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
Pharmacology Poisons
Drugs, remedies, poisons, toxicology, hemlock and potions.
Works
A Burnt-Out Case follows Querry, a celebrated European architect of churches who has lost all feeling: for his work, for women, for God and for himself. Travelling as far as the river boats will take him, he arrives at a leproserie deep in the Belgian Congo run by a community of missionary fathers and by Dr Colin, an atheist physician devoted to his patients.
A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, was published in London in 1843 in two volumes and went through eight editions in John Stuart Mill's lifetime, the last revised in 1872. Of its six books, the third, Of Induction, is the longest and the most influential; the library text gives that book alone, from an 1882 American printing of the eighth edition.
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.
Al-Razi's treatise, known in Arabic as Kitab al-Judari wa al-Hasba (The Book of Smallpox and Measles), is a short practical monograph in fourteen chapters by the leading physician of the Abbasid world. It is usually described as the earliest surviving work devoted to these diseases and the first to set out clearly how to tell them apart at the bedside.
On a hot summer afternoon Alice, bored beside her sister on a riverbank, sees a White Rabbit in a waistcoat take a watch out of its pocket and hurry down a rabbit-hole. She follows, falls slowly down a long well past cupboards and bookshelves, and lands in a hall of locked doors.
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.
Hume first published this book in 1748 as Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, and gave it its present title in 1758. It is his deliberate second attempt at the material of Book I of the Treatise, written, he said, so that the argument would no longer fail through its manner.
Locke says in the Epistle to the Reader that the Essay began when five or six friends meeting in his rooms found themselves at a standstill over questions of morality and revealed religion, and he proposed that they first examine what objects human understanding is fitted to deal with. Nearly twenty years later the result was a long, patient survey of where ideas come from, how they combine, how words signify them and how far knowledge and probable belief can reach.
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.
Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of England was published in London in November 1644, deliberately without a licence, a printer's name or registration with the Stationers' Company. It is written as an oration addressed to the Lords and Commons, though it was never delivered.
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.
The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is a short essay asking one question with unusual persistence: how can so many men, cities and nations put up with a single tyrant, who has no power except what they give him? La Boétie, writing as a young law student around 1548 (some scholars date it to about 1552-53), addresses the question to a friend named Longa and answers it in stages.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. An impoverished hidalgo of about fifty, Alonso Quixano, reads chivalric romances until, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dries up and he loses his wits.
Dracula is told through journals, letters, phonograph diaries, telegrams and newspaper cuttings assembled by its characters. Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to Transylvania to arrange the purchase of a London property, Carfax, for Count Dracula.
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.
Effi Briest opens at Hohen-Cremmen, the Brandenburg estate of the Briest family, where seventeen-year-old Effi, playful and still half a child, is suddenly engaged to Baron Geert von Innstetten, a thirty-eight-year-old district administrator who long ago courted her mother. Effi accepts, partly from ambition and partly from a wish for excitement, and the couple marry and move to Kessin, a small Baltic resort town in Pomerania.
Elements of Chemistry (Traité élémentaire de chimie, Paris, 1789) is Antoine Lavoisier's systematic textbook of the new chemistry he had built over the previous fifteen years. The library text is Robert Kerr's English translation, published at Edinburgh in 1790; Kerr, an Edinburgh surgeon, added Fahrenheit temperatures in brackets beside Lavoisier's Réaumur degrees and appended rules for converting French weights and measures, and the text describes the thirteen copperplates of apparatus drawn by Madame Lavoisier.
Bacon's Essays, or Counsels, Civil and Moral, grew over almost thirty years from a slim volume of ten pieces in 1597 to fifty-eight in the final edition of 1625, the text used here. Bacon borrowed the name essay from Montaigne, but where Montaigne explored himself at leisure, Bacon compressed observation into dense, balanced sentences meant for men of business and government.
Fahrenheit 451 is set in an American city of an unspecified future where houses are fireproof and firemen no longer put out fires but start them, burning books and the houses of people who hide them. Guy Montag, a fireman of ten years, loves the work.
Father Goriot opens in 1819 in the Maison Vauquer, a shabby boarding house in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève on the poor edge of the Latin Quarter, which Balzac describes room by room, smell by smell, before introducing its lodgers. Among them are Eugène de Rastignac, a law student from a poor noble family near Angoulême; the hearty, mocking Vautrin, who claims to be a retired merchant; the spinster Mlle.
Faust, Part One opens with three frames: a verse Dedication, a Prelude at the Theatre in which a Manager, a Poet and a comic actor argue about what a play should be, and a Prologue in Heaven modelled on the Book of Job. There Mephistopheles mocks mankind, and the Lord permits him to tempt Doctor Faust, saying that man errs as long as he strives but that a good man keeps an instinct of the right way.
Galen: Selected Works introduces a physician whose ambition was encyclopedic. The surviving Galenic corpus ranges from technical anatomy and pulse lore to philosophical defenses of method, from therapeutics and compound drugs to autobiography and polemic against rivals.
Gargantua and Pantagruel is the collective title of five comic books about a dynasty of giants, written by François Rabelais and published between 1532 and 1564. Pantagruel appeared first, at Lyon in 1532, under the anagram pen-name Alcofribas Nasier; Gargantua, about the father, followed in 1534 or 1535 and is now printed as Book I. The Third Book (1546) and the Fourth Book (complete 1552) bore Rabelais's own name, and a Fifth Book was published in 1564, eleven years after his death; how much of it he wrote is disputed.
Germ Theory Papers gathers four scientific papers that the Harvard Classics printed together in 1910, in the volume of Scientific Papers that also contains Harvey: one by the Glasgow surgeon Joseph Lister and three by the French chemist Louis Pasteur. Each comes with the series' brief introductory note on its author.
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver, presents itself as the sober memoir of a ship's surgeon. In Part I, shipwrecked, Gulliver wakes on the shore of Lilliput tied down by people six inches tall.
Hamlet opens on the battlements of Elsinore, where sentries and the scholar Horatio see the ghost of the late King Hamlet of Denmark. Prince Hamlet, called home from university at Wittenberg for his father's funeral, is grieving and disgusted that his mother Gertrude has married his uncle Claudius, now king, within two months.
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 Heroides (Heroines) is a collection of twenty-one verse letters in elegiac couplets, written as if by women of myth and legend to the men who have left, betrayed or endangered them, together with three pairs of letters exchanged between lovers. Ovid claimed to have invented the form.
Hippocratic Writings is not a single book but a library of early Greek medicine: case histories, ethical rules, theoretical essays, surgical manuals, dietetic advice, aphorisms and polemics against rival healers. Its strongest works begin from the sickbed.
Death, be not proud is one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets, a group of religious sonnets probably written around 1609-1610, circulated in manuscript among friends and printed only after his death in the Poems of 1633. In Herbert Grierson's 1912 edition, followed here, it is Holy Sonnet X; the numbering differs among manuscripts and early printings.
Household Stories is Lucy Crane's English translation of fifty-two tales chosen from the Brothers Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmärchen, first published in London by Macmillan in 1882 with pictures by her brother Walter Crane; the library text follows a later reprint and omits the illustrations. The selection mixes the most famous wonder tales with comic stories, animal fables and short nursery pieces.
Humboldt's Gift is narrated by Charlie Citrine, a successful middle-aged Chicago writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and made a fortune from a Broadway hit about the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron von Trenck, which was also made into a film. Now in his fifties, Charlie is distracted, spiritually restless and steadily losing his money.
This volume completes the library's surviving plays of Euripides with eleven works in Edward P. Coleridge's prose translation of 1891. Iphigenia in Aulis, produced after the poet's death in 405 BC, opens at night on the shore of Aulis, where the Greek fleet is held back by windless weather.
Journey to the West is the great Ming-dynasty comic and religious novel about the monk Xuanzang's pilgrimage from Tang China to India to bring back Buddhist scriptures, guarded by a band of supernatural disciples. The library text is not a full translation.
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.
Kidnapped is narrated by David Balfour, a seventeen-year-old Lowland Scot who in June 1751, after his father's death, leaves the village of Essendean with a letter for the House of Shaws. The minister Mr. Campbell sends him off with a shilling, a Bible and a handwritten recipe for lily-of-the-valley water, and with the news that he is a Balfour of Shaws.
The Laws is Plato's last and longest dialogue, twelve books of conversation in which three elderly men design the constitution and legal code of a new city. On a midsummer day an unnamed Athenian Stranger walks from Knossos toward the cave and shrine of Zeus with Cleinias, a Cretan, and Megillus, a Spartan.
Le Morte d'Arthur is Thomas Malory's English prose gathering of the Arthurian legend, from the hero's conception to the death of the last knights of the Round Table. Uther Pendragon, with Merlin's help, begets Arthur on Igraine, and the child is raised secretly by Sir Ector.
Lepanto is G. K. Chesterton's ballad of the naval battle fought on 7 October 1571 in the Gulf of Patras, off western Greece, where the galleys of the Holy League, assembled by Pope Pius V and led by Don John of Austria, defeated the Ottoman fleet. Chesterton published it in The Eye-Witness in October 1911 and collected it in his Poems of 1915.
Napoleon dictated or wrote tens of thousands of letters, often several dozen a day, to generals, ministers, prefects, bishops, kings, his family and the women he loved. Napoleon III's government published a thirty-two-volume Correspondance de Napoléon Ier between 1858 and 1870, pruning letters that embarrassed the dynasty; the Fondation Napoléon's complete edition, begun in 2004, runs to more than forty thousand items.
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.
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.
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives set the life of a famous Greek beside that of a famous Roman, so that each could be measured by the other. Twenty-three pairs survive, most closed by a short Comparison in which Plutarch weighs the two men, together with four single Lives: Aratus, Artaxerxes, Galba, and Otho.
Macbeth opens on a Scottish heath where three witches plan to meet Macbeth. Returning from victory over rebels and Norwegian invaders, Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo meet the witches, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and future king, and tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings.
Medea and Other Plays centers on Euripides’ art of making the socially powerless terrifyingly articulate. Medea begins after Jason has abandoned his foreign wife and children to marry the Corinthian princess.
Usama ibn Munqidh dictated these reminiscences, known in Arabic as the Kitab al-I'tibar (the Book of Learning by Example), when he was nearly ninety lunar years old and living in Damascus under Saladin's patronage. The book is not a continuous autobiography but a sequence of anecdotes, grouped loosely by subject and linked by association, meant to teach that the length of each life is fixed by God and that neither daring nor caution can change it.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin poem in fifteen books of dactylic hexameter, about 12,000 lines, that strings together some 250 myths of transformation from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus. Its unifying thread is change of form: gods, humans and nymphs become animals, plants, stones, stars and springs, usually at moments of extreme passion, violence or divine punishment.
Mourning Becomes Electra is a trilogy of plays that moves Aeschylus's Oresteia to a New England seaport town in 1865-1866, at the end of the American Civil War. The Greek house of Atreus becomes the Mannons, a proud Puritan family of shipowners and judges whose white-columned mansion, built like a Greek temple, stands apart from the town.
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.
The Novum Organum ('new instrument') is the second and only substantially completed part of Bacon's projected Instauratio Magna, a six-part plan to rebuild human knowledge from its foundations. Its title throws down a challenge to the Organon, the collection of Aristotle's logical works that had governed university teaching for centuries.
Number the Stars is set in Copenhagen and on the north coast of Zealand in September and October 1943, during the German occupation of Denmark. Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen and her best friend Ellen Rosen race each other home from school and are stopped on the street by two German soldiers; Annemarie's little sister Kirsti, five, chatters at them fearlessly.
On Liberty asks what limits there are on the power society may legitimately exercise over the individual. Mill opens by observing that the old struggle between subjects and rulers has been transformed by democracy.
On Medicine, or De Medicina, is the most important surviving Latin medical work before late antiquity. Celsus organizes medicine into diet, drugs and surgery, giving Roman readers a lucid account of Greek medical learning without the dense polemic of specialist schools.
De Magnete, magneticisque corporibus, et de magno magnete tellure (On the Magnet, Magnetick Bodies Also, and on the Great Magnet the Earth) was published in London in 1600 by William Gilbert, a Colchester-born physician who became president of the College of Physicians that year. It is the first large book devoted to experimental study of magnetism and one of the earliest works of natural philosophy built on systematic, repeated experiment.
On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals is the short Latin treatise, printed at Frankfurt in 1628, in which William Harvey argued that the blood moves continuously in a circuit, driven out by the heart through the arteries and returned to it by the veins. The library text is Robert Willis's English translation of 1847, as revised by Alexander Bowie and reprinted in 1910 in the Harvard Classics, with that series' introductory note on Harvey's life.
Othello is the tragedy of a Moorish general in the service of Venice who is brought, step by step, to murder the wife who loves him. The play opens at night in a Venetian street, where the ensign Iago, furious that Othello has promoted the Florentine Michael Cassio over him, rouses the senator Brabantio with crude news that his daughter Desdemona has eloped with the Moor.
Persian Letters is an epistolary novel made up of letters exchanged between two Persian noblemen travelling in Europe, Usbek and his younger companion Rica, and their friends, servants and wives back home in Isfahan. The letters run from 1711 to 1720, covering the last years of Louis XIV, the Regency and the collapse of John Law's financial system.
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.
This volume pairs one of Plato's most literary dialogues with two letters attributed to him. The Phaedrus takes place outside the walls of Athens, where Socrates, who rarely leaves the city, walks with the young Phaedrus along the river Ilissus and sits under a plane tree on a hot summer day.
This volume joins two treatises by Aristotle that together set out what scientific knowledge is and how the natural world is to be understood. The Posterior Analytics, in two books, belongs to the logical works later grouped as the Organon.
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of two young lovers from feuding families in Verona, compressed by Shakespeare into about four days. A sonnet Prologue announces that a pair of star-crossed lovers will end their parents' strife by their deaths.
Wesley's Sermons on Several Occasions and Primitive Physick make an unusually strong pairing for a medical classics library. The sermons define Methodist teaching on salvation, new birth, sanctification, practical holiness, the means of grace, Christian perfection, money, self-denial, and social responsibility.
Mr. Utterson, a reserved and loyal London lawyer, takes his Sunday walk with his kinsman Richard Enfield, who points out a shabby door in a by-street and tells how, at three one winter morning, he saw a small man trample a little girl and walk on. Caught and threatened, the man paid close to a hundred pounds in compensation with a cheque signed by a respected gentleman.
Tales from Shakespeare retells twenty of Shakespeare's plays as prose stories for children. A short preface explains the method: the authors keep Shakespeare's own words wherever they can, avoid words that came into English after his time, and hope the tales will send young readers on to the plays themselves when they are older.
Tanglewood Tales is Nathaniel Hawthorne's second book of Greek myths retold for children, a sequel to A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. In a short introduction called The Wayside, Hawthorne pretends that the stories were written by his young friend Eustace Bright, a Williams College student who had told the first set to a group of children at Tanglewood in the Berkshires; Eustace visits Hawthorne's snowy Concord hillside with six new stories, and Hawthorne agrees to act as editor.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collects the first twelve short stories about the consulting detective of 221B Baker Street, each narrated by his friend Dr. John Watson. In A Scandal in Bohemia the King of Bohemia hires Holmes to recover a compromising photograph from the singer Irene Adler; Holmes, disguised first as a groom and then as a clergyman, tricks her into revealing its hiding place, but she sees through him and escapes with her new husband, leaving Holmes the admiring loser.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a comic and nostalgic novel of boyhood set in the 1840s in St. Petersburg, a small Missouri town on the Mississippi modelled on Twain's Hannibal. Tom is an orphan living with his kind, anxious Aunt Polly, his priggish half-brother Sid and his cousin Mary.
The Age of Alexander is a collection of nine of Plutarch's Lives covering the Greek world in the fourth and early third centuries BCE, from the decline of Sparta and Thebes through the rise of Macedon and the conquests of Alexander to the struggles of his successors. Removed from their original Roman pairings, they read as a sequence of Greek history told through character.
This volume contains Tacitus' two earliest works, both written in 98 CE, soon after the assassination of the emperor Domitian. The Agricola is a biography and eulogy of the author's father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who died in 93.
The Anatomy of Melancholy presents itself as a medical treatise, laid out in the scholastic manner of partitions, sections, members and subsections, on 'what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it'. It is also an encyclopedia of Renaissance learning, a compendium of quotation from more than a thousand authors, a satire on human folly, and a consolation for its author and readers.
The Annals of Imperial Rome narrates the Julio-Claudian empire from the death of Augustus through Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, though parts are lost. Tacitus writes history as the psychology of autocracy.
The Arabian Nights Entertainments is Andrew Lang's 1898 selection of the Thousand and One Nights for children, retold in English from Antoine Galland's early eighteenth-century French version. The frame story comes first.
The Argonautica is the one full Greek epic of the voyage of the Argo that survives from antiquity, composed in four books of dactylic hexameter by the Alexandrian scholar-poet Apollonius of Rhodes in the third century BC. King Pelias of Iolcus, warned by an oracle to beware a man wearing one sandal, sees Jason arrive having lost a sandal in the river Anaurus, and sends him to fetch the golden fleece from Colchis at the far end of the Black Sea.
The Arthashastra, the 'science of material gain' or of statecraft, is a vast Sanskrit treatise on how a king should acquire, protect and govern territory. Written mostly in prose with occasional verses, it is divided into fifteen books and some 150 chapters, and covers almost every aspect of administration with remarkable detail and an unsentimental realism that has led to comparisons with Machiavelli.
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini is the life story of a Florentine goldsmith and sculptor, dictated in his late fifties and carried from his birth on All Saints' night in 1500 to 1562. It opens with Cellini's claim that anyone who has done excellent work and is honest should write his own life after forty, and with his ancestry and childhood: his father Giovanni, a musician and maker of instruments, wants him to be a flute-player, and once boxes his ears so that he will remember the salamander they have seen in the fire.
The Book of Enoch, usually called 1 Enoch, is a collection of five Jewish apocalyptic books gathered under the name of Enoch, the patriarch of Genesis 5 who walked with God and was not, for God took him. Written in stages during the Second Temple period, it presents Enoch as a righteous scribe who is shown the secrets of heaven, earth and the coming judgment and writes them down for his son Methuselah and for a remote generation.
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is a selection of Lovecraft's tales, edited with notes by the Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, tracing his development from early Poe-influenced pieces to the 'cosmic horror' for which he is known. Lovecraft's central idea is that humanity is an insignificant accident in a vast, indifferent universe, and that knowledge of this truth is enough to destroy sanity.
The 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 Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories framed by a pilgrimage. One April, the narrator, who calls himself Chaucer, is lodging at the Tabard Inn in Southwark when a company of some twenty-nine pilgrims arrives on its way to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a vast novel of injustice and revenge. In 1815 Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseilles, returns from a voyage on which he carried a letter from Napoleon's island of Elba as a dying captain requested.
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.
The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner and war veteran who comes East in the spring of 1922 to learn the bond business and rents a small house in West Egg, on Long Island, beside the vast mansion of the mysterious Jay Gatsby. Across the bay in fashionable East Egg live Nick's cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom, a rich former Yale football player, along with Daisy's friend Jordan Baker, a champion golfer.
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 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 Innocence of Father Brown collects the first twelve stories about Father Brown, a short, round-faced Roman Catholic priest from Essex with a shabby umbrella and an armful of brown-paper parcels, who solves crimes by understanding the sinners who commit them. In "The Blue Cross" Aristide Valentin, head of the Paris police, lands at Harwich hunting the giant French thief Flambeau and follows a trail of absurdities across London: salt in a sugar bowl, soup thrown at a wall, a window broken and paid for in advance, price labels swapped on a fruit stall.
The Institutes of Justinian is a short official textbook of Roman law, issued at Constantinople on 21 November 533 and given the force of law, together with the Digest, from 30 December of that year. It was written for first-year law students: the preface, addressed to the youth desirous of studying the law, explains that the emperor, having reconquered Africa and set in order both the imperial constitutions and the writings of the old jurists, has commissioned Tribonian, Theophilus and Dorotheus to compose an elementary book so that beginners may learn the law as it is actually in force.
Die Traumdeutung appeared in November 1899 with the date 1900 on its title page, and Freud regarded it as his most important book. Its central claim is that dreams are meaningful psychic acts that can be interpreted, and that every dream, properly analysed, proves to be the fulfilment of a wish.
The Lais of Marie de France are twelve short narrative poems in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, preserved together in one manuscript (British Library, Harley 978) with a general prologue in which Marie dedicates them to a 'noble king', probably Henry II. She says she has heard Breton lais, songs commemorating adventures, and has put them into verse so they will not be forgotten.
The Last Days of Socrates gathers four dialogues by Plato that together tell the story of Socrates' trial and death in Athens in 399 BCE: the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. In the Euthyphro, Socrates meets Euthyphro outside the court where Socrates must answer an indictment for impiety and corrupting the young.
The Library is the only complete handbook of Greek mythology to survive from antiquity. In plain, compressed prose it tells the traditional stories of the gods and heroes in order, from the beginning of the world to the death of Odysseus, organized chiefly by family lines.
The Mabinogion is the name given to eleven medieval Welsh prose tales, preserved mainly in the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest, together with the Tale of Taliesin, which Lady Charlotte Guest added from a later source. The library text is Guest's translation in the one-volume form, with her introduction and a few of her notes; it follows her order, opening with the three Arthurian romances.
The Master and Margarita interweaves two stories: the visit of the Devil to Soviet Moscow in the 1930s and a novel about Pontius Pilate written by an unnamed author known as the Master. On a hot spring evening at Patriarch's Ponds, the literary bureaucrat Mikhail Berlioz and the young poet Ivan Bezdomny are discussing the non-existence of Jesus when a mysterious foreigner joins them.
The Misanthrope and Other Plays collects several of Molière's comedies; the edition translated by John Wood and David Coward includes The Misanthrope, The Sicilian, Tartuffe, A Doctor in Spite of Himself and The Imaginary Invalid. Together they show the range of Molière's art, from the verse comedy of character to farce, and his satire of hypocrisy, pretension and medicine.
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 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 Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde's only novel, a moral fable told in the polished language of the London drawing room. In the studio of the painter Basil Hallward, the witty Lord Henry Wotton sees an unfinished portrait of an extraordinarily handsome young man and insists on meeting its subject.
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 Prince and the Pauper opens in London in October 1537, when two boys are born on the same day: Edward Tudor, longed-for son of Henry VIII, and Tom Canty, unwanted son of a thief in Offal Court, off Pudding Lane. Tom is beaten by his father John and his grandmother, but his gentle mother and sisters Nan and Bet love him, and the old priest Father Andrew teaches him reading, a little Latin, and tales of kings.
The Princess and Curdie is George MacDonald's sequel to The Princess and the Goblin, set about a year after the goblins were defeated. Curdie, the miner's son, now nearly thirteen, has grown dull and doubtful; he half believes that Princess Irene's great-great-grandmother was only a child's dream.
The Raven is a narrative poem of eighteen six-line stanzas in which a grieving student, alone at midnight in December, is visited by a talking bird that can say only one word. It appeared in the New York Evening Mirror on 29 January 1845, ahead of its printing in The American Review, and made Poe famous almost overnight.
Ammianus Marcellinus wrote his history in thirty-one books, beginning with the accession of Nerva in AD 96, where Tacitus had stopped, and ending with the Gothic victory at Adrianople in 378. The first thirteen books are lost.
The Satires of Horace and Persius brings together two Roman satiric voices separated by style, temperament and political world. Horace's Sermones, written after the civil wars and during the rise of Augustus, are conversational poems about greed, ambition, social climbing, sexual folly, legacy-hunting, literary quarrels, dinner parties and the art of living within limits.
The Sceptical Chymist is a philosophical dialogue in which Robert Boyle tests the two reigning theories of what bodies are made of: the four elements of the Aristotelians (earth, water, air and fire) and the three principles, or tria prima, of the Paracelsian chemists (salt, sulphur and mercury). Both schools appealed to the same evidence, the analysis of mixed bodies by fire.
The Song of Hiawatha is a book-length poem in twenty-two cantos with an Introduction, retelling legends of the Ojibway and neighbouring peoples around a single hero on the south shore of Lake Superior, which the poem calls Gitche Gumee, the shining Big-Sea-Water. The Introduction presents the songs as gathered by the singer Nawadaha from the forest, the birds and the rivers, and addresses readers who believe every human heart is human.
The Story of the Volsungs is a thirteenth-century Icelandic prose saga that tells, from beginning to end, the legend of the Volsung kindred, the dragon-slayer Sigurd and the fall of the Niflungs. The library text is the translation by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris, first published in 1870, in the 1888 edition, with an introduction, the translators' preface, notes, and an appendix of Morris and Magnússon's versions of related Eddic lays, from the Second Lay of Helgi Hundings-bane to the Lament of Oddrun.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) is Beatrix Potters short picture-story of a disobedient young rabbit who squeezes under Mr. McGregors gate after his mother has warned him away—his father, she reminds them, was put in a pie. Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail gather blackberries; Peter eats lettuces, beans, and radishes until he meets Mr. McGregor, loses his shoes and blue jacket, hides in a watering can, and at last slips home frightened and unwell.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë's second novel, is told in letters written in 1847 by the farmer Gilbert Markham to his friend and brother-in-law Jack Halford, enclosing a long diary. In the autumn of 1827 a young widow calling herself Mrs. Graham takes rooms in the half-ruined Elizabethan mansion of Wildfell Hall with her small son Arthur and an old servant, Rachel.
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 is the first of three volumes of Edward William Lane's translation of The Thousand and One Nights, made directly from the Arabic of the Cairo (Bulaq) printed edition and published in parts from 1838. The library text is the 1859 revision edited by his nephew Edward Stanley Poole, in the 1912 Chatto & Windus reissue with a preface by Stanley Lane-Poole.
The Three Musketeers follows a poor young gentleman from Gascony through three years of duels, court intrigue and war under Louis XIII, from 1625 to the fall of La Rochelle in 1628. D'Artagnan, eighteen years old, rides to Paris on a comic yellow pony with fifteen crowns, his father's advice and a letter of introduction to M. de Tréville, captain of the King's Musketeers.
The Travels of Ibn Battuta is the account of a Moroccan legal scholar who left Tangier in June 1325, aged twenty-one, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and did not settle at home again until 1349. Its Arabic title, given by its editor Ibn Juzayy, means A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling; it is usually called simply the Rihla, the Journey.
The book, known in Italy as Il Milione and in early French manuscripts as the Devisement du Monde (Description of the World), is less a diary than a geography of Asia as the Polos knew it, organized by route and region and told in the voice of Rustichello, who often addresses the reader directly. The Prologue tells how the Venetian brothers Niccolò and Maffeo Polo, trading in the Crimea and on the Volga in the 1260s, were carried by war farther and farther east until envoys brought them to Kublai, the Great Kaan of the Tartars, who questioned them about the Pope and the Christian faith and sent them back to Rome asking for a hundred learned Christians and oil from the lamp of the Holy Sepulchre.
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 Waste Land is a poem of 433 lines in five parts, dedicated to Ezra Pound and prefaced by a Latin and Greek epigraph from Petronius in which the Sibyl of Cumae, shrivelled in a jar, says she wants to die. Part I, The Burial of the Dead, opens with April as the cruellest month, stirring memory and desire in a dead land.
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.
Watership Down is the epic of a small band of rabbits who leave their home to found a new one. In the Sandleford warren in Berkshire, a small, nervous rabbit named Fiver, who has visions, sees the field covered in blood and begs his brother Hazel to warn the Chief Rabbit, the Threarah, who dismisses them.
We is presented as the diary or record of D-503, mathematician and builder of the spaceship Integral in the OneState, a glass-walled totalitarian society ruled by the Benefactor. Citizens, called Numbers, live by tables of hours, regulated labor, monitored sex, prescribed walks and transparent architecture.
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.
Passages
- 12 Years a Slave, Ch. 2-3
Northup is drugged, imprisoned and beaten when he asserts that he is free.
- A Burnt-Out Case, Middle chapters
Colin's routine at the leproserie: dispensing drugs, examining patients, and planning facilities with Querry.
- A System of Logic, Book III: Of Induction, Book III, Ch. X, §§ 6–8
The extended example of testing mercury as a remedy, comparing the deductive, experimental and observational methods, and the remark on specifics such as quinine.
- A System of Logic, Book III: Of Induction, Book III, Ch. IX, § 1
Liebig's account of how arsenious acid and salts of lead, copper and mercury destroy life by combining with animal tissue, used to illustrate the first two methods.
- A System of Logic, Book III: Of Induction, Book III, Ch. VII, § 4
The poison urali, known from the arrows of Guiana, as an example of discovering an effect by experiment or a cause by observation.
- A System of Logic, Book III: Of Induction, Book III, Ch. V, § 3
The man who takes mercury, goes out of doors and catches cold, used to show that the cause is the whole set of conditions.
- A Tale of Two Cities, Book III, Chapter 10
Manette's letter describes attending the Evremonde brothers' victim in a high fever of the brain, using narcotic medicines from their case, and the dying brother's wound, and records his fear that his reason will not remain unimpaired.
- A Tale of Two Cities, Book III, Chapters 9 and 13
Carton buys powders from a chemist and later uses a drug to render Darnay insensible before the exchange in the prison.
- A Treatise on the Smallpox and Measles, Chapter VII
Protection of the eyes, throat, joints, soles and palms; eye-drops of rose-water, sumach and pomegranate; opening of large pustules.
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter I
Alice checks whether the DRINK ME bottle is marked poison before tasting it, then shrinks to ten inches high.
- 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 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section VI
Irregular causes such as rhubarb as a purge and opium as a soporific, used to explain how probability arises from mixed experience.
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section VIII, Part I
Physicians are not surprised when medicines fail, because they assume hidden causes in the animal economy; Hume uses this to argue for regularity in human conduct.
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. XXIII
Opium's colour, taste and soporific or anodyne virtues as powers grounded in hidden primary qualities.
- An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, Part Two, Chapter I
Death by carbon monoxide is explained by its firmer union with haemoglobin than oxygen, as an example of how far physiology can answer the question how.
- An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, Part Three, Chapter I
Bernard recounts poisoning frogs with curare and performing a physiological autopsy, which showed that the poison abolishes the action of motor nerves while muscles remain excitable; he follows it with his experiments on death by carbon monoxide.
- An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, Part Three, Chapter IV
Empirical physicians who know that a remedy works but not how are contrasted with experimenting physicians who seek the mechanism of drug action.
- Areopagitica, Part one, on the nature of books
Books compared to a vial holding the distilled efficacy and extraction of a living intellect.
- 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.
- De Materia Medica, Book 4, hellebore
Black and white hellebore are purgative drugs associated in ancient medicine with melancholia and madness.
- De Materia Medica, Book 4, henbane and hemlock
Dangerous plants illustrate the thin margin between medicinal sedation and poisoning.
- De Materia Medica, Books 1–5, wine and oils
Medicated wines, oils and resins show drug delivery through everyday substances.
- De Materia Medica, Antidote and poison entries
Descriptions of toxic substances and countermeasures form an early practical toxicology.
- Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, Of Voluntary Servitude, on custom
Custom teaches people to swallow servitude unawares, as Mithridates accustomed himself to poison.
- Don Quixote, Part I, Ch. 17
Don Quixote brews and drinks the balsam of Fierabras; he and Sancho are violently sick.
- Dracula, Ch. 8 (Seward's diary)
Sleepless and dejected, Seward considers taking chloral hydrate and resolves not to let it become a habit.
- Dracula, Ch. 10–12
Van Helsing performs successive blood transfusions on Lucy from Arthur, Seward, himself and Quincey, and treats her with garlic and opiates.
- East of Eden, Part Two
Kate poisons the brothel-keeper Faye gradually with medicines.
- East of Eden, Part Four
Kate, suffering from arthritis and fearing exposure, takes poison.
- Effi Briest, Kessin chapters
Friendship with the hunchbacked apothecary Gieshübler.
- Elements of Chemistry, Part I, Chs. III–IV
Air is separated into a part that supports respiration and combustion and a part that kills animals forced to breathe it; the names oxygen and azote are given.
- Elements of Chemistry, Part II, tables of neutral salts
Tables give the new systematic names for the salts used in pharmacy and medicine, with the old names beside them.
- Essays, Essay XXVII, Of Friendship
Friendship as the remedy for 'stoppings and suffocations' of the heart; contemporary remedies for liver, spleen, lungs and brain; those without friends as cannibals of their own hearts; a physician unacquainted with the patient's body may cure the disease and kill the patient.
- Fahrenheit 451, Part One, the night Montag meets Clarisse
Montag finds Mildred unconscious beside an empty bottle of sleeping tablets; the technicians pump her stomach and replace her blood by machine.
- Fahrenheit 451, Part Three, "Burning Bright"
The Mechanical Hound injects an anesthetic into Montag's leg, leaving it numb as he flees.
- Father Goriot (Le Père Goriot), Vautrin's arrest
The police agent's drug, slipped into Vautrin's drink at table, produces a sham apoplexy so that Vautrin's brand can be found; earlier Vautrin drugs the wine of Rastignac and Goriot.
- Faust, Part One, Scene I, Night
Faust despairs of his learning and lifts a cup of poison to drink at dawn before the Easter bells stop him.
- Faust, Part One, Scenes V-VI, Auerbach's Cellar and Witches' Kitchen
Conjured wine for Leipzig drinkers, and the witch's potion that takes thirty years from Faust's body.
- Faust, Part One, Scene XVI, Martha's Garden
Faust gives Gretchen a phial to put her mother to sleep; the later scenes reveal that the mother died of it.
- Galen: Selected Works, Therapeutic and pharmacological works
Compound remedies, theriac and poppy/opium preparations belong to Galen’s drug tradition.
- Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book I, Chapter XXIII
Ponocrates purges Gargantua with Anticyrian hellebore to make him forget the sophisters' teaching, then sets a regimen of study, meals, exercise and sleep.
- Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book III, Chapters XLIX-LII
The mock-encyclopedic praise of Pantagruelion (hemp), its preparation and its many uses, parodying the herbals of the period.
- Germ Theory Papers (Pasteur and Lister), Lister, On the Antiseptic Principle, opening
Lister links Pasteur's work on putrefaction to suppuration in wounds and introduces carbolic acid.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part IV, Ch. 6
Gulliver explains European physicians, purges, clysters and the habit of foretelling death to save reputation.
- Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5
The Ghost describes the juice of hebenon poured in his ear, curdling his blood and covering his body with a leprous crust.
- Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2
The poisoned rapier and cup kill Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius and Hamlet.
- Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, Chapter 43, A Discovery
Dr. Boekman explains that his son prepared the wrong medicine, a deadly poison, which was never given.
- 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.
- Heroides, Letter VI (Hypsipyle to Jason)
Hypsipyle accuses Medea of winning Jason by spells, baneful herbs and a waxen image pierced with a needle.
- Hippocratic Writings, The Oath
The physician promises restraint with deadly drugs, confidentiality and disciplined conduct in the houses of patients.
- Holy Sonnet X: "Death, be not proud", Lines 9-12
Death keeps company with poison, war and sickness, and poppy or charms are said to bring sleep as well as death's blow.
- Household Stories (Grimm's Fairy Tales), Snow-white
The queen dies when Snow-white is born; the stepmother tries poisoned laces, a poisoned comb and a half-poisoned apple.
- Humboldt's Gift, Middle sections
Humboldt's paranoid accusations, violence toward his wife, use of drink and pills, and commitment to Bellevue.
- Iphigenia in Aulis and Other Plays, Ion, servant's report
Creusa's poisoned cup is spilled; a dove drinks from it, convulses and dies, exposing the plot.
- Journey to the West (A Mission to Heaven), Chapters V–VII
The immortal peaches, the elixir pills in Laozi's gourds, and the forty-nine days in the eight-trigram crucible, from which the Monkey emerges with smoke-reddened eyes.
- Journey to the West (A Mission to Heaven), Chapter LXXIII
The pilgrims are poisoned with tea at a Daoist temple and saved by antidote pills from a bodhisattva; the chapter heading links hatred to illness.
- Kalevala, Rune XV
Lemminkäinen's mother rakes his body from the river of Tuonela, joins it together and revives him with salves, the last fetched by a bee from heaven.
- Kidnapped, Chapter I
Mr. Campbell's third gift is a handwritten recipe for lily-of-the-valley water, distilled in sack, said to restore speech in palsy, ease gout and comfort the heart: a glimpse of household remedies of the period, from a plant now known to contain heart-active compounds.
- Laws, Book XI
The law that the mad must be kept at home by their relatives, the kinds of madness, the sale of a slave with epilepsy, and the law on poisoning and sorcery.
- Le Morte d'Arthur, Book VIII, Chs. VIII-IX
Marhaus dies of a sword fragment no surgeon can remove; Tristram's poisoned spear wound is healed by Isoud, a noble surgeon, in Ireland.
- Lepanto, Stanza 7
King Philip in his black-velvet closet touches a moon-colored crystal phial, his face pale and fungus-like, while the narrator says death is in the phial.
- Letters of Napoleon, Letters and orders from Egypt and Syria (1798–1799)
Plague in the Army of the Orient, quarantine measures, and the siege of Acre; context for the disputed Jaffa opium episode.
- Life of St. Martin, Life, Ch. 6: hellebore
The poisonous plant episode links ascetic foraging to ancient pharmacology and the dangers of diet.
- Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Life of Antony
Cleopatra tests poisons on condemned prisoners and studies the bite of venomous creatures before her death.
- Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 1–2
The hallucinated dagger; the voice crying 'Sleep no more'; the drugged possets given to the grooms.
- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 3
Macbeth asks the Doctor to minister to a mind diseased; 'Throw physic to the dogs'.
- Medea and Other Plays, Medea, poisoned gifts
A robe and crown destroy Jason’s bride and Creon through concealed toxic power.
- Memoirs of Usama ibn Munqidh, Section I, ch. 8, following cases
A Frankish physician heals a leg with washings of strong vinegar; a Frank's remedy for scrofula cures a boy, and Usama uses it on others.
- Metamorphoses, Book VII
Medea drains Aeson's blood and refills his veins with a magic brew, restoring his youth; the daughters of Pelias are tricked into killing their father.
- Mourning Becomes Electra, Homecoming, Act Four
During a heart attack Christine gives Ezra a pellet in place of his medicine; he accuses her before dying, and Lavinia finds the box.
- 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 25, hellebore traditions
Hellebore appears in the ancient therapeutic world of purging and treatment of mental disturbance.
- Natural History: A Selection, Book 25, mandrake traditions
Mandrake lore connects narcotic, magical and surgical uses.
- Novum Organum, Book II, Aphorism L
Medicines that condense the flesh or the spirits: mild soporifics (violet, dried roses, lettuce), rose-water for fainting fits, and opiates that expel the spirits from the brain's ventricles yet in moderation may aid cure and longevity.
- Number the Stars, Chapter 11
Peter gives the baby drops from a small bottle so it will not cry during the crossing.
- Number the Stars, Chapters 15-16; Afterword
The soldiers' dogs sniff the handkerchief; Henrik explains what it did, and the afterword describes the blood-and-cocaine powder.
- On Liberty, Ch. V, Applications
Sale of poisons: labelling, a register of buyers, Bentham's 'preappointed evidence', and rejection of a universal prescription requirement; the unsafe-bridge example and its exceptions for the delirious or overexcited.
- On Medicine, Books 5–6
Drug preparations include purges, plasters, narcotic applications and substances that can heal or poison.
- On the Magnet (De Magnete), Book I, Ch. XIV
Survey and criticism of medicinal claims for the loadstone: purging humours, causing melancholy, curing headaches, extracting arrowheads, and its use in wound plasters.
- On the Magnet (De Magnete), Book I, Ch. XV
Preparation and use of iron and steel as remedies for disorders of the liver and spleen, with warnings against their misuse and a discussion of whether iron is warm or cold.
- On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (De Motu Cordis), Ch. XVI
Contagion, poisoned wounds, rabies, the lues venerea, tertian fever and externally applied medicines are explained by the returning current of blood.
- Othello, Act 1, Scenes 2 and 3
Brabantio charges that Othello bewitched Desdemona with drugs, minerals and medicines bought of mountebanks; Othello answers that his only witchcraft was his story.
- Persian Letters, Final letter (Letter 161 in the 1758 numbering)
Roxane writes to Usbek after taking poison, declaring her deception and her inner freedom.
- Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy), Chapter XIII
Hook poisons the medicine cup by Peter's bed; Tinker Bell drinks it, her light fades, and the children's clapping restores her.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 274c–275b
The myth of Theuth: writing as a pharmakon for memory that weakens memory.
- Posterior Analytics and Physics, Physics II.3 (194b–195a)
Health as the final cause of walking; reducing flesh, purging, drugs and surgical instruments as means for the sake of health.
- Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 3
Friar Lawrence gathers herbs and reflects that a single flower contains poison and medicine.
- Romeo and Juliet, Act 4, Scenes 1 and 3
The Friar describes the potion's effects; Juliet, alone with the vial, fears poison, suffocation in the vault and madness among the bones.
- Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Scene 1
Romeo seeks out the starving apothecary and buys a fast-acting poison against Mantua's law.
- Sermons on Several Occasions and Primitive Physick, Primitive Physick, preface and remedy lists
Wesley promotes simple remedies and access for the poor, revealing eighteenth-century lay medicine and its hazards.
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Last Night
Poole reports the repeated notes sent to wholesale chemists demanding a purer sample of a drug, and the men find Hyde dead amid the smell of kernels.
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dr. Lanyon's Narrative
Lanyon inventories the drawer of white salt, the blood-red liquid and the notebook of experiments, then watches the visitor drink and transform.
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case
Jekyll explains that his original supply of salt was impure, that fresh supplies fail, and that he expects his last transformation.
- Tales from Shakespeare, Cymbeline, middle
The queen's physician, distrusting her, gives her a sleeping drug instead of the poison she asked for, and Imogen takes it.
- Tanglewood Tales, The Minotaur
Medea prepares a poison so strong that a fly sipping from the goblet drops dead; later Aegeus, seeing the black sails, falls from the cliff.
- Tanglewood Tales, The Golden Fleece
Chiron teaches harp, war and the curing of diseases; at the end Medea drugs the dragon with a sleeping potion.
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Speckled Band
Dr. Grimesby Roylott, a physician who once practised in Calcutta, uses a trained swamp adder through a ventilator; Holmes reflects on doctors who become murderers and on poisons that escape chemical detection.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 12
Aunt Polly, infatuated with patent medicines, tries the water treatment and other remedies on a listless Tom, who gives the Pain-killer to the cat.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 19
Alexander falls ill after bathing in the cold Cydnus and drinks his physician Philip's draught while showing him an accusation of poisoning.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 75–77
Alexander's final fever at Babylon, day by day from the royal journals, with Plutarch's discussion of poisoning rumours.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Demosthenes 29–30
Demosthenes takes poison concealed in his pen to avoid capture by Macedonian agents.
- The Agricola and the Germania, Agricola 43
Agricola's last illness, the emperor's physicians and freedmen visiting, and rumours of poison.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 2, Sect. 4, Memb. 2, Subs. 1
Emetic simples, hellebore and antimony, and the double-edged praise and condemnation of tobacco.
- The Annals of Imperial Rome, Book 12, death of Claudius traditions
Tacitus reports the famous poisoning tradition surrounding Claudius and succession.
- The Arabian Nights Entertainments, The Story of the Greek King and the Physician Douban
Douban cures the king's leprosy with a drug in the handle of a polo club, is executed through the vizir's slander, and kills the king by a poisoned book.
- The Arabian Nights Entertainments, The Story of the Blind Baba-Abdalla
A dervish's ointment shows hidden treasure when applied to one eye but blinds the greedy Baba-Abdalla when applied to the other.
- The Argonautica, Book III, Medea's night and the charm of Prometheus
Medea's sleepless night of divided thought, followed by the narrator's account of the flower sprung from Prometheus' ichor and how she gathered it.
- The Argonautica, Book IV, the serpent and the fleece
Medea sings to the serpent and sprinkles its eyes with a brew from a juniper spray until it sleeps.
- The Argonautica, Book IV, Libya, death of Mopsus
A serpent sprung from the Gorgon's blood bites Mopsus; numbness, failing sight and rapid corruption of the body follow.
- The Arthashastra, Book 1 (protection of the king)
Signs by which poisoned food and drink can be detected, and the role of physicians and antidotes in guarding the king.
- The Arthashastra, Book 4 (examination of sudden death)
Procedures for inspecting a corpse to determine whether death resulted from hanging, drowning, poison or violence.
- The Arthashastra, Book 14
Recipes for poisons, injurious smokes and their counter-measures, used in secret warfare.
- The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Book I, Chapter LIX
Cellini's own case of the French disease and his fifty-day cure by guaiac wood and abstinence.
- The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Book I, Chapters CXXV-CXXVI
The plot to kill him with pounded diamond in his food and his examination of the powder.
- The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch), Chapters VII–VIII
The Watchers teach charms, enchantments, root-cutting and the knowledge of plants, alongside weapons, cosmetics and astrology.
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'The Colour Out of Space'
The Gardner family sicken, grow grey and brittle, and lose their minds as the colour poisons the land.
- The 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 Canterbury Tales, The Pardoner's Tale
The youngest rioter buys rat poison from an apothecary to kill his companions.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Château d'If chapters ('The Abbé's Chamber' to 'The Cemetery of the Château d'If')
Faria's cataleptic attacks, treated with drops of a red liquid; the third attack kills him.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Paris section ('Toxicology')
Monte Cristo discusses poisons, tolerance and the medicinal and lethal effects of drugs with Madame de Villefort.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Paris section (Saint-Méran and Barrois deaths)
Successive poisonings in the Villefort household; Dr d'Avrigny diagnoses poison and confronts Villefort.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Late Paris section ('Locusta' and following)
Monte Cristo substitutes a narcotic that simulates death to save Valentine from poisoning.
- The Giver, Chapter 5
After his dream of Fiona, Jonas's mother explains the Stirrings and gives him the first of the pills he must take every day.
- The Golden Ass, Book 3
Lucius applies the wrong magical ointment and becomes a donkey while retaining human mind.
- The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles, Part III, VII: Jason and Medea
Medea gathers magic herbs and grasses, brews a draught and anoints herself so that the marks of age leave her; she then tempts the trembling old Pelias with the hope of restored health.
- The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles, Part II, II: Medea the Sorceress
Medea mingles the juice of secret herbs in a phial as a charm to protect Jason against the fire-breathing bulls.
- The Great Gatsby, Chapter VII
Tom accuses Gatsby of selling grain alcohol over the counter through drugstores in New York and Chicago.
- 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 Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children, The Argonauts, Part VI
Medeia appears to make an old ram young in her cauldron and tricks Pelias's daughters; the songs say she restored Jason's father.
- The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children, Theseus, Part II
Medeia prepares a poisoned cup for Theseus at the court of Aegeus.
- The Iliad, Book 4.190–219
Machaon is summoned to treat Menelaus' arrow wound: he draws the arrow, sucks out the blood and applies healing herbs.
- The Iliad, Book 11.828–848
Patroclus cuts the arrow from Eurypylus' thigh, washes the wound, and applies a bitter, pain-killing root.
- The Innocence of Father Brown, The Wrong Shape, Dr. Harris's letter
A physician explains how he drugged his patient, staged a suicide note and calculated the angle of the knife.
- The Innocence of Father Brown, The Secret Garden, last paragraph
Valentin is found dead at his desk with a small box of pills beside him.
- The Institutes of Justinian, Book IV, Title 3.6-7
Liability of a surgeon who neglects aftercare, operates unskilfully or gives the wrong medicines.
- The Institutes of Justinian, Book IV, Title 18.5
The lex Cornelia's penalty of death for poisoners using poison and magic and for public sellers of deadly drugs.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter II, the dream of Irma's injection
A patient with hysterical symptoms, a throat examination revealing white patches, colleagues diagnosing infection and blaming an injection given with an unclean syringe; Freud's analysis of his own professional guilt.
- The Lais of Marie de France, 'Les Deus Amanz'
A strengthening potion from a relative at Salerno; the lover refuses it and dies of exhaustion at the summit.
- The Last Days of Socrates, Phaedo 116a–118a
The bath, the farewell, the friends' weeping, the drinking of the hemlock and the ascending numbness until death.
- The Library (Bibliotheca), Book III.10.3-4
Asclepius learns healing from Chiron, raises the dead with the Gorgon's blood, and is struck down by Zeus.
- 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 Mabinogion, Branwen the Daughter of Llyr
The cauldron of renovation returns dead warriors to fighting strength but without speech; Bran is wounded in the foot by a poisoned dart; Branwen dies of grief.
- The Mabinogion, Math the Son of Mathonwy
Llew, struck by a poisoned dart and found as a wasted eagle, is brought back to his form as skin and bone and healed by the physicians of Gwynedd before the year's end.
- The Master and Margarita, Part Two, Ch. 23
Satan's ball: Margarita receives a procession of poisoners and murderers from history.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Imaginary Invalid, Act 1, Scene 1
Argan audits his apothecary's bill for enemas, purges and draughts.
- The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Chapter III
Mrs. Inglethorp's convulsions behind the bolted doors, Dr. Bauerstein's artificial respiration and her death.
- The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Chapter VI
The inquest: medical evidence of strychnine, the chemist's poison register and the question of when the dose was taken.
- 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 Mysterious Affair at Styles, Chapter XIII
Poirot explains the bromide precipitation of strychnine in the tonic and the narcotic in the cocoa that delayed the symptoms.
- The Odyssey, Book 4
Helen mixes a drug into wine that suppresses grief and anger, a striking ancient fantasy of pharmacological emotional control.
- The Odyssey, Book 10
Circe's potion transforms men into swine; Hermes provides moly as protective antidote before Odysseus confronts her.
- The Pearl, Chapter 3
The doctor arrives uninvited, gives the child a white powder, and returns an hour later to treat the illness that follows, while watching Kino's eyes for the pearl's hiding place.
- The Persian Expedition, Book IV, Chapter VIII
Mass poisoning by wild honey: dose-dependent intoxication, vomiting, diarrhoea, inability to stand, delirium and collapse, with recovery after a day and convalescence over three to four days.
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter VIII
Lord Henry reports Sibyl's death at the theater from a swallowed substance he supposes was prussic acid or white lead, and the inquest that will follow.
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter XIV
Alan Campbell, a chemist with his own laboratory, is forced to destroy Basil's body with chemicals; a smell of nitric acid remains.
- The Popol Vuh (Lewis Spence's account), The myth of Vukub-Cakix (First Book), close
The twins give Cabrakan a bird poisoned with earth, after which his strength fails.
- The Prince and the Pauper, Chapter XV
A man is condemned to be boiled alive for poisoning on the doctors' word about the symptoms; Tom examines the evidence and frees him.
- The Princess and Curdie, Chapter 19, The King's Chamber
Irene describes her father's nightly wandering and the doctor's medicine that is not really medicine but wine; Dr Kelman rouses the king and appears to run something bright into his arm.
- The Princess and Curdie, Chapter 29, Barbara
Evil dreams left by the doctor's medicines wake the king in terror, and only the sleeping child Barbara laid in his arms drives them away.
- The Raven, Stanza 14
The speaker imagines a heaven-sent drug of forgetting and begs to drink it, a pharmacological wish for relief from memory.
- The Roman History, Book XXV, ch. 10
Jovian dies suddenly at Dadastana; Ammianus gives the explanations current at the time, among them noxious fumes and overeating.
- The Roman History, Books XXVIII, ch. 1 and XXIX, ch. 1-2
Prosecutions at Rome and Antioch for sorcery and poisoning spread through the senatorial class.
- The Satires of Horace and Persius, Horace, Satire 1.8
Canidia and Sagana's magic rites invoke poisons, corpses and bodily grotesquerie in a comic anti-witchcraft scene.
- The Sceptical Chymist, A Praeface Introductory
Boyle warns that physicians and naturalists are adopting chemical theories uncritically, while affirming his esteem for chemical remedies.
- The Sceptical Chymist, The First and Second Parts
Accounts of distilling human blood and deer's blood into differing oils, spirits and salts, used to question whether the products existed beforehand.
- The Sceptical Chymist, The Fifth Part
Carneades argues that specific qualities of bodies, including medicinal virtues, are not explained by salt, sulphur and mercury.
- The Song of Hiawatha, Canto XV, Hiawatha's Lamentation
Seven weeks of mourning for Chibiabos, ended by the Medas' herbal drink, chants and medicine-dance; Hiawatha then teaches simples, antidotes and the art of healing.
- The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga), Chapter VIII
Sigmund can eat venom without harm, while Sinfjotli can bear it only on his skin; later, after the wolf-skin fight, Sigmund sees a weasel heal its fellow with a leaf and uses the same herb on Sinfjotli's throat.
- The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga), Chapter X
Queen Borghild offers Sinfjotli the horn three times; Sigmund, by then very drunk, tells him to strain the venom out with his lip, and he dies at once.
- The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga), Chapter XXVI
Grimhild gives Sigurd a horn of drink, and he forgets Brynhild entirely and remains at the Giuking court.
- The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Closing
Chamomile tea and bed.
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Chapter XLI
Helen describes giving her son wine dosed with tartar-emetic until he is disgusted by every kind of liquor, and her fear that he may inherit the taste.
- The Thirty-Nine Steps, Chapter VI
Hannay escapes the storeroom after the lentonite blast, sick, giddy and half-poisoned by the fumes, and swoons on top of the dovecot.
- The Thousand and One Nights (Lane's translation, Volume I), Chapter II, Story of King Yoonán and the Sage Doobán
Doobán cures the King's leprosy with drugs concealed in a goff-stick, is executed on the Wezeer's slander, and kills the King with a book whose leaves are poisoned.
- The Thousand and One Nights (Lane's translation, Volume I), Chapter II, Story of the Young King of the Black Islands, with Note 46 (On the Use of Hemp to induce Intoxication)
The queen drugs her husband's nightly wine with benj; Lane's note identifies benj with henbane or hemp and connects it with the Assassins.
- The Thousand and One Nights (Lane's translation, Volume I), Chapter VII, Story of Ghánim the Son of Eiyoob
Ḳoot-el-Ḳuloob is drugged with benj and buried alive in a chest; later Ghánim, wasted by grief and hunger, is spared from the Baghdád hospital by a charitable sheykh.
- The Three Musketeers, Chapter XLII, The Anjou Wine
Poisoned wine sent as a gift kills a soldier who drinks it before the musketeers can.
- The Three Musketeers, Chapter LXIII, The Drop of Water
Constance dies in the convent after drinking the wine Milady has drugged.
- The Travels of Ibn Battuta, Prologue (Chapter I)
The abridger notes that Ibn Battuta's account of Indian aromatic roots differs from the physicians' and is probably correct.
- The Travels of Ibn Battuta, Chapter II (Upper Egypt, Humaithira)
Story of the Sufi master al-Shadhili, who dies at a desert station with a poisonous well after foretelling his own burial.
- The Travels of Marco Polo, Book I, Chapters XXIII-XXIV
The Old Man of the Mountain gives his young followers a sleeping potion and carries them into his garden paradise.
- The Travels of Marco Polo, Book I, Chapter XLIII; Book II, Chapter LXXV
Rhubarb in the mountains of Tangut and rhubarb and ginger near Suju, gathered for trade all over the world.
- The Travels of Marco Polo, Book III, Chapter XX
Ascetics of India who live long on rice and milk and drink sulphur and quicksilver twice a month.
- The Twelve Caesars, Several lives
Poisoning rumors, assassination wounds and deathbed omens recur as instruments of political interpretation.
- The Waste Land, II. A Game of Chess, ll. 139-172
In the pub, Lil's friend tells of her demobbed husband, her teeth, her five children and the pills taken to bring off a pregnancy.
- The Woman in White, Third Epoch, The Story Continued by Isidor, Ottavio, Baldassare Fosco
Fosco's praise of chemistry as power and his account of the drugs used during the substitution.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, §5
The last man: health-conscious, conflict-averse, managing his days with small doses of poison for pleasant dreams and a larger dose for a pleasant death; dissenters go voluntarily into the madhouse.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Introduction by Mrs Förster-Nietzsche (stored text, before the Prologue)
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche describes the Rapallo winter of influenza and her brother's effort in spring 1883 to stop taking chloral hydrate.
- Watership Down, Part II, Holly's story
Holly and Bluebell, exhausted and shocked, tell how men gassed the Sandleford warren and filled in the runs.
- Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Chapter IV
Cholera at Cruces: her treatments, the deaths, the examination of an infant's body to learn about the disease, and her own attack of cholera.
Quotes
“nor has rhubarb always proved a purge, or opium a soporific to every one, who has taken these medicines”
“For the colour and taste of opium are, as well as its soporific or anodyne virtues, mere powers, depending on its primary qualities”
“you may take sarza to open the liver, steel to open the spleen, flowers of sulphur for the lungs, castoreum for the brain; but no receipt openeth the heart, but a true friend”
“he found the same operation and effect that those do who have taken one indeed”
“The precepts for the physician to make his patient thoroughly healthy, and for a poisoner to ensure certain death, are of equal value in this respect, that each serves to effect its purpose perfectly”
Frequently cited
“Alas, wretched me, that love may not be healed by herbs!”
“Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell”
“Here he subsisted for some time on the roots of plants; and, while doing so, he took for food hellebore, which is, as people say, a poisonous kind of grass”
“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, / Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, / Raze out the written troubles of the brain, / And with some sweet oblivious antidote / Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart?”
“Throw physic to the dogs, I’ll none of it”
“But opiates, and the like, banish the spirits by their malignant and hostile quality”
“If poisons were never bought or used for any purpose except the commission of murder, it would be right to prohibit their manufacture and sale”
“But to require in all cases the certificate of a medical practitioner, would make it sometimes impossible, always expensive, to obtain the article for legitimate uses”
Frequently cited
“Not poppy, nor mandragora, Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep Which thou ow’dst yesterday.”
“When we are well we wonder what we would do if we were ill, but when we are ill we take medicine cheerfully; the illness persuades us to do so”
“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”
“this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories”
“Virtue itself turns vice being misapplied, And vice sometime’s by action dignified.”
Frequently cited
“Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.”
“I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.”
“Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases”
“but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, 'tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul”
“see how cruelty and injustice are punished.”
“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.”
Frequently cited
“Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt”
Frequently cited
“If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
“Alfred—Alfred——”
“A small dose produced a condition not unlike violent drunkenness, a large one an attack very like a fit of madness, and some dropped down, apparently at death's door”
“on the third or fourth day got on their legs again like convalescents after a severe course of medical treatment”
“Then how doth one know there was poison given at all?”
“Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”
“though I am a great Lover of Chymical Experiments, and though I have no mean esteem of divers Chymical Remedies, yet I distinguish these from their Notions about the causes of things, and their manner of Generation.”
“I am determined to enlist all the powers of association in my service;”
“A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death”