipline; the knowledge and pride of those who have suffered deeply.
- Black Beauty, Part II (Earlshall)
The bearing rein's effect on Beauty and Ginger: pain in mouth, neck and windpipe.
- Black Beauty, Part II
Reuben Smith rides drunk, Beauty falls and breaks his knees, Smith is killed; Beauty is left scarred and devalued.
- Candide: Or Optimism, Ch. 5–6
The Lisbon earthquake, the injured Candide, and the auto-da-fé held to prevent further quakes.
- Candide: Or Optimism, Ch. 3
Battle between Bulgars and Abares; heaps of dead and dying, mutilated villagers.
- Candide: Or Optimism, Ch. 19
The enslaved man in Surinam missing a hand and a leg as punishment.
- Chronographia, Reign of Constantine IX Monomachos
The emperor's gout and the pain that crippled his hands and feet.
- Confessions, Book IX.2, 4
Chest pain and difficulty breathing support his resignation from teaching; a severe toothache relieved after prayer.
- Confessions, Book VIII
The Vincennes illumination 'approaching a delirium'; congenital bladder defect, nephritic colic, treatment by Morand and Daran, Morand's prognosis of six months to live, and the decision to abandon physicians.
- De Materia Medica, Book 4, poppy/opium entries
Poppy juice and opium preparations are described as powerful pain-relieving and sleep-inducing substances with lethal risk.
- De Materia Medica, Book 4, mandrake
Mandrake is presented as a narcotic and surgical/anodyne aid, later surrounded by magical lore.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10
Gratuitous pains of gout, gravel, migraine, toothache and rheumatism, and spleen, melancholy and superstition as pains of the mind.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 11
Four circumstances behind natural evil: pain as motive, general laws, frugal endowment of animals, inaccurate workmanship of nature (including excess or deficiency of humours and disease).
- Early Christian Lives, Life of Antony, tomb and fortress episodes
Demonic assaults, terrifying visions and endurance under attack structure ascetic combat.
- Early Franciscan Sources, Life of St. Francis, Ch. XIX
Doctors use cautery for Francis's eye disease, providing a vivid premodern treatment scene.
- East of Eden, Part Four
Kate, suffering from arthritis and fearing exposure, takes poison.
- Ecce Homo, Wise and clever chapters
Nietzsche links diet, climate, illness, recovery, and intellectual style.
- Essays, Book II, Ch. III, 'A Custom of the Isle of Cea'
Survey of classical and biblical cases of voluntary death and the arguments for and against it, including unbearable pain as a justification.
- Essays, Book II, Ch. XXXVII, 'Of the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers'
First-person account of kidney stone attacks, speculation on hereditary transmission from his father, and a long critique of physicians' contradictions and fees.
- Essays, Book III, Ch. XIII, 'Of Experience'
Detailed personal regimen (sleep, diet, habits) and colic attacks, with the argument that long experience of one's own body outranks medical rules.
- Essays and Aphorisms, Parerga II, 'On the Suffering of the World' and 'On the Vanity of Existence' (in the Hollingdale selection)
Pain as positive and pleasure as negative; boredom; life as a debt repaid at death.
- Essays and Aphorisms, On Human Nature, 'Human Nature' (stored text)
Egoism, malice and the pleasure of anger and hatred; cruelty as the embittered will's attempt to relieve its own torment; Schadenfreude and envy as opposites of pity.
- Essays on Education in a Republic, Thoughts upon the Amusements and Punishments Proper for Schools, reasons 4, 9 and 10 against corporal punishment
Injuries to body and intellect from beating, a schoolmate's reported death after a whipping, fear debilitating the mind, and the analogy between dosing a remedy to a patient's excitability and fitting discipline to a child's temper.
- Evangelium Vitae, Medicine and law
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
- Fairy Tales (Selection), The Little Sea Maid
The sea witch warns that every step on human feet will feel like treading on sharp knives; the sea maid bears it gladly at the prince's side.
- Farewell Address and Selected Letters, Final illness correspondence and accounts
Washington's death after severe throat illness and bloodletting reflects eighteenth-century medical practice.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, First Section (happiness as indirect duty)
The gouty patient who prefers present pleasure to doubtful future health, showing how indefinite the concept of happiness is.
- Hard Times, Book the Second, Chapter IX
The death of Mrs. Gradgrind, too vague to say whether she is in pain.
- Hard Times, Book the Third, Chapter VI
Stephen is drawn up from the Old Hell Shaft, badly injured, and dies after speaking of the many lives the old pits have taken.
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Chapter XXI, The Loophole of Retreat
Dimensions of the garret, the absence of light and air, and the frostbite of her shoulders and feet in the first winter.
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Chapter XXIII, Still in Prison
The second winter: cramps, cold in the head, stiffening of face and tongue, loss of speech and consciousness, and revival by her brother.
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Chapter XXXIII, A Home Found
Swelling of her limbs after escape and the physician Mrs. Bruce engages for her.
- Island of the Blue Dolphins, Middle chapters (sea elephant hunt)
Karana is injured in her attack on a sea elephant and must recover alone in her shelter.
- Ivanhoe, Chapter XXII
Front-de-Bœuf shows Isaac the iron bars over glowing charcoal in his dungeon to extort a ransom.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 17, Herod's final illness
Herod's last disease includes severe pain, feverish decline, abdominal and genital symptoms, physicians and desperate therapies before death.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 19, Agrippa I's death
The sudden illness and death of Agrippa I are framed as divine judgment, showing how acute disease becomes political theology.
- Johnny Tremain, Chapter 2
The cracked crucible, the burn, and Gran' Hopper's treatment, after which the thumb heals fused to the palm.
- Just So Stories, The Elephant's Child
Kolokolo Bird's refrain about the Limpopo River set about with fever-trees; the Crocodile stretches the young elephant's nose, which he wraps in cool banana leaves.
- Just So Stories, How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin
Stale crumbs inside his skin make the Rhinoceros itch, roll and rub until his skin folds.
- Kalevala, Runes VIII-IX
Väinämöinen's axe slips and gashes his knee; an old man stops the bleeding by singing the origin of iron and then applies salve and bandages.
- Kalevala, Rune XLV
Loviatar bears the nine diseases, which Louhi sends upon Kalevala; Väinämöinen heals the people with the sauna, ointments and prayers.
- Letters from a Stoic, Letter 54
Seneca describes severe breathing attacks and his mental response to bodily crisis.
- 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 on the Mississippi, Chapter 20
The Pennsylvania's boilers explode; scalded passengers and crew wait on a wood-flat in the sun without food or help until carried to Memphis.
- Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 20
The delirious chief mate refuses morphine, which he blames for his wife's death, and survives three trips to the death-room.
- Little Britches, Middle chapters
Ralph breaks nine toes when he loses control of the horses Bill and Nig.
- 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 in the Big Woods, Chapter 3, "The Long Rifle"
The girls burn their fingers touching the bright bullets Pa has just cast.
- Little Lord Fauntleroy, Chapter V
The Earl sits with his gouty foot on a stool through his first evening with Cedric, and the boy offers his shoulder for the walk to dinner.
- Long Walk to Freedom, Robben Island chapters
Hard labor, surveillance, diet, study, discipline, and solidarity shape the health and identity of prisoners.
- Meditations, Book 7.33, 7.64
On pain: if intolerable it ends life, if lasting it is bearable; in every pain remember there is no dishonour.
- Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation VI
Argument for the real distinction of mind and body, followed by the claim that the mind is not in the body as a pilot in a ship, as hunger, thirst and pain show.
- Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation VI
Phantom pain felt by those whose arm or leg has been amputated, used to show that the senses can mislead about the location of pain.
- Much Ado About Nothing, Act 5, Scene 1
Leonato rejects Antonio's counsel of patience, saying no philosopher has borne the toothache patiently.
- My Father's Dragon, Chapter Two, My Father Runs Away
The cat explains that the baby dragon fell from a cloud with a bruised wing, was tied up while it healed, and is now beaten and overloaded.
- Narrative of the Life and What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?, Narrative, childhood and plantation violence
Family separation, whipping, hunger, and terror show slavery as chronic bodily and psychological injury.
- Natural History: A Selection, Books 20–27
Medicinal plants are cataloged with uses for pain, sleep, wounds, digestion and mental disturbance.
- Natural History: A Selection, Book 20, poppy traditions
Poppy preparations appear among sleep- and pain-related remedies, with danger implicit in potency.
- Notes from Underground, Part I, Chapter IV
The argument about toothache: the educated man moans not from pain alone but to make his suffering felt by everyone in the house.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 3
Lennie crushes Curley's hand; the injury is covered up as a machine accident and Curley is taken to the doctor.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 4
Crooks rubs liniment into his crooked back in his solitary room.
- 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.
- On Medicine, Book 3
Inflammation is described through redness, swelling, heat and pain, a durable clinical formula.
- On Medicine, Books 5–6
Drug preparations include purges, plasters, narcotic applications and substances that can heal or poison.
- On Medicine, Book 7
Operations for cataract, fistula, bladder stone and damaged body parts show technical Roman surgery.
- On the Genealogy of Morality, Essay II
Guilt and bad conscience are traced through pain, debt, punishment, and internalized instinct.
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Evening, the return search
Buynovsky is sent to the punishment cells, where the narration notes that ten days of strict regime can ruin a man's health for life.
- Pensees, Fragment 552, Section VII
The Mystery of Jesus: Christ's self-inflicted agony in Gethsemane, the sleeping disciples, and the voice that says physicians will not heal.
- Personal Memoirs, Preface
Grant notes he was 'reduced almost to the point of death' while writing and that his son F. D. Grant helped with the work.
- Personal Memoirs, Vol. II, Ch. LXVII
Sick headache treated with hot mustard footbaths and plasters, cured on reading Lee's note; Grant's 'sad and depressed' feelings at the surrender.
- Philosophical Investigations, Part I, §§243-246
How words for sensations are learned, with the example of a child who has hurt himself, and the question whether pain is private.
- Philosophical Investigations, Part I, §§258 and 293
The diary of a recurring sensation and the beetle in the box.
- Poems: First, Second and Third Series, First Series, Life IX
The heart asks first for pleasure, then for excuse from pain, then for anodynes that deaden suffering, then sleep, and last the liberty to die.
- Selected Sermons, Autobiographical allusions to illness and pain
His own suffering informs pastoral speech about endurance and weakness.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book IV (the march to Aqaba)
The crossing of waterless country in summer; heat, thirst and the search for a lost man in the desert; the near-fatal effects of exhaustion on men and camels.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book VI (Deraa, November 1917)
Lawrence's account of his capture, flogging and sexual assault and of the lasting damage to his sense of self. Handle with care: the account is contested as fact and should be cited as his testimony.
- Shane, Chapters 6-8
Shane breaks Chris's arm; the brawl in Grafton's with Morgan's men, and Marian dressing Joe's and Shane's injuries afterward.
- Shane, Chapters 15-16
The gunfight at Grafton's; Shane, wounded, rides away.
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Green Chapel
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight gives this tag concrete force through medical interest gathers around bodily vulnerability: decapitation, fear, dream, the nick on the neck, confession, and shame felt as an embodied wound
- Sts. Roch and Sebastian: Plague Saints, Sebastian's arrows
Arrow wounds become a plague symbol, translating invisible epidemic danger into an image a viewer can recognize and pray before.
- That Hideous Strength, Chapter 7, The Pendragon
Jane first sees the Director lying with his wounded foot raised, living in constant pain from the heel wound received on Perelandra.
- The Alexiad, Book XII
Irene accompanies Alexios on campaign partly because only her careful rubbing can ease his gout.
- The Alexiad, Book XIV
Anna's account of the causes of her father's gout: a polo injury, long audiences with the Frankish counts, and anxiety for the empire.
- The Art of War, Book II
Roman soldiers made the weight of armour bearable by habituating their bodies to hardship; accustomed pains cease to be felt.
- The Call of the Wild, Chapter IV
Dave's inward injury: the drivers examine him at the fire, cannot locate the trouble, and let him return to harness before he is shot.
- The Call of the Wild, Chapter VI
Thornton, still limping from frozen feet, nurses Buck back to health; later Buck is found to have three broken ribs after the Forty-Mile rapids.
- The Canon of Medicine, Book I, Part 4, paras. 920-922 and 934-975
General rules of treatment, the relief of pain with white poppy, joy as an aid to cure, and the indications for bloodletting, purging and emesis.
- The Complete Poems, Drum-Taps
The Civil War poems move through camps, hospitals, wounds, deathbeds and nursing care.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 1
The widow tells Peter Ivanovich of her husband's three days of incessant screaming before death.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 3–4
The fall against a window frame, the pain in the side, the strange taste in the mouth, and the first consultation with a celebrated doctor.
- 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 Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 12
Three days of screaming, the sensation of being pushed into a black sack, then light and the end of fear.
- The Divine Comedy, Paradiso
The Divine Comedy gives this tag concrete force through dante is rich for the history of mind: despair, fear, grief, bodily torment, purgative healing, visionary states, and spiritual therapy structure the journey
- The Eagle of the Ninth, Calleva chapters (around Chapters VII–VIII)
A surgeon at Calleva reopens and cleans the badly healed wound in a painful operation that finally lets it mend.
- The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Life of Marius 6
Marius has the varicose veins of one leg cut out without restraint, then refuses surgery on the other.
- The Giver, Chapter 12
The Giver transmits sunburn, Jonas's first experience of pain beyond the scraped knees that are instantly medicated.
- The Golden Ass, Books 4–10
Lucius as ass suffers beating, hunger, overwork and repeated threat from human owners.
- The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles, Part I, XII: The Mountain Caucasus
The heroes hear Prometheus cry out as the vulture of Zeus descends on him each day.
- The Golden Legend: Popular Saints, Life of St. Lucy
Lucy's later eye patronage and martyrdom narratives make her important for the history of blindness devotion and ocular symbolism.
- The Gulag Archipelago, Part I, chapter on interrogation
Methods of interrogation, including sleep deprivation, cold, hunger and prolonged standing, and their effects on body and will.
- The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children, The Argonauts, Part VI
Cheiron is wounded by a poisoned arrow after the fight over Heracles's wine-jar and, unable to die, gives his immortality to Prometheus to end his pain.
- The History of the Church, Books 5–6, martyr narratives
Accounts of imprisoned and tortured Christians make bodily suffering central to communal memory.
- The History of the Church, Books 8–9, Great Persecution
Executions, mutilations, mines and prisons under Diocletian dominate the late narrative.
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Selections), Chapter LXVIII, Part IV, and notes 58–59
Justiniani's wound, his withdrawal to seek a surgeon, the varying accounts of the injury, and the death of Constantine Palaeologus.
- The Jewish War, Book 1, late Herod narrative
Herod the Great's final illness is described through bodily pain, feverish symptoms, ulceration and futile attempts at relief before his death.
- The Jewish War, Book 3, siege of Jotapata
Roman siege engines, wounds, exhaustion, fear and Josephus' survival after a collective death pact make the campaign a study in injury and combat psychology.
- The Jewish War, Book 6, burning of the Temple
The final fighting around the Temple brings fire, crush injuries, slaughter and mass death in a sacred precinct.
- The Koran, Sura 19:23–26
Mary's labour pains beneath a palm tree; she is told to eat dates and drink from a stream.
- The Koran, Sura 38:41–44
Job, afflicted by Satan with distress and suffering, is told to strike the ground and finds cool water to wash and drink.
- The Library (Bibliotheca), Book II.5.4
Heracles accidentally wounds Chiron with a poisoned arrow; the medicine fails, and the immortal centaur longs to die.
- The Library (Bibliotheca), Book I.7.1
An eagle daily devours the lobes of Prometheus's liver, which grow again by night.
- The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, Chapter IV, §§ 6-8
Fainting fits and heart trouble after entering the convent; her father takes her to a place of cures, where she suffers harsh remedies.
- The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, Chapter VI
Years of paralysis and pain endured with patience, and her recovery, which she credits to St. Joseph.
- The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, Chapter XXIX, §§ 16-17
The vision of the angel with a fiery spear and her description of a pain that is spiritual but shared by the body.
- The Master and Margarita, Part One, Ch. 2
Pilate suffers an excruciating hemicrania during the interrogation; Yeshua perceives it and it lifts.
- The Metaphysical Poets, George Herbert, 'Affliction (I)'
Herbert recounts how sickness and setbacks wasted his youth, and his complaint against God.
- The Moonstone, Fourth Narrative
Jennings' journal records his own opium dreams and pain, the preparation of the house, the forty-minim dose, and Franklin's trance-like reenactment.
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Ch. 2-3
The Ariel voyage exposes Pym and Augustus to intoxication, storm, near drowning and rescue after impaired judgment at sea.
- The Natural History of Selborne, To Pennant, Letter XXXIV
The harvest-bug's bites raise tumours that itch intolerably on those who walk in the grass in summer.
- The Nibelungenlied, Aventiure 3
Siegfried's dragon-blood invulnerability leaves one concealed vulnerable spot, making the hero's body both magical and anatomically fragile.
- The Nibelungenlied, Aventiure 33-39
The fighting in Etzel's hall emphasizes wounds, exhaustion, burning, thirst and the mass death of warriors trapped by honor.
- The Old Man and the Sea, The marlin
The Old Man and the Sea gives this tag concrete force through its medical lens is practical and bodily: age, cramps, hand wounds, exhaustion, starvation, pain tolerance, and the dignity of care between santiago and manolin
- The Old Regime and the Revolution, Book II, ch. 16
Evils patiently endured become intolerable once escape seems possible; the pain lessened, the patient's sensibility greater.
- 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 2
Juana prepares a seaweed poultice for the baby's swollen shoulder while Kino dives.
- The Persian Expedition, Book IV, Chapter V
The Armenian snows: deep drifts, a north wind, men dying overnight without fire or food, hunger-faintness, snow-blindness and frostbitten toes, with practical remedies.
- The Popol Vuh (Lewis Spence's account), The myth of Vukub-Cakix (First Book)
Spence's summary of Vukub-Cakix's jaw wound and toothache and the disguised grandparents' false operation on his teeth and eyes.
- The Power and the Glory, Opening section with Mr. Tench
The dentist's decayed professional life and the priest's search for brandy establish bodily and spiritual malaise together.
- The Practice of the Presence of God, Eleventh to Thirteenth Letters
Advice to a long-ill correspondent on sickness, physic, and God as physician of body and soul.
- The Prince, Chapter XXVI
Italy pictured as beaten, despoiled and lacerated, waiting for someone to heal her wounds and cleanse her long-festering sores.
- The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, A Sick Collier
Willy Horsepool's pit injury, six weeks of pain, and his raving outburst during the strike; his wife's fear for the compensation.
- The Quiet American, Watchtower episode
Fowler and Pyle trapped in danger reveal fear, pain and dependence beneath political disagreement.
- 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 VIII
The procession of walking wounded on the road to the rear: a man with a shoeful of blood laughing hysterically, a singing soldier, an officer carried by two privates, the spectral soldier with the gray seal of death on his face, and the tattered man with wounds to the head and arm.
- The Red Badge of Courage, Chapter XII
Henry is struck on the head by a retreating soldier's rifle and walks on dazed and bleeding until a stranger guides him.
- The Scarlet Pimpernel, Ch. XXIX-XXXI
Chauvelin's soldiers beat the supposed carter, who later proves to be Percy, sore but able to carry Marguerite along the cliffs.
- 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 Silver Chair, Chapter 12: The Queen of Underland
The Queen's green powder, sweet smoke and thrumming dull the travellers' minds until Puddleglum stamps on the fire and the pain of his burnt foot clears his head.
- The Story of a Soul, Epilogue
The final months in the infirmary, the doctor's visits and remedies, her suffering and her death on 30 September 1897.
- The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2; Act 4, Scene 1
Prospero threatens and punishes Caliban and the conspirators with cramps, aches and pinches sent by spirits.
- The Trial, Chapter 5 (The Flogger)
In a lumber room at the bank K. finds the warders being whipped by an official in leather, and their cries follow him.
- The Underdogs, Opening mountain fighting
Demetrio's band fights from rough terrain, foregrounding gunshot wounds, flight and bodily endurance.
- The Voyage of the Beagle, South America chapters
Darwin records illness, exposure, fatigue, and the bodily demands of collecting and travel.
- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Chapter 6: The Adventures of Eustace
The gold bracelet bites into the dragon's foreleg, and Lucy's cordial does not ease the pain.
- Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, Chapter I
Childhood asthma and the discovery of his nearsightedness and first spectacles.
- Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Chapter V
The White Queen's memory works both ways; she bandages and screams over her finger before the brooch pricks it.
- Treasure Island, Stockade fighting
The loyal party deals with gunshot wounds, field treatment, fever risk and pain during the island conflict.
- Two Lives of Charlemagne, Campaign narratives
Wars and punishments imply wounds, pain and coercive bodily discipline at the edge of exemplary kingship.
- Uncle Vanya, Act II
Serebrakoff, sleepless with gout, fears angina and complains of old age; he refuses to see Astroff, whom he had sent for, and is soothed by Marina with linden tea; Astroff drinks with Vanya.
- 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.
- 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.
- Waiting for Godot, Act I, opening
Estragon's struggle with his boot and Vladimir's urinary discomfort and anxiety about his hat.
- Washington: A Life, Throughout, especially the presidency
Washington's dental losses, dentures and the pain they caused.
- Where the Red Fern Grows, Chopping the big sycamore
Billy chops for days until his hands are blistered and bleeding, refusing to quit on his promise to the dogs.
- 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.
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.”
“use the consolations of reason in this case, and you were as good preach ease to one on the rack, and hope to allay, by rational discourses, the pain of his joints tearing asunder”
“The discipline of suffering, of GREAT suffering--know ye not that it is only THIS discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto”
“Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks.”
“A defect in the bladder caused me, during my early years, to suffer an almost continual retention of urine”
“But what racking pains, on the other hand, arise from gouts, gravels, megrims, toothaches, rheumatisms, where the injury to the animal machinery is either small or incurable”
“The doctors, having exhausted the therapeutic arsenal of the time, decided to resort to cauterization; it was decided to draw a rod of white-hot iron across his forehead”
“Brother fire," he said, "you are beautiful above all creatures; be favorable to me in this hour; you know how much I have always loved you; be then courteous to-day”
“It is as natural to die, as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful, as the other”
“the very sight of another’s pain materially pains me, and I often usurp the sensations of another person”
“I am in conflict with the worst, the most sudden, the most painful, the most mortal, and the most irremediable of all diseases”
“man is the only animal which causes pain to others without any further purpose than just to cause it”
“it is the will to live, which, more and more embittered by the constant sufferings of existence, seeks to alleviate its own torment by causing torment in others”
“a gouty patient, for instance, can choose to enjoy what he likes, and to suffer what he may”
“I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room”
“the Blood in a Pleurisie, getting into the Membrane of the breast, breedeth there an Inflammation, accompanied with a Fever, and painfull stitches”
Frequently cited
“Sooner would I stand Three times to face their battles, shield in hand, Than bear one child”
Frequently cited
“If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgement about it.”
“Jesus will be in agony even to the end of the world. We must not sleep during that time”
“Later I was reduced almost to the point of death, and it became impossible for me to attend to anything for weeks”
“The sight was more unendurable than encountering the enemy's fire, and I returned to my tree in the rain”
“I spent the night in bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and the back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning”
“When the officer reached me I was still suffering with the sick headache, but the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured”
“Diocletian, cruel emperor of Rome, commanded that Sebastian should be led into the middle of a field and there bound to a stake, and that his archers should shoot at him till he was as full of arrows as an urchin is full of pricks”
“the whiche thinges thei overcame, with accustomyng the body to diseases, and with hardenyng it, to bee able to indure labour. And you knowe, how that in thinges accustomed, men suffer no grief”
“If it is necessary to induce a stuporose state, do not go beyond the use of such as white poppy. Its anodyne action is well-known.”
“For upon that mountain the Titan god was held, his limbs bound upon the hard rocks by fetters of bronze.”
“Then they drew out their swords and smote her through the throat, but nevertheless she died not anon, but preached to the people”
“I remained there nearly a year, for three months of it suffering most cruel tortures--effects of the violent remedies which they applied.”
“Lord, abate my great affliction, or increase my patience: but Lord, I repine not”
“Rose late, after a dreadful night; the vengeance of yesterday’s opium, pursuing me through a series of frightful dreams.”
“if the pain be less, the patient's sensibility is greater.”
“disabled soldiers, struck down with snow-blindness or with toes mortified by frostbite”
“sitting down and keeping quiet helped the blood to freeze and the toes to mortify”
“Let him go--I will take his lashes.”
“If it gets about as he’s out of his mind, they’ll stop his compensation, I know they will.”
Frequently cited
“I was a sickly, delicate boy, suffered much from asthma, and frequently had to be taken away on trips to find a place where I could breathe.”
“there ain’t no more ye can do! I forgive ye, with all my soul!”
“What means are there of determining which is the acutest of two pains, or the intensest of two pleasurable sensations, except the general suffrage of those who are familiar with both”