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.
Medical tag
Physicians Doctors
Physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, healers as characters or institutions.
Works
The title play, A Doll's House (1879), takes place over three days of Christmas in the comfortable Norwegian home of Torvald Helmer, a newly appointed bank manager, and his wife Nora, whom he treats as a charming pet, calling her his songbird and squirrel. Years earlier, when Torvald was gravely ill and doctors advised a year in Italy, Nora secretly borrowed the money from the lawyer Krogstad, forging her dying father's signature as guarantor.
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 Letter Concerning Toleration is John Locke's argument that the civil government and the church are two distinct societies with different ends, and that the magistrate has no authority to compel belief or worship. Locke wrote it in Latin, as Epistola de Tolerantia, during the winter of 1685–86 while living in exile in the Dutch Republic, addressing it to his friend the Remonstrant theologian Philipp van Limborch.
A 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.
Pinel presents insanity as a medical and moral problem rather than a condition to be met chiefly with chains, spectacle, or punishment. The treatise moves between nosology, institutional observation, and therapeutic counsel.
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.
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in about six weeks in the autumn of 1791, and Joseph Johnson published it in London early in 1792. Two years earlier she had answered Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France with A Vindication of the Rights of Men.
Huckleberry Finn tells his own story in the speech of a half-schooled Missouri boy, some forty or fifty years before the book appeared. After the treasure found at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the Widow Douglas has taken Huck in to civilize him, while her sister Miss Watson drills him in manners and spelling.
Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge was published in London in 1975 by New Left Books. It began as a long essay of 1970 and was meant to be one half of a joint book with Feyerabend's friend Imre Lakatos, For and Against Method, in which Lakatos would defend scientific rationality and Feyerabend attack it; Lakatos died in 1974, and Feyerabend dedicated the book to him.
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.
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.
Anne of Green Gables opens in Avonlea, a farming village on Prince Edward Island, where the elderly brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert have arranged to adopt a boy from a Nova Scotia orphan asylum to help on their farm. Through a mistake the child sent is Anne Shirley, an eleven-year-old red-haired girl who talks without stopping, renames everything she loves and has survived a hard childhood by imagination.
This collection pairs Melville's posthumous novella Billy Budd, Sailor with the best of the short fiction he published in magazines in the 1850s, usually including Bartleby, the Scrivener, Benito Cereno and The Encantadas (contents vary by edition). Bartleby (1853) is narrated by a comfortable Wall Street lawyer who hires a pale, quiet copyist.
Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, subtitled 'The Autobiography of a Horse', is narrated by a handsome black horse with a white star and one white foot. He grows up in a pleasant meadow under a kind master, Farmer Grey, and his mother Duchess teaches him to be gentle and good and to work willingly.
Bleak House is built around Jarndyce and Jarndyce, an endless lawsuit over a disputed will in the Court of Chancery, and around a secret that links a great lady to an orphan girl. Dickens tells it in two voices: an unnamed narrator in the present tense who surveys London's fog, the lawcourts, fashionable society and the slum called Tom-all-Alone's, and Esther Summerson, who writes her own story modestly in the past tense.
Maudsley's Body and Mind argues that mental life cannot be separated from bodily organization, nervous function, heredity, and disease. Based on the Gulstonian Lectures, the book brings Victorian psychiatry, physiology, and evolutionary thought into one frame.
Eric Metaxas's Bonhoeffer is a full-length popular biography of the German Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), written for a general Christian readership. It begins with the large, cultured Bonhoeffer family of Breslau and Berlin: his father Karl, a leading professor of psychiatry and neurology; his devout mother Paula, who schooled her children at home in their early years; his twin sister Sabine; and the death of his brother Walter in the First World War, which marked the family deeply.
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.
Cannery Row is a loosely plotted, affectionate portrait of the sardine-cannery district of Monterey, California, during the Depression, built from short narrative chapters alternating with self-contained vignettes or 'inter-chapters'. Its centre is Doc, a gentle, learned marine biologist who runs the Western Biological Laboratory, collects specimens from the tide pools, listens to Gregorian chant and Bach, reads poetry, and is trusted by everyone on the Row.
Captains Courageous begins in the smoking-room of a transatlantic liner in fog, where fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne, the spoiled only son of an American railroad and shipping millionaire, brags about his pocket money and annoys the grown men. Sick from a strong cigar, he goes out on deck, is pitched overboard by a roll of the ship, and is pulled out of the sea by Manuel, a Portuguese fisherman in a dory from the Gloucester schooner We're Here.
Carmilla is a Gothic vampire novella narrated by Laura, the nineteen-year-old daughter of an Englishman who retired from the Austrian service and bought a lonely castle in the forests of Styria. A brief prologue presents the story as a case from the papers of the physician Doctor Hesselius and notes that its narrator has since died.
Ceremony follows Tayo, a young man of mixed Laguna and white ancestry, who returns to the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico after the Second World War deeply ill in body and mind. In the Philippines he fought alongside his cousin Rocky, the family's favoured son, and endured the Bataan Death March; Rocky died of his wounds during the march, and Tayo could not save him.
Charlotte's Web opens at breakfast on the Arable farm, when eight-year-old Fern learns that her father is going out to kill the runt of a new litter of pigs. She protests so fiercely against killing a creature for being small that he gives her the piglet to raise.
Chess (Schachnovelle, also translated as The Royal Game or Chess Story) is narrated by a passenger on a liner sailing from New York to Buenos Aires shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. Aboard is the world chess champion Mirko Czentovic, a stolid, almost illiterate son of a poor Danube boatman who was raised by a village priest, revealed an uncanny talent for chess, and now plays mechanically and greedily for money, showing no curiosity about anything else.
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.
Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel parodying the overwrought rural fiction of the early twentieth century, the 'loam and lovechild' school associated with writers such as Mary Webb and D. H. Lawrence. It is set in a slightly futuristic England of video-phones and air taxis.
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.
Cranford is a small English country town, twenty miles by railway from the busy commercial city of Drumble, where nearly every householder of the better sort is a single lady or a widow. The narrator, Mary Smith, a young woman from Drumble, visits often and describes their code: calls of exactly fifteen minutes, card parties with wafer bread-and-butter, and an 'elegant economy' that treats spending as vulgar and never names poverty.
Cuchulain of Muirthemne is Lady Gregory's arrangement of the Ulster Cycle, the oldest group of Irish heroic tales, told in the English of the Kiltartan countryside in County Galway, with its Irish turns of phrase such as 'it is what he said'. Working from medieval Irish texts and the editions and translations of nineteenth-century scholars, she joined the separate tales into a single life of the hero Cuchulain, leaving out what she thought her readers would not care for and adding little of her own.
Cyrano de Bergerac is Edmond Rostand's five-act verse play about a seventeenth-century Gascon soldier, poet and swordsman whose enormous nose convinces him that no woman could love him. Act I opens in 1640 at the Hôtel de Bourgogne theatre in Paris.
Daisy Miller: A Study is told in close third person through Frederick Winterbourne, a young American who has lived most of his life in Geneva and has grown, in his aunt's phrase, too used to European ways. At a hotel in Vevey on Lake Geneva he meets Annie 'Daisy' Miller, a pretty, rich and uninhibited girl from Schenectady, New York, travelling with her vague, dyspeptic mother and her brash little brother Randolph, accompanied by a courier, Eugenio, whom they treat almost as a member of the family.
David Copperfield is the first-person autobiography of a novelist looking back on his life. David is born at Blunderstone in Suffolk six months after his father's death, on a night when his formidable great-aunt Betsey Trotwood storms out on learning he is not a girl.
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.
Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-dalal) is the intellectual autobiography of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, the most influential theologian of medieval Sunni Islam. Written in Arabic about 1106–1110, after he had resumed teaching at Nishapur, it answers a 'brother in the faith' who has asked how he found his way through the quarrelling schools of his day and why he gave up his famous chair at Baghdad.
Bleuler's Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias reworks Kraepelin's deteriorating psychosis into a broader and more psychologically complex group of disorders. Its most famous act is terminological: Bleuler introduces schizophrenia to name a splitting or disjunction in psychic functions, not a split personality in the popular sense.
Tuke describes the York Retreat, a Quaker institution founded after scandals in local madhouse care, as an alternative to fear, neglect, and routine coercion. The book gives the Retreat a history, an architecture, a daily rhythm, and a theory of treatment.
The Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences was published anonymously in Leiden in 1637 as a preface to three scientific essays, the Dioptrics, the Meteors and the Geometry. Descartes wrote it in French rather than Latin so that readers using their natural reason, including women, could judge it without scholastic training, and he presented it not as a treatise but as a history or fable of his own mind.
The Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's answer to a prize question set by the Academy of Dijon in 1753: what is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law? Rousseau's essay did not win the prize, but it was printed at Amsterdam by Marc-Michel Rey in 1755 with a dedication to the Republic of Geneva, a preface and extensive notes.
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 Discourses and the Encheiridion preserve the teaching of Epictetus, a lame former slave who ran a school of Stoic philosophy at Nicopolis in western Greece in the early second century. Epictetus wrote nothing.
The Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius are Niccolò Machiavelli's long commentary on the first ten books of Livy's history of Rome, which run from the founding of the city to the Samnite wars of the early third century BC. Machiavelli wrote them in the years after 1513, when he had been dismissed from the service of the Florentine Republic, and discussed them with young friends in the Rucellai gardens in Florence; he dedicated them to two of those friends, Zanobi Buondelmonti and Cosimo Rucellai, explaining that he had chosen men who deserved to be princes rather than men who were.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. An impoverished hidalgo of about fifty, Alonso Quixano, reads chivalric romances until, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dries up and he loses his wits.
Dracula is told through journals, letters, phonograph diaries, telegrams and newspaper cuttings assembled by its characters. Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to Transylvania to arrange the purchase of a London property, Carfax, for Count Dracula.
Early Christian Lives gathers late antique biographies of saints, monks and holy figures, often including Athanasius’ Life of Antony and Jerome’s lives of Paul, Hilarion and Malchus. These works do not present biography as neutral chronology.
This volume joins Robert Frost's first three books of poems, all written about New England farm country and published between 1913 and 1916. A Boy's Will (London, 1913) is a book of short lyrics arranged in three parts, and the library text keeps the original contents page, where each title is followed by an italic gloss in the third person describing what the youth of the book is feeling: in Into My Own he imagines stealing away into dark trees and believes those who follow will find him only more sure of all he thought was true; in Storm Fear he is afraid of his own isolation; in The Tuft of Flowers a mower finds a patch of butterfly weed spared by the man who scythed the field before him and decides that men work together whether they work together or apart; and in Mowing a scythe whispers in the hay while the speaker concludes that fact is the sweetest dream labor knows.
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.
Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished in 731 at the monastery of Jarrow, tells how the peoples of Britain received the Christian faith. A dedication to King Ceolwulf of Northumbria explains that history offers good examples to imitate and bad ones to shun, and names his informants, chief among them Abbot Albinus of Canterbury and the priest Nothelm, who searched the papal archives in Rome.
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.
Emma Woodhouse, not quite twenty-one, is the clever, handsome and wealthy mistress of Hartfield, a house in the Surrey village of Highbury, where she keeps company with her fond, fretful and health-obsessed widowed father. When her governess and friend Miss Taylor marries the genial widower Mr. Weston, Emma credits herself with the match and resolves to arrange more.
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.
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.
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.
David Hume's Essays, Moral and Political first appeared anonymously in Edinburgh in two volumes in 1741 and 1742, after his Treatise of Human Nature had, in his own phrase, fallen dead-born from the press. Written in the manner of Addison's Spectator for a polite reading public, they brought the philosophy of the Treatise to bear on British politics, religion, taste and manners.
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.
Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry is an anthology of Irish fairy lore, ghost stories, legends and comic tales chosen and introduced by the young W. B. Yeats. Rather than collecting stories himself, Yeats gathered the best versions already printed by nineteenth-century Irish writers and folklorists: Thomas Crofton Croker, William Carleton, Samuel Lover, Patrick Kennedy, Lady Wilde, Letitia Maclintock, Douglas Hyde and others, along with poems by William Allingham, Samuel Ferguson, Edward Walsh and Yeats himself.
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.
Lou Gehrig's farewell speech was delivered at Yankee Stadium on 4 July 1939, Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day, between the games of a doubleheader against the Washington Senators. Two months earlier Gehrig, whose strength had been failing for a season, had taken himself out of the lineup in Detroit, ending his streak of 2,130 consecutive games.
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.
Fathers and Sons is set in the Russian countryside in the spring and summer of 1859, two years before the emancipation of the serfs. Arkady Kirsanov, a newly graduated student, returns to his father's modest, poorly run estate, Maryino, bringing his friend and mentor Yevgeny Bazarov, a brusque, brilliant medical student of humble origins who calls himself a nihilist: he accepts no principle on authority and values only what is useful, especially natural science.
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.
Heraclitus's book does not survive; what remains are roughly 130 short sayings preserved as quotations by later authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus and Diogenes Laertius. Modern editions number them according to Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (DK), and the reference edition presents them in a fresh translation with commentary.
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.
This volume gathers three works from the three stages of Galileo's career: the discoverer, the defender, and the old master of mechanics. The Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius), printed at Venice in March 1610 and here read in Edward Stafford Carlos's 1880 English version, reports what Galileo saw through a telescope he had built and improved after hearing of a Dutch spyglass.
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.
Great Expectations is the first-person story of Philip Pirrip, called Pip, an orphan brought up by hand by his harsh elder sister and her gentle husband Joe Gargery, the village blacksmith on the Kent marshes. On Christmas Eve, in the churchyard where his parents lie, an escaped convict seizes Pip and makes him bring a file and food; Pip steals both from his sister's house, and the convict is later recaptured struggling with another fugitive.
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.
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.
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.
Heart of Darkness is told by an unnamed narrator aboard the yawl Nellie, anchored in the Thames estuary at dusk, who reports a story told by his companion, the seaman Charles Marlow. Marlow begins by observing that the Thames, too, was once one of the dark places of the earth when the Romans came.
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.
The first two books of Procopius's History of the Wars tell the long contest between the Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople, and Sasanian Persia, from the early fifth century to 549. Procopius opens by declaring that he writes so that great deeds will not be lost, that he was an eyewitness as adviser to Belisarius, and that truth alone suits history.
In Flanders Fields is a fifteen-line poem written in early May 1915 by John McCrae, a Canadian army doctor, during the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium, the battle in which German forces first used chlorine gas on the Western Front. By the traditional account, McCrae wrote it the day after burying his friend and former student Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, killed by a shell on 2 May, in a small cemetery near his dressing station beside the Yser canal, where wild poppies were blooming among the graves.
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.
Institutes of the Christian Religion is John Calvin's ordered account of Christian doctrine, written to train readers in godliness and to show the King of France what his persecuted evangelical subjects actually believed. The library text opens with the Prefatory Address to Francis I, which pleads that the Reformers teach nothing new but the faith of Scripture and the early fathers, and with Calvin's Epistle to the Reader, dated Geneva, 1 August 1559, in which he says he was never satisfied until the work was set in its present order.
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.
Jane Eyre is the life story, told by Jane herself, of an orphan girl who grows into a governess and finally a wife, keeping her conscience and her self-respect through poverty, temptation and grief. At ten Jane lives at Gateshead Hall with her aunt by marriage, Mrs. Reed, who resents her, and her bullying cousin John.
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.
David McCullough's John Adams is a full narrative biography of the second president of the United States, built largely on the Adams family papers and especially on the letters between John and Abigail Adams. It follows Adams from his boyhood on a farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, where he was born in 1735, through Harvard College, schoolteaching in Worcester and the law, to his marriage in 1764 to Abigail Smith, whom McCullough presents as his closest adviser and equal partner.
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.
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.
Kokoro, a word meaning heart, mind or the core of things, is in three parts. In the first, 'Sensei and I', a young university student in Tokyo meets an older man at the seaside resort of Kamakura and is drawn to him, calling him Sensei, 'teacher'.
The Laws is Plato's last and longest dialogue, twelve books of conversation in which three elderly men design the constitution and legal code of a new city. On a midsummer day an unnamed Athenian Stranger walks from Knossos toward the cave and shrine of Zeus with Cleinias, a Cretan, and Megillus, a Spartan.
Le Morte d'Arthur is Thomas Malory's English prose gathering of the Arthurian legend, from the hero's conception to the death of the last knights of the Round Table. Uther Pendragon, with Merlin's help, begets Arthur on Igraine, and the child is raised secretly by Sir Ector.
Kraepelin's Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry introduces readers to psychiatric diagnosis through bedside cases and disease course. Rather than beginning with abstract definitions, the lectures proceed from patients: mood disturbance, excitement, confusion, delusions, hallucinations, deterioration, alcoholism, epilepsy, paralysis, dementia praecox, manic-depressive insanity, and other clinical groupings.
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.
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.
Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain's book about the great river in two eras: the steamboat age of his youth and the changed river he revisited in 1882. It opens with three chapters of history and lore, from De Soto and La Salle to the keelboat and raft men, including a long raft episode with the boy Huck Finn borrowed from the novel Twain was then writing.
Little House on the Prairie follows the Ingalls family through roughly a year in Kansas, on land the book calls Indian Territory, around 1869 and 1870. Pa sells the little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin because the woods are filling with people and the game is growing scarce.
Little Women follows the four March sisters growing up in a New England town during and after the American Civil War, while their father serves as an army chaplain. Meg, the eldest, is pretty and longs for fine things; Jo, a tomboyish aspiring writer with a quick temper, is the heart of the book; Beth is shy, gentle and musical; and Amy, the youngest, is artistic and vain.
Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects is a collection of biographies of Italian artists from the late thirteenth century to Vasari's own day, arranged to tell the story of how the arts of design, after their decline in late antiquity, were reborn in Tuscany and brought to perfection in the age of Michelangelo. The library text is the first of the ten volumes of Gaston du C. de Vere's English translation of the 1568 edition, published 1912-1915.
Lord Jim begins with an omniscient narrator describing Jim, a young English parson's son who went to sea after reading light holiday literature and dreams of heroic deeds. Injured by a falling spar, he recovers in an Eastern port and takes a berth as chief mate of the Patna, a decrepit steamer carrying eight hundred Muslim pilgrims across the Arabian Sea.
This volume collects three of Aristophanes' comedies (contents vary by edition; a long-standing selection is The Acharnians, The Clouds and Lysistrata). The Acharnians (425 BCE), the earliest surviving comedy, is set in the sixth year of the Peloponnesian War.
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.
Man's Search for Meaning has two parts. The first, Experiences in a Concentration Camp, is not a chronicle of atrocities but a psychiatrist's account of how ordinary prisoners lived, suffered and either kept or lost their inner hold on life.
Mansfield Park follows Fanny Price, the timid daughter of a poor, overburdened family in Portsmouth, who at ten is taken in by her wealthy aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, at Mansfield Park in Northamptonshire. Her other aunt, the officious and mean Mrs Norris, never lets her forget her dependent status, and her cousins Tom, Maria and Julia treat her with indifference.
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.
Sherman's Memoirs, published in two volumes in 1875 and revised in 1886, present themselves less as history than as testimony; in the preface to the second edition he says he writes as a witness before the tribunal of history, supplying material for some future historian. The first volume, the text stored in this library, runs from his Ohio boyhood to the Meridian campaign of February 1864.
Usama ibn Munqidh dictated these reminiscences, known in Arabic as the Kitab al-I'tibar (the Book of Learning by Example), when he was nearly ninety lunar years old and living in Damascus under Saladin's patronage. The book is not a continuous autobiography but a sequence of anecdotes, grouped loosely by subject and linked by association, meant to teach that the length of each life is fixed by God and that neither daring nor caution can change it.
Esquirol expands Pinelian alienism into a more elaborate clinical and institutional system. Mental Maladies surveys insanity as a family of disorders marked by disturbances of perception, judgment, passion, volition, and bodily function.
Griesinger gives nineteenth-century psychiatry a somatic and medical program. Mental Pathology and Therapeutics treats insanity as a disorder of the brain, even while admitting how little pathological anatomy could yet prove.
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.
Middlemarch, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, follows several households in and around a Midlands market town from 1829 to 1832, the years leading to the first Reform Act. Its Prelude recalls Saint Teresa of Ávila and asks what becomes of women with a similar longing for a great life who are born into an age that gives it no outlet.
Moby-Dick is Herman Melville's novel of the whaling voyage of the Pequod and of her captain's pursuit of a great white sperm whale. School Launch points readers to parent-chosen selections, while the library provides the complete text of the Etymology, Extracts, one hundred thirty-five chapters and Epilogue for those who want the whole voyage.
Mourning Becomes Electra is a trilogy of plays that moves Aeschylus's Oresteia to a New England seaport town in 1865-1866, at the end of the American Civil War. The Greek house of Atreus becomes the Mannons, a proud Puritan family of shipowners and judges whose white-columned mansion, built like a Greek temple, stands apart from the town.
Mrs. Dalloway follows a single day in the middle of June 1923 in London, from a bright morning to the small hours of a party. Clarissa Dalloway, fifty-one, wife of the Conservative Member of Parliament Richard Dalloway, walks from Westminster up to Bond Street to buy flowers for the party she is giving that evening.
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.
Northanger Abbey follows Catherine Morland, the unremarkable seventeen-year-old daughter of a country clergyman, whom the narrator teasingly insists no one would have supposed born to be a heroine. Catherine is a devoted reader of Gothic novels, especially Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.
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.
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.
Oliver Twist, subtitled The Parish Boy's Progress, follows an orphan from a workhouse cradle to a safe home, passing on the way through the criminal underworld of 1830s London. Oliver is born in a workhouse in an unnamed town; his mother dies within minutes, leaving only a locket and a ring that later prove who she was.
On Duties is Cicero's last philosophical work, written in the autumn of 44 BC, in the months after the murder of Julius Caesar, and addressed as a letter in three books to his son Marcus, then studying philosophy at Athens under the Peripatetic Cratippus. Cicero follows, with freedom, the Stoic Panaetius of Rhodes, whose treatise on duty (kathēkon, Latin officium) he adapts for a Roman reader, adding examples from Roman history and from his own career.
On Liberty asks what limits there are on the power society may legitimately exercise over the individual. Mill opens by observing that the old struggle between subjects and rulers has been transformed by democracy.
On Medicine, or De Medicina, is the most important surviving Latin medical work before late antiquity. Celsus organizes medicine into diet, drugs and surgery, giving Roman readers a lucid account of Greek medical learning without the dense polemic of specialist schools.
De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Seven Books on the Fabric of the Human Body) was printed at Basel by Johannes Oporinus in 1543, when its author, Andreas Vesalius, professor at Padua, was twenty-eight. Its seven books describe the bones and cartilages, the ligaments and muscles, the veins and arteries, the nerves, the organs of nutrition and generation, the heart and the organs of the chest, and the brain and the senses.
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.
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium) is the Latin treatise in which Nicolaus Copernicus, a canon of the cathedral of Frombork in Warmia, set the sun near the centre of the universe and made the earth a planet that turns daily on its axis and travels yearly around the sun. It was printed at Nuremberg by Johannes Petreius in 1543.
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.
Orthodoxy (1908) is G. K. Chesterton's account of how he came to believe the Christian creed. It answers a challenge from the critic G. S. Street, who, after Chesterton's Heretics (1905) had criticized the philosophies of his contemporaries, said he would begin to worry about his own philosophy when Chesterton had given his.
Our Town presents Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, through three acts named Daily Life, Love and Marriage, and Death and Eternity. The Stage Manager introduces streets, families, dates, statistics, church steeples, milk deliveries, schoolbooks, and weather with almost no scenery, making the ordinary visible by stripping theater to gesture, voice, and memory.
Passing is a short novel in three parts, told in close third person through the consciousness of Irene Redfield, a light-skinned Black woman married to a Harlem physician. It opens with a letter that stirs Irene's memory of an encounter two years earlier.
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.
Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy was published in 1958 by Routledge and Kegan Paul in London and by the University of Chicago Press. Its author, Michael Polanyi, had been a physician and a distinguished physical chemist before turning to philosophy, and the book grew from his Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1951–52.
Persuasion is Austen's last completed novel, a story of second chances. Anne Elliot is the overlooked middle daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, a vain and extravagant baronet of Kellynch Hall in Somerset.
Peter and Wendy, the 1911 novel that grew out of J. M. Barrie's play Peter Pan, opens in the London nursery of the Darling family: Mr. Darling, a clerk anxious about money and dignity; Mrs. Darling, who tidies her children's minds each night; Wendy, John and Michael; and Nana, a Newfoundland dog who serves as their nurse. Mrs. Darling finds the name Peter in her children's thoughts and later sees a strange boy at the nursery window; Nana snaps the window shut on his shadow.
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.
Philosophy of Natural Science is a short introductory textbook by the German-American philosopher Carl G. Hempel, published in 1966 by Prentice-Hall in its Foundations of Philosophy series. It is still under copyright, so the library holds no text; this record describes the book in its own words and quotes only two short sentences.
Pollyanna Whittier, eleven years old, is the orphaned daughter of a poor missionary minister in the American West. Her mother, Jennie, had long ago disappointed her proud New England family by marrying the young minister instead of a wealthy suitor.
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.
Psychopathia Sexualis is a medico-forensic taxonomy of sexual behavior written for physicians and lawyers. Krafft-Ebing organizes case histories under categories such as hyperaesthesia, anaesthesia, paraesthesia, sadism, masochism, fetishism, and contrary sexual feeling, using the language of degeneration, neuropathic heredity, and criminal responsibility.
Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in London in November 1790, is cast as a long letter to a young Frenchman, Charles-Jean-François Depont, who had asked Burke's opinion of events in Paris. Its immediate occasion was the sermon A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, preached by the Dissenting minister Richard Price on 4 November 1789 to the Revolution Society at the meeting-house in the Old Jewry, and the society's address of congratulation to the French National Assembly.
Richard III follows Richard, Duke of Gloucester, youngest brother of the Yorkist King Edward IV, from his first soliloquy to his death at Bosworth Field in 1485. The Wars of the Roses are over and peace has come, but Richard, born misshapen and unfit for courtship, tells the audience he has determined to prove a villain and win the crown.
Ruth is Gaskell's novel about a 'fallen woman', written to challenge the Victorian assumption that an unmarried mother and her child were beyond redemption. Ruth Hilton is a beautiful, innocent orphan of fifteen, apprenticed to a dressmaker, Mrs Mason, in a country town, where she works long hours in a cold workroom.
The Second Treatise, subtitled 'An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government', is the constructive half of Locke's Two Treatises. The First Treatise demolishes Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, which derived the absolute power of kings from Adam's fatherly dominion.
Maupassant's stories, written mostly between 1880 and 1890, are compact, ironic and often brutal studies of French life: Norman peasants, Parisian clerks, prostitutes, bourgeois families, soldiers and the provincial gentry. This selection gathers many of the best known, which typically include the following.
Sense and Sensibility follows two sisters whose temperaments represent the opposed values of its title. When Henry Dashwood dies, Norland Park in Sussex passes to John, his son by a first marriage, who promises to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters but is talked out of any real generosity by his grasping wife Fanny.
Donne's Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions bring the metaphysical imagination into pulpit and sickroom. The sermons, including Death's Duel, display a preacher fascinated by mortality, judgment, resurrection, the body, and the unstable boundary between private self and Christian community.
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.
Silas Marner is George Eliot's short novel of a lonely linen-weaver restored to human fellowship by a child. In his youth Silas belonged to a strict dissenting congregation at Lantern Yard in a northern manufacturing town, where he was respected for his piety and for the cataleptic fits the brethren took for spiritual visitations.
This volume, published in New York in 1922 as Three Plays, brought Pirandello's theatre to English readers. It contains Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Henry IV (1922), both translated by Edward Storer, and Right You Are!
Shakespeare's Sonnets is a sequence of 154 fourteen-line poems, nearly all in the form now named after him: three quatrains rhyming abab cdcd efef and a closing couplet gg, in iambic pentameter. The sequence has no plot in the ordinary sense, but readers since the eighteenth century have traced a loose story.
The Statesman (Politikos) is one of Plato's late dialogues, usually dated to the 360s or 350s BC. It continues the conversation of the Sophist, held the day before: a visitor from Elea, a follower of Parmenides, has defined the sophist, and now, at Socrates' request, he undertakes to define the statesman or king.
Mr. Utterson, a reserved and loyal London lawyer, takes his Sunday walk with his kinsman Richard Enfield, who points out a shabby door in a by-street and tells how, at three one winter morning, he saw a small man trample a little girl and walk on. Caught and threatened, the man paid close to a hundred pounds in compensation with a cheque signed by a respected gentleman.
Structural Anthropology (Anthropologie structurale) is a collection of seventeen essays by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, published by Plon in Paris in 1958 and translated into English by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf for Basic Books in 1963. In his preface Lévi-Strauss explains that he chose them from roughly a hundred papers written over some thirty years; most had appeared in journals between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s, and two were printed for the first time in the book.
Sts. Cosmas and Damian are the physician saints par excellence: twin or paired martyrs, healers without payment, patrons of doctors and surgeons, and subjects of one of medieval art's strangest surgical miracles. The historical core is modest.
Studies on Hysteria is the classic collaborative text from which psychoanalysis narrates much of its beginning. It opens with the preliminary communication on hysterical symptoms, then presents case histories including Anna O., Emmy von N., Lucy R., Katharina, and Elisabeth von R., followed by theoretical and therapeutic reflections.
Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann) is the first volume of Marcel Proust's seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time, which C. K. Scott Moncrieff translated under the title Remembrance of Things Past. Grasset issued it at Proust's expense in November 1913.
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.
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.
In a Tuscan village the carpenter Mastro Cherry finds a log that cries out when he strikes it, and gladly hands it to his poor friend Geppetto, who carves it into a marionette and names him Pinocchio. The puppet runs off before his feet are finished, gets Geppetto taken to jail, and kills the Talking Cricket with a hammer when it warns him that disobedient boys come to grief.
The 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.
The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes, is Thomas Bulfinch's prose retelling of Greek and Roman mythology, with shorter chapters on Egyptian, Eastern, Norse and Celtic belief, first published in Boston in 1855. Bulfinch, a bank clerk with a Harvard classical education, wrote it so that ordinary readers could understand the mythological allusions in English poetry and speech.
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 Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (La Théorie physique: son objet et sa structure) was published in Paris in 1906 by Pierre Duhem, professor of theoretical physics at Bordeaux, after appearing as a series of articles in the Revue de philosophie. A second edition (1914) added two essays, 'The Physics of a Believer' and 'The Value of Physical Theory'.
The Alexiad is the life and reign of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos (ruled 1081–1118), written by his daughter Anna in fifteen books. In her preface Anna introduces herself as born in the purple and trained in Aristotle and Plato, explains that her husband, the Caesar Nikephoros Bryennios, had begun a history of her father but died of an illness brought home from campaign, and promises to praise or blame as the facts require.
The 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.
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 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 Bible is the sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity, and the reference edition presents the King James Version of 1611, the most influential translation in English. It is a library rather than a single book.
The Boxcar Children follows four orphaned brothers and sisters: Henry, fourteen; Jessie, twelve; Violet, ten; and Benny, six. After their parents die, the children set out on their own rather than go to their grandfather, whom they have never met and believe to be a hard man who disliked their mother.
The 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 Comedy of Errors takes place in a single day in the Greek city of Ephesus, where two sets of identical twins, separated as babies, are mistaken for each other until the whole town seems bewitched. Egeon, an old merchant of Syracuse, has been arrested because the two cities are at war and any Syracusan found in Ephesus must pay a thousand marks or die.
The Commonwealth of Oceana, published in London in 1656 during Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, is a model constitution for a republic set in an island called Oceana, which is England under a thin disguise. Scotland is Marpesia, Ireland Panopea, London Emporium, and Cromwell himself appears as Olphaus Megaletor, the Lord Archon or sole legislator who founds the commonwealth and then gives up his power.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a vast novel of injustice and revenge. In 1815 Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseilles, returns from a voyage on which he carried a letter from Napoleon's island of Elba as a dying captain requested.
The 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.
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.
Book I of The Faerie Queene, the Legend of the Knight of the Red Cross, or of Holiness, tells how a young, untried knight wins his spurs by freeing a kingdom from a dragon and, on the way, learns how easily a Christian soul is deceived. Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, has sent the Redcrosse Knight, who bears a bloody cross on breast and shield, to help the lady Una, whose royal parents are besieged in their brazen castle by a monstrous dragon.
This record surveys the eyewitness and near-contemporary narratives of the Ottoman siege and capture of Constantinople, from 6 April to 29 May 1453, and the perspectives each brings. The library does not include a full text: the accounts were written in Italian, Greek, Latin and Ottoman Turkish, and the standard English translations (Barbaro by J. R. Melville Jones, 1969; Sphrantzes by Marios Philippides, 1980; Doukas by Harry J. Magoulias, 1975) are under copyright, so no quotations are given.
The Fate of Rome is a history of the Roman Empire from its height in the second century AD to the crises of the seventh, written by the classicist Kyle Harper and published by Princeton University Press in 2017 in its series on the history of the ancient world. Its argument is that the empire's long story cannot be told only through emperors, armies and barbarian peoples: changes in climate and the arrival of new infectious diseases were active forces that repeatedly struck a society whose own success had made it vulnerable.
The Golden Bough sets out to explain one strange rule. In the sacred grove of Diana at Nemi, in the Alban Hills near Rome, the priest, called the King of the Wood, held office until a runaway slave broke a bough from a certain tree and killed him in single combat, becoming priest in turn.
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 Histories is the first great work of prose history in the Western tradition, an inquiry (historia) into the causes and course of the wars between the Greeks and the Persian Empire. Herodotus states his purpose in the opening: to preserve the memory of great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and barbarians, and especially the reason why they fought one another.
The Histories is Tacitus's narrative of the Roman Empire from 1 January AD 69 onward. It originally ran to Domitian's death in 96, but only Books I-IV and the first part of Book V survive, covering about eighteen months.
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 History of the Peloponnesian War is Thucydides’ unfinished account of the war between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 411 BCE. Unlike Herodotus’ broad storytelling, Thucydides narrows his gaze to power, fear, interest, decision and the deterioration of civic language under pressure.
Tom Jones tells the story of a foundling raised by a good country gentleman, his expulsion from home, his adventures on the road and in London, and his final restoration and marriage. The eighteen books are each opened by an essay in which the narrator talks with the reader about the art of writing, critics, love, or human nature.
The Homeric Hymns are a collection of thirty-three anonymous Greek poems addressed to the gods, composed in the same dactylic hexameter and formulaic language as the Iliad and Odyssey. Ancient audiences treated many of them as Homer's own; most scholars now see them as the work of different singers over a long period, with the four great narrative hymns usually dated to the archaic age and some short pieces much later.
The Hound of the Baskervilles brings Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to Dartmoor to investigate a family curse. It opens in Baker Street with a walking stick left by a visitor, from which Holmes deduces a young country doctor with a curly-haired spaniel.
The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate is the name later given to an unscheduled exchange on Saturday, 30 June 1860, at the Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, seven months after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. It was not a formal debate with set speeches and a motion, and no transcript was taken.
The Idiot tells what happens when a man of complete goodness and simplicity enters the money-driven society of St. Petersburg in the late 1860s. Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, the last of an old noble family, returns to Russia after four years in a Swiss sanatorium, where Dr. Schneider treated him for the epileptic illness that left him so slow as a child that people called him an idiot.
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 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 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 Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 is set in the wilderness of northern New York during the French and Indian War. Colonel Munro, the Scottish commander of Fort William Henry on Lake George, which the scout calls the Horican, is threatened by the French general Montcalm and his Native allies.
The Library is the only complete handbook of Greek mythology to survive from antiquity. In plain, compressed prose it tells the traditional stories of the gods and heroes in order, from the beginning of the world to the death of Odysseus, organized chiefly by family lines.
Tristram Shandy promises to tell the life and opinions of its narrator, a Yorkshire gentleman, and spends most of its nine volumes failing to reach his life at all. Tristram begins with the moment of his conception in March 1718, when his mother interrupts his father at the critical instant to ask whether he has remembered to wind up the clock.
The Life of Samuel Johnson is James Boswell's account of the poet, essayist, critic and lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), arranged year by year and built largely from conversations Boswell wrote down over twenty-one years of friendship. It opens with Johnson's birth in Lichfield, the son of a bookseller, his childhood scrofula, for which his mother took him to London to be touched by Queen Anne, and his schooling.
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 Lord of the Rings continues the story begun in The Hobbit. Sixty years after his adventure, Bilbo Baggins leaves the Shire on his eleventy-first birthday and, at Gandalf's urging, leaves his magic ring to his young cousin and heir Frodo.
The 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 Major Symptoms of Hysteria gathers Janet's Harvard lectures into a clear account of dissociation, narrowed consciousness, fixed ideas, amnesia, anesthesia, motor symptoms, crises, and suggestibility. Janet stands close to Charcot but less theatrical; he is interested in how psychological functions fall apart, become dissociated, or continue automatically outside ordinary awareness.
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 Meek One (Krotkaya), also translated as A Gentle Creature, is a long short story that Dostoevsky published in his one-man journal A Writer's Diary in November 1876, prompted by newspaper reports of suicides, including that of a young seamstress who leapt from a window holding an icon. In a short preface Dostoevsky calls it a 'fantastic' story, explaining that it is realistic in every respect except its form: it imagines the inner monologue of a man as though a stenographer could record his chaotic thoughts.
The 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 Misanthrope and Other Plays collects several of Molière's comedies; the edition translated by John Wood and David Coward includes The Misanthrope, The Sicilian, Tartuffe, A Doctor in Spite of Himself and The Imaginary Invalid. Together they show the range of Molière's art, from the verse comedy of character to farce, and his satire of hypocrisy, pretension and medicine.
The Monroe Doctrine is the name later given to a few passages in President James Monroe's Seventh Annual Message to Congress, sent in writing on December 2, 1823, and read aloud to the new Eighteenth Congress. The library text gives the whole message, so readers can see the famous statements in their setting.
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 Muqaddimah (Introduction) is the opening part of Ibn Khaldun's universal history, the Kitab al-Ibar, and has long been read on its own as a treatise on the nature of human society and the method of history. Ibn Khaldun wrote it in 1377 during a retreat from court life at the castle of Qal'at Ibn Salama, in the hills of what is now western Algeria, and kept revising it for the rest of his life in Cairo.
The Murder on the Links is Agatha Christie's second Hercule Poirot novel, narrated like the first by Captain Arthur Hastings. Returning from Paris on the Calais boat-train, Hastings meets a pert young actress with black curls who calls herself Cinderella.
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 New Roman Empire is a one-volume narrative history of the eastern Roman Empire, the state modern writers call Byzantium, from the reforms of Diocletian in the late third century to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Its author, Anthony Kaldellis, is a historian at the University of Chicago, and the book was published by Oxford University Press at the end of 2023 (many catalogues date it 2024) in more than a thousand pages with maps, color plates and glossaries.
Les Passions de l'âme, published in Amsterdam and Paris in November 1649, was Descartes's last book and his fullest account of how mind and body interact in emotional life. It grew out of his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, who in 1643 had asked him how an immaterial thinking soul could move a body, and who later pressed him on the regulation of grief and the good life.
The Pearl is a short novella in six chapters, framed as a folk tale retold in the Gulf town of La Paz, on the coast of Baja California. Kino, a poor pearl diver, lives in a brush house by the shore with his wife, Juana, and their infant son, Coyotito.
The Persian Expedition, known in Greek as the Anabasis or 'march up-country', is Xenophon's account of the campaign of 401–399 BCE in which about ten thousand Greek mercenaries followed Cyrus the Younger into Mesopotamia and then fought their way home. Cyrus, younger son of Darius II, gathers an army in Sardis on the pretext of a war against Pisidian raiders, while his real aim is to unseat his brother, King Artaxerxes II.
The Plague is a chronicle of an epidemic of bubonic and then pneumonic plague in Oran, a commercial port on the Algerian coast, in an unspecified year of the 1940s. The narrator, who reveals himself only at the end as the physician Bernard Rieux, writes as an impartial witness, drawing also on the notebooks of his friend Jean Tarrou.
The Power and the Glory is set in an unnamed Mexican state during an anticlerical campaign that has outlawed or driven out Catholic priests. Its central figure is the last active priest in the region, a fugitive known as the whisky priest because of his alcoholism and moral failures.
The 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 Princess and Curdie is George MacDonald's sequel to The Princess and the Goblin, set about a year after the goblins were defeated. Curdie, the miner's son, now nearly thirteen, has grown dull and doubtful; he half believes that Princess Irene's great-great-grandmother was only a child's dream.
The Principles of Psychology is a two-volume, 1,400-page textbook that William James spent twelve years writing for Henry Holt's American Science Series. It sets out to treat psychology as a natural science of mental life, studying feelings, desires, cognitions and decisions together with their bodily conditions, while refusing to reduce the mind to physiology or to dissolve it into atoms of sensation.
The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, published by Duckworth in London in late 1914, is D. H. Lawrence's first collection of short fiction: twelve stories, most of them revised from magazine versions written between about 1907 and 1914. Two are set among German soldiers, the rest in the colliery villages and farms of the English Midlands where Lawrence grew up.
Jung's Psychology of Dementia Praecox attempts to make psychotic speech and behavior psychologically intelligible. Working from the Burgholzli clinic, word-association studies, Bleuler's dementia praecox, and Freud's ideas about complexes, Jung argues that seemingly senseless symptoms may express emotionally charged complexes.
The 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.
Cicero wrote his two dialogues on the state in the troubled 50s BC, when the Roman Republic was strained by the private power of Pompey, Caesar and Crassus. On the Commonwealth (De re publica), published in 51 BC, imitates Plato's Republic but asks what the best constitution is for a real people, and answers with Rome itself.
The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan is the young Winston Churchill's history of the Anglo-Egyptian campaigns of 1896–1899 that destroyed the Mahdist state in the Sudan. Churchill begins with geography and the Nile, which he presents as the thread on which the whole story hangs, and then with the rebellion of Muhammad Ahmad, a Dongolawi boat-builder's son and Sufi ascetic who proclaimed himself the Mahdi in 1881.
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 Scarlet Letter is set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston but begins with a nineteenth-century frame, The Custom-House, in which a narrator claims to discover an embroidered letter A and the story of Hester Prynne. Hester appears on the scaffold with her infant Pearl, condemned to wear the scarlet letter for adultery while refusing to name the child's father.
The 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 Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening was published in Copenhagen on 30 July 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, with Kierkegaard named as editor. Its title comes from Jesus' words about Lazarus in John 11:4, 'This sickness is not unto death.' The introduction argues that for the Christian even death is not the sickness unto death, since there is hope beyond it; the true sickness unto death is despair, a condition in which one cannot die and cannot live, a perpetual dying without end.
Of the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right is a compact treatise in four books, the only finished part of a larger work on political institutions that Rousseau abandoned. It opens with its most famous sentence, that man is born free and everywhere in chains, and with a promise not to explain how this happened but to say what could make it legitimate.
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 Story of My Boyhood and Youth is John Muir's account of his first twenty-five years, from a Scottish seaside town to the edge of what he calls the University of the Wilderness. In the first chapter he remembers Dunbar on the stormy North Sea coast: rambles with his grandfather David Gilrye, who taught him his letters from shop signs, scrambles over the ruins of Dunbar Castle, fights and dares with schoolmates, the servant girls' terrifying tales of the Dandy Doctors who were said to steal children for the Edinburgh dissecting rooms, and a school where Mr. Lyon and his father together drilled grammar and Bible verses into him by memory and the rod.
The Story of My Life is Helen Keller's account of her first twenty-two years, written while she was a student at Radcliffe College. She begins at Ivy Green, the family home in Tuscumbia, Alabama, where she was born on June 27, 1880.
Thomas Kuhn's essay argues that the sciences do not grow by steady accumulation of facts but pass through long periods of settled work broken by revolutions in which the framework of a field is replaced. It was first published in 1962 by the University of Chicago Press as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, and a second edition of 1970 added a Postscript answering critics.
The Subjection of Women is John Stuart Mill's extended argument that the legal subordination of women to men in mid-Victorian Britain was wrong in principle and an obstacle to human improvement, and that it should give way to perfect equality before the law. Mill drafted it in 1860–1861, after the death of his wife Harriet Taylor Mill, and published it with Longmans in 1869.
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.
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 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 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 Vampyre is a brief but enormously influential Gothic tale that turns the vampire from folkloric corpse into a fashionable aristocratic predator. Aubrey, a young gentleman of imagination and moral seriousness, enters London society and becomes fascinated by Lord Ruthven, a mysterious nobleman whose charm is inseparable from coldness.
Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in London by Strahan and Cadell on 9 March 1776, asks what makes a nation rich and what policies help or hinder that growth. Smith's answer is that wealth is not a store of gold and silver but the annual produce of a nation's labour, and that it grows chiefly through the division of labour, the accumulation of capital and the freedom to trade.
The Witch of Blackbird Pond is a historical novel in twenty-one chapters set in Connecticut Colony in 1687 and 1688. Katherine Tyler, called Kit, is sixteen and has grown up in freedom and comfort on her grandfather's plantation in Barbados.
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.
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.
To Kill a Mockingbird is narrated by Jean Louise Finch, called Scout, looking back as an adult on three years of her childhood, from the summer she was nearly six, in Maycomb, a small, poor county seat in Alabama during the Depression of the 1930s. She lives with her older brother Jem, their widowed father Atticus, a lawyer and state legislator, and Calpurnia, the Black cook who helps raise them.
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.
In 1866 ships in several oceans report a huge, swift, glowing creature, and some are holed by it. Pierre Aronnax, a professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris who happens to be in New York, publishes the opinion that it is a gigantic narwhal and is invited to join the American frigate Abraham Lincoln, under Commander Farragut, which sails to hunt it.
Twenty Years at Hull-House is Jane Addams's account of her early life and of the settlement house she founded on Chicago's West Side in 1889. The first four chapters are autobiographical.
Uncle 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.
Understood Betsy follows nine-year-old Elizabeth Ann, an orphan raised in a medium-sized Midwestern city by her Great-aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances, a piano teacher who has studied child-rearing books and correspondence courses and is determined that her niece shall be thoroughly understood. Elizabeth Ann is thin, pale and frightened of dogs, thunder and examinations, and Aunt Frances shares and rehearses every fear with her.
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.
Lucy Snowe tells her own story, years after the events, in a reserved voice that often withholds what she feels and sometimes what she knows. As a girl she stays with her godmother Mrs. Bretton in the old town of Bretton, where she watches the tiny, intense Paulina Home attach herself to Mrs. Bretton's teenage son Graham.
War and Peace follows several Russian noble families from 1805 to 1820, through the wars against Napoleon and the French invasion of 1812. It opens at a St. Petersburg soirée given by Anna Pávlovna Schérer in July 1805, where talk of Bonaparte mixes with gossip about inheritances.
Washington Square is a compact novel about an heiress, a suitor and a father whose intelligence becomes a weapon. Catherine Sloper is the plain, shy and dutiful daughter of Dr. Austin Sloper, a wealthy New York physician still grieving his brilliant dead wife and disappointed that Catherine lacks her mother's beauty and charm.
Washington: 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.
Hugh Kennedy's When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World is a narrative history of the Abbasid caliphate at the height of its power, from the revolution that brought the dynasty to the throne in 750 to the anarchy of the later ninth century at Samarra, after which effective power slipped away from the caliphs. It was first published in Britain in 2004 as The Court of the Caliphs and in the United States in 2005 under its present title.
White Fang follows a wolf-dog from his birth in a cave in the frozen North to a sunny estate in California. The novel opens with two men, Bill and Henry, hauling a coffin across the Yukon wilderness while a starving wolf pack trails them.
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands is the lively autobiography of a Jamaican doctress, nurse and businesswoman. Mary Seacole begins in Kingston, where she was born to a Scottish soldier and a Creole mother who kept a boarding house and was famous for her cures; she declines to give the year, saying only that she and the century were young together.
Passages
- A Burnt-Out Case, Early chapters (Part 1)
Dr Colin explains to Querry the meaning of a burnt-out case and describes the mutilations left after the disease has run its course.
- A Burnt-Out Case, Middle chapters
Colin's routine at the leproserie: dispensing drugs, examining patients, and planning facilities with Querry.
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, A Doll's House, Act 1
Nora reveals that Torvald's life was saved by a year in Italy prescribed by doctors, paid for with the secret loan.
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, A Doll's House, Act 3
Rank leaves his visiting card marked with a black cross to announce his approaching death.
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, An Enemy of the People, Acts 1–4
Dr Stockmann's laboratory analysis of the spa water, suppression of his report, and the public meeting that brands him an enemy of the people.
- A Farewell to Arms, Book II, Chapters XIV-XVI
The Milan hospital: X-rays, the three doctors who advise waiting six months, and Dr. Valentini's decision to operate on the knee at once.
- A Farewell to Arms, Book II, Chapter XXII
Frederic's jaundice; Miss Van Campen finds the empty bottles and accuses him of bringing it on with alcohol to avoid the front.
- A Farewell to Arms, Book III, Chapter XXV
Rinaldi, worn out by the summer's operations, drinks heavily and fears he has syphilis.
- A Letter Concerning Toleration, Letter, on the magistrate's care of souls
The analogy of a prince compelling subjects to consult only Roman physicians and take remedies from the Vatican or a Geneva shop; no one forced to be rich or healthful.
- A 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 Tale of Two Cities, Book II, Chapters 18-19
Manette's nine-day relapse after the wedding; his clinical conversation with Lorry about the case and the destruction of the bench.
- 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 Treatise on Insanity, Introduction and Ch. 1
Pinel frames mental alienation as a medical subject requiring observation, classification, and reform of custodial habits.
- A Treatise on the Smallpox and Measles, Chapter III
Prodromal symptoms and the differential diagnosis of smallpox and measles.
- A Treatise on the Smallpox and Measles, Chapter XIV
Prognostic signs: color, size and spacing of pustules, timing of eruption, fever after eruption, delirium and swooning as fatal signs; scarification of a threatened limb.
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Ch. 9
Women as physicians, nurses and midwives, and the replacement of the midwife by the accoucheur.
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Ch. 13, sect. 1
Fortune-tellers and magnetisers, with Wollstonecraft's account of regimen, air, exercise and medicine as the only sound means of restoring health.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapters XXV-XXIX
Dr. Robinson denounces the king as a fraud at the Wilks house and later helps test the claimants.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapters XL-XLII
Tom is shot in the calf during the escape; the doctor treats him and testifies that Jim stayed to help nurse him at the risk of his freedom.
- Against Method, Closing chapters (science in a free society)
The state-sponsored revival of traditional Chinese medicine offered as an example of a non-scientific tradition with valuable results.
- All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter X
The surgeons' table, Paul's fear of chloroform and amputation, the nuns' ward, the Dying Room, tetanus deaths, traction, X-rays, and Albert's amputation.
- All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter XI
Staff surgeons pass half-recovered men as fit; hunger and dysentery in 1918; Kat's shin wound and death from a splinter in the head.
- 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 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part II and notes
Reported miraculous cures at the tomb of the Abbé Pâris, with physicians and witnesses for and against, including the case of Mademoiselle Thibaut.
- An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, Part Two, Chapter II, section on averages and statistics
Bernard argues that averaging urine or blood analyses, or pulse rates, produces a state that does not exist in any real animal.
- An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, Part Three, Chapter I
Bernard narrates how an unexpected finding of sugar in the blood led to his discovery of the glycogenic function of the liver.
- 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.
- Anne of Green Gables, Chapter XVIII
With the doctor away, Anne treats Minnie May's croup with ipecac through the night; the doctor later says she saved the child's life.
- Anne of Green Gables, Chapter XXIII
Anne falls from the ridgepole of the Barrys' kitchen roof and breaks her ankle, which the doctor sets.
- Anne of Green Gables, Chapter XXXVIII
Marilla's headaches and failing eyes lead an oculist to warn of blindness unless she gives up reading and sewing.
- Billy Budd and Other Stories, Billy Budd, after Claggart's death
The surgeon examines Claggart and silently questions Vere's sanity as Vere moves toward a drumhead court.
- Billy Budd and Other Stories, Billy Budd, after the execution
The purser and the surgeon debate why Billy's body showed no spasm at hanging.
- Black Beauty, Part I (Birtwick chapters)
Beauty and John ride through the night to fetch Dr White for the gravely ill mistress.
- Bleak House, Chapters X-XI
Nemo found dead in his room at Krook's; the surgeon's opinion of an opium overdose; the inquest at the Sol's Arms.
- Bleak House, Chapter XLVII, Jo's Will
Woodcourt attends the dying Jo in George's shooting gallery.
- Body and Mind, Responsibility chapters
The legal and moral reflections ask how disease, habit, and brain function alter blame.
- Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, Early chapters on the Bonhoeffer family
Karl Bonhoeffer's career as a psychiatrist and neurologist and his influence on his children.
- Candide: Or Optimism, Ch. 22
In Paris Candide falls ill; doctors and others descend on him and his health worsens under their care.
- Cannery Row, Interchapter on the epidemic
Influenza hits the Row; Dora's girls and Doc care for sick families.
- Carmilla, Chapter IX, The Doctor
Doctor Spielsberg questions Laura about the needle-like sensation and the feeling of strangulation, finds a small blue spot below her throat, and orders that she never be left alone.
- Carmilla, Chapter XIV, The Meeting
The General's first physician ridicules the doctor from Gratz, who declares that no natural disease exhibits Bertha's symptoms and sends a sealed letter to be read before a clergyman.
- Carmilla, Chapters XV-XVI
Two medical men attest to breathing and heartbeat in the exhumed body; Vordenburg explains that a suicide may become a vampire and that the vampire's strength sustains itself on living blood.
- Ceremony, Opening section
Tayo's sleeplessness, nausea and flood of memories; his recollection of the VA hospital ward where he felt himself invisible.
- Charlotte's Web, Chapter XIV
Mrs. Arable consults Dr. Dorian about Fern's absorption in the barn animals; he reassures her and reflects on the web as something no one fully understands.
- Chess, Dr B.'s narrative (breakdown and release)
He attacks a guard and wakes in hospital; a doctor's diagnosis secures his release from Gestapo custody.
- Chronographia, Reign of Isaac I Komnenos
Psellos at the bedside of the ailing emperor, judging his condition by the pulse before his abdication.
- Cold Comfort Farm, Later chapters
Flora arranges for Judith to see a psychoanalyst to cure her fixation on her son.
- Confessions, Book IV.3
The physician Vindicianus, who crowned Augustine in a poetry contest, warns him against astrology.
- Confessions, Book VI
The attack of pounding arteries and tinnitus with permanent partial deafness; insomnia; 'the vapors'; reading anatomy and imagining a polyp of the heart; the journey to the physicians of Montpellier and their waters and whey.
- 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.
- Cranford, Ch. XI
The injured conjuror is moved to lodgings and nursed under Mr Hoggins, whose verdict Cranford treats as infallible.
- Cuchulain of Muirthemne, The Dream of Angus Og
Angus pines and refuses food for a year after a dream-woman stops visiting him; Fergne, physician of Conn, judges the sickness to be of the mind and identifies love as its cause.
- Cuchulain of Muirthemne, The Awakening of Ulster (Fingan and Cethern)
Fingan examines each of Cethern's wounds in turn and names the warriors who dealt them from the wounds alone.
- Cyrano de Bergerac, Act 5, Scene 3
Ragueneau tells Le Bret of the falling wood, the head wound, the loss of consciousness and the doctor's words about fever and meningitis.
- Daisy Miller, Part I
Mrs Miller's dyspepsia and her faith in her doctor at home in Schenectady.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 1
David's birth attended by the mild Mr Chillip; Aunt Betsey's interrogation of the doctor.
- Deliverance from Error (The Confessions of al-Ghazali), Sufism (the crisis at Baghdad)
Loss of speech, appetite and the ability to swallow; the physicians' verdict that the cause lies in the heart and in sadness.
- Discourse on Method, Part V
Harvey credited with circulation; evidence from surgeons who tie the arm above the vein they open in bloodletting.
- Discourse on Method, Part VI
Health as the first good; the mind's dependence on bodily organs; hope that medicine could cure diseases of body and mind and the debility of age.
- Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, First Part, on medicine
He questions whether medicine lengthens life, describes wild animals healed without surgeons or drugs, and concedes that medicine well administered helps social man.
- Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, Of Voluntary Servitude, the address to the peoples (end)
La Boétie says physicians wisely leave incurable wounds alone and compares his own advice to a people long used to servitude.
- Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, Of Voluntary Servitude, on cowardice; translator's endnotes 5 and 7
Hippocrates is cited on the cowardice of peoples under despots and praised for refusing to treat the army of Artaxerxes.
- Discourses (selection) and Encheiridion, Discourses, "In What Manner We Ought to Bear Sickness" (III.10)
How a student should bear fever, thirst and hunger, and how he should regard the physician's good or bad report.
- Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, Book I, Preface
The healing art described as the recorded experience of the old physicians, set as a model for imitating ancient political practice.
- Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, Book III, ch. I
The physicians' maxim that the body daily gathers something needing treatment, applied to the decay and renewal of republics.
- Don Quixote, Part II, Ch. 47
As governor of Barataria, Sancho is denied his meals by the physician Pedro Recio de Agüero.
- Dracula, Ch. 8–9
Sister Agatha writes from Budapest that Jonathan has been suffering from a violent brain fever.
- 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.
- Dracula, Ch. 14
Van Helsing invokes Charcot and hypnotism to persuade Seward to open his mind to the inexplicable.
- Dracula, Ch. 21
Renfield is found with a broken back and depressed skull fracture; Van Helsing operates (trephining) to relieve pressure so that he can speak before he dies.
- Early Christian Lives, Life of Antony, visitors and healings
Antony counsels, consoles and participates in healing while resisting fame.
- Early Poems: A Boy's Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval, North of Boston, A Servant to Servants
The farm wife describes her exhaustion, her doctor's prescription of rest, her stay in the State Asylum, and her family's earlier practice of keeping a mad uncle caged in the house.
- Early Poems: A Boy's Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval, Mountain Interval, "Out, Out--"
A boy's hand is cut by the buzz-saw; he begs that the doctor not amputate, is put under ether, and his pulse fades while watchers listen at his heart.
- East of Eden, Part Two
Samuel Hamilton and Lee deliver Cathy's twins; Cathy shoots Adam and leaves.
- Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book IV, Chapter XIX
The physician Cynifrid recounts opening Ethelthryth's tumour beneath the jaw, her death, and the healed wound seen at her translation.
- Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book V, Chapter II
Bishop John teaches a mute youth to speak and has a physician treat his scalp.
- Effi Briest, Kessin chapters
Friendship with the hunchbacked apothecary Gieshübler.
- Effi Briest, Berlin chapters (c. Ch. 23–24)
Effi feigns illness and Dr Rummschüttel, seeing through it, prescribes accordingly.
- 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.
- Elements of Chemistry, Part III, Ch. III
The calorimeter measures the caloric released in combustion and in the respiration of animals; guinea pigs are recommended as subjects.
- Emma, Vol. I, Ch. I-III
Mr. Woodhouse's dislike of change and marriage, his gruel and fears about wedding cake, and his reliance on Mr. Perry are introduced at Hartfield's evening parties.
- Emma, Vol. I, Ch. XII-XIII
Isabella and her father compare their medical men, Mr. Wingfield and Mr. Perry, and the merits of South End and Cromer for sea-bathing; Harriet's feverish sore throat makes Mr. Elton fear a putrid infection.
- Essays, Book I, Ch. XX, 'Of the Force of Imagination'
Sympathetic coughs and fevers, impotence induced and cured by belief, the merchant who responds to a mimed clyster, and other cases of suggestion acting on the body.
- 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, 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.
- Essays, Essay XXX, Of Regiment of Health
Self-observation as physic, gradual change, Celsus's alternation of fasting and full eating, waking and sleep; passions to avoid; choosing a physician of middle temper.
- Essays on Education in a Republic, Thoughts upon the Amusements and Punishments Proper for Schools, on gunning and on school rooms
Gunning exposes boys to fevers and accidents; long sitting deforms the body; crowding children into one room breeds fevers from morbid effluvia, which Rush says he has seen in many hundred cases.
- Essays on Education in a Republic, A Defence of the Use of the Bible as a School Book, argument VIII
The memory of old age recovering early learning, and Sir John Pringle's turn to Scripture at the close of his life.
- Essays, Moral and Political (selection), Whether the British Government Inclines More to Absolute Monarchy or to a Republic
A physician will not venture to predict a patient's condition a month ahead; still less can a politician foretell public affairs, as Harrington's failed prophecy shows.
- 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.
- Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, Witches, Fairy Doctors, introduction
The fairy doctor's knowledge of herbs and spells, and the fairy blast or stroke that causes swellings or paralysis.
- Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, T'yeer-na-n-oge, Loughleagh (Lake of Healing)
A lake whose black mud is said to cure scurvy and sores, and a traveler who arrives on crutches and leaves sound.
- Fairy Tales (Selection), The Nightingale
When the mechanical bird breaks, the body physician is called in vain; later the sick emperor sees Death on his chest and is revived by the real nightingale's song.
- Father Goriot (Le Père Goriot), Dinner after the daughters' quarrel
Bianchon reads the signs of serous apoplexy in Goriot's face and eyes and gives a poor prognosis.
- Father Goriot (Le Père Goriot), Goriot's last illness
Mustard poultices, moxas from the Hospice Cochin, a medical consultation, and laudanum rubbed on the diaphragm.
- Fathers and Sons, Ch. 20–21
Vassily Ivanovich's old-fashioned country practice and his pride in his son's modern medical training.
- Fathers and Sons, Ch. 24
After the duel, Bazarov examines and bandages Pavel's leg wound.
- Faust, Part One, Scene II, Before the City-Gate
Peasants thank Faust for his service during a plague; he tells Wagner how his father's alchemical medicine killed more than it cured.
- Faust, Part One, Scene IV, The Study
Mephistopheles, in Faust's gown, advises the Student on the faculties, including a cynical account of medical practice.
- Fragments, DK 58
Physicians who cut and burn the sick and demand a fee, given as an example of good and ill being one.
- Fragments, Diogenes Laertius, Lives IX.3–4 (ancient testimony)
Account of Heraclitus's dropsy, his riddle to the physicians and his attempt to cure himself with dung.
- Galileo: The Starry Messenger, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, and Two New Sciences (First Day), Two New Sciences, First Day, on fall through water and air
Salviati times the descent of bodies through air and water in pulse-beats, using the pulse as a unit of time.
- Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book II, Chapter VIII
Gargantua's letter recommends the ancient physicians and frequent anatomies as part of a complete education.
- Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book III, Chapters XXXI-XXXIV
The physician Rondibilis advises Panurge on the cooling of desire, on marriage and on cuckoldry, and accepts his fee with a show of reluctance.
- Germ Theory Papers (Pasteur and Lister), Lister, On the Antiseptic Principle, compound fractures and abscesses
Cases at the Glasgow Infirmary, including a boy treated eight and a half hours after injury, and the method of opening abscesses without admitting germs.
- Great Expectations, Chapter XLIX
Miss Havisham's dress catches fire; the surgeon dresses her burns and Pip's.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Second Section (imperatives of skill)
The physician's precepts for healing and the poisoner's for killing are equally valid as technical rules; morality must come from elsewhere.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part I, Ch. 1
Gulliver's training as a surgeon and apprenticeship under a London surgeon before going to sea.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part III, Ch. 5
A Lagado physician treats colic by inflating the patient with bellows.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part IV, Ch. 6
Gulliver explains European physicians, purges, clysters and the habit of foretelling death to save reputation.
- Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, Chapter 32, The Crisis
Dr. Boekman discusses the case with his assistant Vollenhoven, explains the risk to Hans, obtains the mother's consent and begins the operation.
- Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, Chapter 47, Broad Sunshine
Hans praises surgery as the grandest thing on earth and Dr. Boekman offers to train him as his successor.
- Heart of Darkness, Part I (the Company office)
The doctor measures Marlow's cranium, asks whether there is madness in his family and notes that he never sees those who go out return.
- Heroides, Letter XXI (Cydippe to Acontius)
Cydippe describes her wasting, pallor and a fever that returns as her wedding approaches; the nurse guards her door and physicians cannot help.
- Hippocratic Writings, Epidemics, Books 1 and 3
Case notes track fever, delirium, sleep, stools, urine, crisis days and death or recovery across seasons.
- Hippocratic Writings, The Oath
The physician promises restraint with deadly drugs, confidentiality and disciplined conduct in the houses of patients.
- History of the Wars, Books I-II (The Persian War), Book II, ch. 22
Physicians open the swellings of the dead; failed prognoses; mixed results of bathing and treatment; death of pregnant women; suppuration as a sign of recovery; sequelae in survivors.
- In Flanders Fields, Lines 1-5
The graves and guns of the field near the dressing station, written in the midst of the battle the poet was treating casualties from.
- 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.
- Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book I, ch. 5, secs. 2-3
Medicine and astronomy as sciences that disclose God's wisdom; Galen's anatomy of the human body; man called a microcosm.
- Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book I, ch. 17, sec. 4
Providence does not excuse neglect: believers must still take precautions and use the remedies God provides.
- Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book IV, ch. 19, secs. 18-21
Calvin's argument that the apostolic anointing with oil and the gift of healing were temporary, set against the Roman rite of extreme unction.
- Ivanhoe, Chapter XXVIII
Scott's account of Jewish physicians in medieval England, Rebecca's training under Miriam, her balsam for Ivanhoe's wound and her sedative draught.
- Ivanhoe, Chapter XXXVII
At Rebecca's trial a Saxon peasant she treated for palsy is dragged forward, and her cures and balms are offered as proof of witchcraft.
- Jane Eyre, Chapters II-III
Jane faints from terror in the red-room and is examined by the apothecary Mr. Lloyd, who recommends a change of scene and school.
- Jane Eyre, Chapter XX
Rochester and the surgeon Carter dress Mason's knife and bite wounds; Mason says his attacker sucked his blood.
- 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.
- John Adams, Part I
Adams's smallpox inoculation of 1764 and Abigail's inoculation of the children in Boston in 1776.
- Johnny Tremain, Chapter 12
Rab dies of his Lexington wound; Dr. Warren examines Johnny's hand and offers to cut the scar.
- Journey to the West (A Mission to Heaven), Chapter LXIX
Sun diagnoses a king's illness at a distance by a string attached to his wrist; the illness proves to be grief for an abducted wife.
- 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.
- Kidnapped, Chapter VII
David lies fevered in the dark hold until Mr. Riach, who calls himself more than half a doctor, insists he be moved to the forecastle.
- Kidnapped, Chapter XXIV-XXV
Exhausted and ill, David collapses after the quarrel; a doctor is fetched in Balquhidder and he is bedridden for a week.
- Kokoro, Part Two
The father's slow decline from kidney disease, the doctor's visits and the family's vigil.
- Laws, Book IV
The slave doctor and the free doctor compared, introducing the persuasive preambles to the laws.
- Laws, Book IX
Offences committed in madness, disease or extreme old age, and the mocking doctor who says the gentle physician only educates his patient.
- 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.
- Le Morte d'Arthur, Book XIX, Chs. X-XII
Sir Urre's enchanted wounds are searched by a hundred and ten knights in vain and healed when Launcelot prays over them, after which Launcelot weeps like a beaten child.
- Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry, Clinical demonstrations
Kraepelin models diagnosis as observation of patient presentation joined to disease course and prognosis.
- Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, Neurological lectures
The lectures use clinical signs, lesion localization, and pathology to classify disorders of movement and sensation.
- 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.
- Letters of Napoleon, St Helena correspondence and will (1815–1821)
Complaints about climate and confinement, failing health, and the will's request that his body be examined after death.
- Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 9
Twain says that since learning to read the river he has pitied doctors, who may see in a lovely flush only the sign of hidden disease.
- Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 20
The Memphis hall used as a hospital: wounded wrapped in raw cotton and linseed oil, physicians and medical students on watch, women of the city as nurses, and the death-room for the dying.
- Little House on the Prairie, Chapter 15, "Fever 'n' Ague"
The whole family falls ill with chills and fever; Dr. Tan arrives, gives medicine, and Mrs. Scott nurses them; the watermelon and night-air theories of the illness are debated.
- Little Women, Part One, Ch. 16–18
Beth nurses the poor Hummel family's sick baby, who dies of scarlet fever; Beth catches it; Amy is sent away; Dr Bangs attends.
- Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (Volume 1), Life of Andrea di Cione Orcagna
The physician Dino del Garbo portrayed among the blessed in physician's dress.
- Lord Jim, Ch. 2
Jim is disabled by a falling spar and recovers in a hospital in an Eastern port.
- Lord Jim, Ch. 5
Marlow visits the Patna's chief engineer in hospital, raving in delirium tremens about pink toads under the bed; the hospital doctor comments on the case.
- Lysistrata and Other Plays, The Acharnians, finale
Lamachus returns wounded and calls for the doctor Pittalus while Dicaeopolis revels.
- Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3
An English doctor describes King Edward curing 'the evil' (scrofula) by touch.
- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1
Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking and hand-washing observed by the Doctor and Gentlewoman.
- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 3
Macbeth asks the Doctor to minister to a mind diseased; 'Throw physic to the dogs'.
- Man's Search for Meaning, Part One, second phase
Frankl works as a doctor in a typhus camp, falls ill with fever, and keeps himself awake at night reconstructing his lost manuscript.
- Man's Search for Meaning, Part Two
Clinical cases of paradoxical intention and dereflection, and the elderly physician whose grief for his wife is reframed as a sacrifice that spared her.
- Mansfield Park, Vol. III, Ch. 13–14 (Ch. 44–45)
News that Tom has fallen dangerously ill with fever after a drinking bout and a fall; his return home and nursing.
- Meditations, Book 3.3; 4.48
Catalogues of the dead, including Hippocrates and physicians who frowned over the sick.
- Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation VI
Nerves compared to a cord whose pull at any point produces the same motion in the brain; the dropsical patient's thirst as a natural signal that harms the sick body.
- Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. X (Pittsburg Landing, March–April 1862)
Sick soldiers shipped to Savannah for want of any building for a hospital; Sherman's postscript rejects floating hospitals in favour of regimental surgeons; his Shiloh report praises surgeons who treated wounded of both armies.
- Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XIV (October 1863)
Willie's typhoid on the steamer Atlantic, the attending army surgeon's warning, death at the Gayoso Hotel, and Sherman's self-reproach and midnight letter.
- Memoirs of Usama ibn Munqidh, Section I, ch. 8, 'Their curious medication'
Thabit's poultice and diet; the Frankish amputation by axe and the scalp incision of a woman judged possessed; both patients die.
- 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.
- Memoirs of Usama ibn Munqidh, Section II, ch. 2 (Noteworthy Cures)
Cures by ibn-Butlan and others: dropsy, a dust-clogged throat, a feared leprosy, a cold in the head, a chill and a colic cured after a dream.
- Mental Pathology and Therapeutics, Book I
Griesinger argues that mental diseases must be understood as diseases of the brain, while admitting the limits of pathology.
- Metamorphoses, Book XV
Aesculapius comes from Epidaurus to Rome as a serpent to end a pestilence.
- Middlemarch, Book II, Chapter XV
Lydgate's history: his first reading of anatomy as a boy, his studies in London, Edinburgh and Paris, and his ambition to continue Bichat's work on tissues.
- Middlemarch, Book III, Chapters XXVI-XXVII
Lydgate diagnoses Fred Vincy's typhoid fever against the prior opinion of Mr. Wrench and supervises his nursing.
- Middlemarch, Book III, Chapter XXX; Book IV, Chapter XLII
Lydgate examines Casaubon with the stethoscope and later tells him he has a disease of the heart that may prove sudden.
- Moby-Dick, Chapter 100
The Samuel Enderby's Captain Boomer and Dr Bunger describe the loss of his arm to Moby Dick.
- Mourning Becomes Electra, The Hunted, Act One
Doctor Blake's view that Ezra died of angina, and gossip at the funeral about the general's heart.
- Mrs. Dalloway, Midday, Dr. Holmes's visits
Holmes's cheerful prescriptions and his refusal to see illness, and Septimus's growing dread of him as the agent of human nature.
- Mrs. Dalloway, Noon, Harley Street
Sir William Bradshaw's consultation, the decision to send Septimus to a country home, and the narrator's long passage on proportion and conversion.
- Northanger Abbey, Vol. II, Ch. 8–9
Catherine's suspicions about Mrs Tilney's death and Henry's account of her illness and the physicians who attended her.
- Notes from Underground, Part I, Chapter I
The narrator calls himself sick, suspects his liver, and declares that he will not consult a doctor out of spite.
- Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism LXVI
Bacon criticises the doctrines of elementary qualities and occult specific powers while commending physicians' attention to attraction, astringency, maturation and other secondary qualities of medicines.
- Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism LXXIII
Citing Celsus, Bacon observes that medical experiments came first and philosophical causes were assigned afterward, using medicine as evidence against speculative systems.
- Oliver Twist, Chapter I
Oliver's birth in the workhouse, attended by a contract parish surgeon and a pauper nurse; his unnamed mother dies soon after holding him.
- Oliver Twist, Chapters XXVIII-XXX
Oliver, shot in the arm during the burglary, lies feverish at the Maylies' house; Mr. Losberne treats him and protects him from the Bow Street officers.
- On Duties (De Officiis), Book I, ch. XXIV
The prudent man in danger is compared to physicians who use gentle medicines for gentle illnesses and stronger, riskier cures for dangerous diseases.
- On Duties (De Officiis), Book I, ch. XLII
Medicine, architecture and the liberal arts listed as honourable professions for those whose station they suit.
- On Liberty, Ch. V, Applications
Sale of poisons: labelling, a register of buyers, Bentham's 'preappointed evidence', and rejection of a universal prescription requirement; the unsafe-bridge example and its exceptions for the delirious or overexcited.
- On Medicine, Book 1, Preface
The history of medical schools frames medicine as a debate between reason, experience and practical method.
- On the Fabric of the Human Body (Preface), Preface to Charles V
The division of medicine among physicians, apothecaries and barbers, and its consequences for knowledge of the body.
- On the Fabric of the Human Body (Preface), Preface to Charles V
Satire of lecture-room anatomy, with the professor reading Galen from a chair while an unlearned barber dissects.
- 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 Magnet (De Magnete), Book II, Ch. II
Galen's three kinds of attraction and the analogy of the cupping-glass, which Gilbert rejects as explanations of amber's attraction.
- On the Magnet (De Magnete), Edward Wright's preface
Wright's praise of Gilbert as a distinguished doctor of medicine who gave his intellect to magnetism as well as medicine.
- On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (De Motu Cordis), Ch. IX
The calculation of blood expelled per beat and per half hour, which makes a circulation necessary.
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Morning, the infirmary
Shukhov, feverish, asks to be excused from work; Vdovushkin takes his temperature, finds it too low, and sends him out.
- Orthodoxy, Chapter II, The Maniac
Remarks on doctors and psychologists who must treat a madman's system intolerantly, and the comparison of cure to casting out a devil.
- Our Town, Daily Life
Our Town gives this tag concrete force through the medical material is quiet but important: doc gibbs, childbirth, mortality statistics, grief, and the care rituals surrounding death
- Passing, Part Two
Disagreements between Irene and Brian over what to tell their sons about sex and lynching; Brian's dissatisfaction with medicine and his wish to go to Brazil.
- Pensees, Fragment 82, Section II
Imagination as the 'mistress of error', able to make men healthy or sick; the philosopher sweating on a plank above a precipice; cats, rats and a crushed coal that 'unhinge the reason'; physicians in cassocks and mules; diseases that spoil judgment.
- Personal Knowledge, Part One, ch. 4 (Skills), section on connoisseurship
Medical diagnosis as connoisseurship learned by apprenticeship; the example of recognizing an accentuated pulmonary second heart sound.
- Personal Knowledge, Part Two, ch. 5 (Articulation)
A medical student in a course on X-ray diagnosis of pulmonary disease gradually learns to see what the radiologist describes.
- Persuasion, Vol. I, Ch. 12
Louisa's fall from the Cobb; Anne directs restoratives and calls for a surgeon while others panic.
- Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy), Chapter I
The narrator compares a child's mind to the maps doctors draw of other parts of the body, introducing the Neverland as a map of the mind.
- Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy), Chapter VI
After Wendy is shot, Slightly is sent for a doctor and returns in John's hat pretending to be one, taking her temperature with a glass thing.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 270c–d
Appeal to Hippocrates: understanding the body, like the soul, requires understanding the nature of the whole.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Seventh Letter, c. 330c–331a
The counsellor compared to a physician advising a patient whose way of life must change before treatment can help.
- Philosophy of Natural Science, Ch. 2
Kolletschka's fatal scalpel wound during an autopsy suggests that students coming from dissections carry cadaveric matter; handwashing in chlorinated lime follows.
- Philosophy of Natural Science, Ch. 8
Mechanism and vitalism in biology and the question whether life processes can be reduced to physics and chemistry.
- Pollyanna, Chapter XV
Dr. Chilton says the child is better than any tonic and wishes he could prescribe her for his patients.
- Pollyanna, Chapters XXIII-XXVI
The motor-car accident, Miss Polly's account to Pendleton of an injury to the spine with paralysis from the hips down, and the specialist Dr. Mead's consultation.
- Posterior Analytics and Physics, Posterior Analytics I.13 (79a)
The physician knows that circular wounds heal more slowly; the geometer knows the reason why, an example of one science taking its reasons from another.
- Posterior Analytics and Physics, Physics II.8 (199a–b)
The doctor who pours out the wrong dose and the malformations of early creatures as failures of purposive effort; nature compared to a doctor doctoring himself.
- Psychopathia Sexualis, Forensic conclusions
The work links diagnosis to responsibility, punishment, and expert testimony.
- Reflections on the Revolution in France, On the real rights of men
Abstract rights compared with a right to food or medicine; Burke would call in the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics.
- Reflections on the Revolution in France, On the Assembly's new constitution
The physician of the state who, not content to cure distempers, undertakes to regenerate constitutions; the Assembly's members likened to empirics.
- Richard III, Act 1, Scene 1
Richard's opening soliloquy describes his deformity and premature birth; Hastings reports that the king is sickly and his physicians fear for him.
- Ruth, Ch. 35–36
Mr Davis the surgeon offers Leonard an apprenticeship, revealing his own illegitimate birth.
- Selected Short Stories, 'The Horla', middle entries
A doctor's demonstration of hypnotic suggestion on the narrator's cousin in Paris.
- Sense and Sensibility, Vol. III, Ch. 6–7
Marianne's fever at Cleveland after walks in the wet; Mr Harris the apothecary attends, fears of infection send the Palmers' baby away, and Elinor nurses her through the crisis.
- Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Devotions, bells and physicians
The sickroom is linked to doctors, neighbors, death bells, and the social meaning of mortality.
- 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.
- Silas Marner, Chapter II
Silas prepares foxglove for Sally Oates's heart disease and dropsy and is then besieged by neighbors seeking charms and cures.
- Silas Marner, Chapter XIII
Doctor Kimble is called from the dance to the dead woman at Silas's cottage.
- Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays, Henry IV, Act II
Dr. Genoni explains his plan to shock the patient back into time by means of the portrait.
- Sonnets, Sonnet 147
Love as a fever that feeds the disease; Reason the physician leaves in anger because his prescriptions are ignored, and the patient is frantic-mad.
- Statesman, 267e–268b
Rivals of the royal herdsman include physicians and trainers, while the true herdsman is himself the physician and midwife of his flock.
- Statesman, 293a–c
The physician who heals with or against the patient's will, by cutting or burning, as the model of rule by knowledge.
- Statesman, 295b–296c
A physician or trainer going into a far country leaves written notes for his patients, and on his return should be free to change them if circumstances have changed.
- Statesman, 298a–299e
The thought experiment of an assembly of laymen legislating rules for medicine and navigation, with annual audits and penalties for inquiry beyond the written code.
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Search for Mr. Hyde
Lanyon tells Utterson that Jekyll began to go wrong in mind more than ten years ago and dismisses his work as unscientific.
- Structural Anthropology, Magic and Religion, The Sorcerer and His Magic
The career of Quesalid, the Zuni boy accused of sorcery who confesses and is spared, and the argument that magic is effective within a shared system of belief.
- Sts. Cosmas and Damian: Physician Saints, Anargyroi title
The saints are remembered as healers who do not take payment, making fees and charity central to the moral image of medicine.
- Sts. Cosmas and Damian: Physician Saints, Byzantine shrine incubation
Patients sleep at or near shrines, receive dream instructions, and report cures, blending ritual, expectation, and therapeutic authority.
- Swann's Way, Swann in Love
Swann's jealousy described as a malady so bound up with his life that surgeons would call it past operation; Dr Cottard among the Verdurins.
- Tales from Shakespeare, King Lear, after the storm
Cordelia's physicians put off her meeting with her father until sleep and herbal medicine restore some composure to his mind.
- Tales from Shakespeare, King Lear, Kent's banishment
The narrator likens Lear to a frantic patient who kills his physician and loves his mortal disease.
- Tales from Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well, opening
Helena, the physician Gerard de Narbon's daughter, offers his prescription to the king whose doctors have called his malady incurable.
- Tales from Shakespeare, Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Cerimon, a skilful physician of Ephesus, revives Thaisa, who had been buried at sea in a chest.
- 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.
- That Hideous Strength, Chapters 3 and 7
Grace Ironwood questions Jane about her dreams and tells her they are true visions, not a disorder to be cured.
- The Adventures of Pinocchio, Chapter 16
The Fairy calls three doctors, a Crow, an Owl, and the Talking Cricket, to decide whether the hanged puppet is alive; the first two give circular verdicts and the Cricket answers with a moral diagnosis instead.
- The Adventures of Pinocchio, Chapter 17
Feverish Pinocchio refuses his bitter medicine until four black rabbits bring a coffin for him; he swallows it and recovers at once.
- The Adventures of Pinocchio, Chapter 32
A Dormouse feels Pinocchio's pulse and diagnoses the donkey fever that turns lazy boys into donkeys.
- 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 Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb
Victor Hatherley comes to Watson's surgery near Paddington with his thumb cut off by a cleaver; Watson cleans and dresses the wound while the patient tells his story.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 9
Dr. Robinson, Muff Potter and Injun Joe dig up a fresh grave to obtain a body; Injun Joe murders the doctor.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 8
Aristotle's teaching gives Alexander a taste for medicine; he treats his friends when they are ill.
- 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 72
Hephaestion dies of fever after eating against his doctor's orders; Alexander has the physician executed and mourns extravagantly.
- The Age of Fable, Chapter III, Apollo and Daphne
Bulfinch explains why medicine belongs to Apollo's province, quoting the physician-poet Armstrong on music that allays grief and expels disease.
- The Age of Fable, Chapter XII, Cadmus--The Myrmidons
Aeacus narrates the plague of Aegina: corrupted air and water, the death of animals first, fever and thirst, contagion that kills the physicians, and the collapse of social restraint.
- The Agricola and the Germania, Agricola 43
Agricola's last illness, the emperor's physicians and freedmen visiting, and rumours of poison.
- The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, Part II, ch. 6, opening sections
Duhem contrasts Claude Bernard's account of experiment in physiology with the logical situation of experiment in theoretical physics.
- The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, Part II, ch. 6, on the impossibility of isolating a hypothesis
The comparison of the physicist with a physician who diagnoses the whole organism rather than a watchmaker who dismantles a watch.
- 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 Alexiad, Book XV, last illness
The physicians' dispute over purging, Alexios's breathlessness and swelling, the family's vigil, and his death in August 1118.
- 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 Little Hunchback
The hunchback chokes on a fishbone; a Jewish doctor, a purveyor and a broker each believe they have killed him until the barber revives him.
- The Arabian Nights Entertainments, The Enchanted Horse
The Princess of Bengal feigns madness; doctors are summoned from far and wide, and the prince gains access to her disguised as a physician.
- The Art of War, Book VI
How Roman generals avoided disease: fleeing fens and injurious winds, reading local inhabitants' complexions, shelter, shade, water, timing of marches, physicians, and daily exercise.
- 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 (protection against artisans and professionals)
Penalties for physicians whose treatment causes death or injury without notification to authorities.
- The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Book I, Chapters XXVII-XXX
Plague in Rome and Cellini's work for the surgeon Giacomo da Carpi, famous for treating the French disease.
- The Bible, 2 Kings 20:1–7 / Isaiah 38
Hezekiah's mortal illness and the lump of figs laid on his boil.
- The Bible, Mark 5:25–34
The woman with an issue of blood for twelve years who had spent all she had on physicians and grew worse.
- The Boxcar Children, Chapters 11-12
Violet falls ill in the boxcar; Henry runs for Dr. Moore, who takes the children to his own house and nurses her back to health.
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'Herbert West—Reanimator', Parts I–II
Medical students steal fresh corpses for reanimation trials; a typhoid epidemic in Arkham supplies bodies and kills the medical dean.
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'Cool Air'
Dr Muñoz keeps his dead body functioning through artificial refrigeration until the machinery fails.
- The Canon of Medicine, Book I, Part 1, paras. 6-10
The definition of medicine, the relation of theory and practice, and whether there is a third state between health and disease.
- The Canon of Medicine, Book I, Part 2, Thesis 3
The pulse and the urine as signs of disease, with their classification by quality and rhythm.
- The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, the Doctor of Physic
The portrait of the physician, his learning in humours and astrology, and his love of gold, which in physic is a cordial.
- The Comedy of Errors, Act 4, Scene 4
Pinch feels the patient's pulse, attempts an exorcism, and has the husband and his servant bound and confined in a dark room.
- The Commonwealth of Oceana, Part I, The Preliminaries (reply to Leviathan)
Political principles compared with Harvey's circulation of the blood, discovered from nature and not from the anatomy of a single body.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Paris section (Saint-Méran and Barrois deaths)
Successive poisonings in the Villefort household; Dr d'Avrigny diagnoses poison and confronts Villefort.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 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. 4–5
Competing diagnoses (floating kidney, appendix); Ivan Ilyich reads medical books and becomes absorbed in his symptoms.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 8
Opium and morphine for pain and sleeplessness; the doctor's routine visit; the family goes to the theatre.
- The Eagle of the Ninth, Chapters XI–XVII
Marcus works his way north as the oculist Demetrius of Alexandria, treating eye ailments with salves among the tribes.
- The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Observation methods
Photographs, questionnaires, children, and animals show nineteenth-century methods for studying emotion.
- The Faerie Queene, Book I, Book I, Canto V, stanzas 17 and 36-44
Leeches wash Sansjoy's wounds with wine and oil; Night carries him to Aesculapius in hell, whose story of healing Hippolytus is told.
- The Faerie Queene, Book I, Book I, Canto X, stanzas 23-29
Coelia summons the leech Patience for a soul-diseased knight; diet, salves, Penance, Remorse and Repentance complete the cure.
- The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Chapter 3, Apollo's Revenge
The Antonine Plague, Galen's observations, and the case for smallpox.
- The Golden Bough (abridged edition), Chapter V, section 1
The public magician's precarious office and Frazer's claim that such men were the predecessors of physicians and surgeons.
- The Gulag Archipelago, Part III, chapters on camp life
Rations, work norms and the progressive wasting of prisoners; the camp medical unit and the role of doctors in certifying fitness for work.
- The Histories, Book 1.197
The Babylonians, having no physicians, carry the sick into the market so passers-by can advise them.
- The Histories, Book 3.129–137
Democedes of Croton heals Darius' dislocated ankle and Atossa's breast growth, then escapes to Greece.
- The Histories, Book IV, ch. 81
Vespasian consults doctors about a blind man and a man with a maimed hand before attempting their cure at Alexandria.
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Selections), Chapter II, Part II, note 57
Footnote observing that many Roman physicians were slaves.
- The History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 2.47–54
The plague enters Athens and produces fever, inflamed eyes, throat distress, ulcers, thirst, diarrhea and high mortality.
- The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Book II, Chapters viii-ix
Captain Blifil dies suddenly; two physicians called in after death dispute apoplexy versus epilepsy.
- The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Book V, Chapter vii
Allworthy, seriously ill, gathers his household to settle his affairs, believing himself near death.
- The Homeric Hymns, Hymn XVI, To Asclepius
Five-line hymn to Asclepius, born of Coronis, as healer and soother of pain.
- The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chapter 1
Watson reads Dr. Mortimer's entry in the Medical Directory: Charing Cross house-surgeon, prize essay on whether disease is a reversion, papers on atavism in the Lancet and on progress in the Journal of Psychology.
- The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chapter 2
Mortimer describes Sir Charles's mounting dread of the legend and his medical advice to spend months in London for distraction.
- The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chapter 14
After the hound's attack Sir Henry is revived with brandy; that night the shock brings on a delirious high fever, and Mortimer later takes him round the world to recover.
- The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate, Background (Darwin's absence)
Darwin, ill, is away at a hydropathic establishment and learns of the meeting through letters from Hooker and others.
- The Idiot, Part IV, Chapter VII and Conclusion
The seizure at the Epanchins' party, and Myshkin's final loss of understanding and return to Dr. Schneider's care in Switzerland.
- 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 11.504–520
Machaon is wounded and carried from the field; the healer is said to be worth many men.
- The Innocence of Father Brown, The Wrong Shape, Dr. Harris's letter
A physician explains how he drugged his patient, staged a suicide note and calculated the angle of the knife.
- The Institutes of Justinian, Book I, Title 25.15
Physicians at Rome, with grammarians and rhetoricians, excused from serving as guardians or curators.
- 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 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 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, Crito 47a–48a
Analogy of the trainer and physician: one should heed the expert, not the many, about health of body and soul.
- The Last of the Mohicans, Chapters XXIV-XXV
Heyward, disguised as a French healer, is led to a sick Huron woman lying paralysed in a cave, where David sings to her and Hawkeye appears as a bear-conjurer.
- The Library (Bibliotheca), Book II.2.2
The daughters of Proetus go mad and roam the land; Melampus demands a share of the kingdom, then cures them by a pursuit and purification, though the eldest dies.
- The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Vol. III, Chs. 8–16, and Vol. IV, Ch. 27
Dr. Slop's knotted bag of instruments, the newly invented forceps, and the injury to the infant's nose.
- The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1709-1728 (early life)
Johnson's scrofula, his impaired eye, and the journey to London to be touched by Queen Anne on Sir John Floyer's advice.
- The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1729 (the Oxford years)
The first great attack of morbid melancholy, Johnson's long walks to fight it, and the Latin case history he gave Dr. Swinfen.
- The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1783 (Aetat. 74), letter to Mrs. Thrale on the stroke
His own account of a paralytic stroke that took his speech but not his hand, and his summons of Heberden and Brocklesby.
- 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 Lord of the Rings, Book I, Chapters 11-12
Frodo is stabbed on Weathertop; the cold spreads from the wound until Elrond removes the knife-splinter at Rivendell.
- The Lord of the Rings, Book V, Chapter 8: The Houses of Healing
Aragorn treats Faramir, Éowyn and Merry for the Black Breath with athelas, while Ioreth and the herb-master look on.
- The Mabinogion, The Lady of the Fountain
After a damsel takes back his ring, Owain wanders the mountains until his clothes wear out and he lives among wild beasts; a widowed Countess's maiden revives him with a flask of balsam.
- The Mabinogion, 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 One, Ch. 2
Pilate suffers an excruciating hemicrania during the interrogation; Yeshua perceives it and it lifts.
- The Master and Margarita, Part One, Ch. 6–8
Ivan's arrival at the clinic in his underwear, his sedation, and his interview with Professor Stravinsky.
- The Meek One, Part Two, Ch. 1
Her prolonged fever; the narrator arranges a doctor and nursing care; her silent withdrawal afterwards.
- The Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, 'Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness'
Donne, on what he believes is his deathbed, imagines his physicians as cosmographers reading his body as a flat map.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, A Doctor in Spite of Himself, Act 2
Sganarelle, disguised as a physician, diagnoses Lucinde's feigned dumbness with Latin nonsense and reversed anatomy.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Imaginary Invalid, Act 2
The Diafoiruses visit; young Thomas Diafoirus boasts of rejecting the circulation of the blood; the doctors examine Argan.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Imaginary Invalid, final interlude
Burlesque Latin ceremony admitting Argan to the medical profession.
- The Monroe Doctrine, Navy section, paragraph on Thompson's Island
The malignant fever at the West India station, the loss of medical officers, and Commodore Rodgers's mission with surgeons to determine the fever's origin.
- The Moonstone, First Period, Chapter X
At the birthday dinner Franklin Blake, sleepless after giving up tobacco, mocks medicine, and Mr. Candy takes offense; Betteredge notes Franklin's restless nights.
- The Moonstone, Seventh Narrative
Mr. Candy's letter reports Jennings' death and his request to be buried with his papers in an unmarked grave.
- The Muqaddimah, Chapter 6 (the science of medicine)
Medicine described as a craft based on Galen and later Arabic physicians, with remarks on Bedouin medicine and the medicine of the prophetic tradition.
- The Murder on the Links, Chapter 3, At the Villa Geneviève
Dr. Durand reports that death occurred seven to ten hours before his examination and that the stab could not have been self-inflicted; he has sedated Mrs. Renauld.
- The Murder on the Links, Chapters 14-15 and 19
The examining doctor finds that the man in the shed was already dead when stabbed; Poirot's reconstruction attributes his death to an epileptic fit.
- 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 Pearl, Chapter 1
The scorpion stings Coyotito; Juana sucks the puncture; the family goes to the doctor's gate and is refused through his servant.
- The Pearl, Chapter 3
The doctor arrives uninvited, gives the child a white powder, and returns an hour later to treat the illness that follows, while watching Kino's eyes for the pearl's hiding place.
- The Persian Expedition, Book I, Chapter VIII
At Cunaxa Cyrus wounds Artaxerxes through his corselet; Ctesias the physician states he healed the wound. Cyrus is struck under the eye by a javelin and killed.
- The Plague, Part I
The health committee at the prefecture, where Rieux and Castel press officials to name the disease and adopt the regulations it requires.
- The Plague, Part IV
Paneloux's final illness, which the doctors record as a doubtful case because it lacks the usual signs.
- 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 III
The extended analogy between foreseeing political trouble and the physicians' maxim about hectic fever: easy to cure but hard to detect early, easy to detect but hard to cure late.
- The Prince and the Pauper, Chapter V
The court and physicians examine Tom in Latin and French and Henry VIII declares him mad from over-study.
- The Prince and the Pauper, Chapter 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 Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter II: The Functions of the Brain
Motor and sensory aphasia, cerebral localisation, lesion studies and the cases in which patients recognise and suffer from their speech errors.
- The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, The Prussian Officer, III-IV
The orderly wanders feverish and hallucinating in the heat, collapses, and dies in hospital; the doctors notice the bruises and say nothing.
- The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, Association experiment chapters
Jung uses reaction times and verbal responses to infer affective complexes.
- The Railway Children, Chapter III, The old gentleman
Dr Forrest diagnoses Mother's influenza and lists what she needs; the children ask the old gentleman for it.
- The Railway Children, Chapter V, Prisoners and captives
The doctor sees the Russian exile and says he is worn out, mind and body.
- 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 Republic and The Laws, Republic, Book V fragments
The ruler's aim compared with a pilot's safe voyage and a physician's restoring his patient to health.
- The Republic and The Laws, Laws, Book II
Unjust enactments compared with the recipes of unskilful empirics who give poisons instead of medicines.
- The River War, Chapter XV: The Battle of Omdurman
Field hospitals in the zeriba, the hospital-barge blunder, the wounded of the Lancers' charge trickling in, and the field of Dervish dead and wounded.
- The Roman History, Book XXV, ch. 3
Julian is speared through the side, cuts his fingers trying to pull out the weapon, is treated by a physician, and dies after losing blood while discussing the soul.
- The Scarlet Letter, Ch. 9-10
Chillingworth becomes Dimmesdale's physician and investigates his secret through bodily symptoms and psychological pressure.
- 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 Second Part
Discussion of the physicians' teaching that chyle becomes blood and blood the parts of the body, as an analogy for the transformation of matter.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Preface and Introduction
The physician's bedside manner as a model for Christian exposition; the Lazarus story and the claim that despair, not death, is the mortal sickness.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Part One, B
The analogy of the physician who knows that apparent health may hide illness, applied to the universality of unrecognised despair.
- The Social Contract, Book II, Chapter VIII
Peoples, like men, are docile only in youth; aged peoples resist reform like cowardly patients who rave at the sight of the doctor. Revolutions are compared to illnesses that make individuals forget the past, after which a state may be reborn.
- 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 Story of My Boyhood and Youth, Chapter III
The mare Nob, overdriven to Portage on a hot day, sickens with inflamed lungs and is treated without success by a minister who doubles as horse-doctor.
- The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, Chapter VI
Harvest work through mumps, pneumonia with no physician called, and the overwork common among the Scottish, English and Irish settlers.
- The Story of My Life, Part I, Chapter III
The visit to the oculist Dr. Chisholm in Baltimore and to Dr. Bell in Washington.
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Preface
Kuhn acknowledges Fleck's monograph on the history of the concept of syphilis as anticipating many of his own ideas.
- The Subjection of Women, Chapter I
Medical practitioners and physiologists know something of bodily differences, but few are psychologists and their views of women's minds are no better than common opinion.
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Chapters XLVII–XLIX
Helen's letters report Huntingdon's hunting injury, his half-delirium and thirst, the doctor's order to bleed him, his relapse into wine, the onset of mortification, and his death.
- 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 V, Story of the Humpback and its conclusion
A fishbone apparently kills the humpback; a Jewish physician believes he caused the death; the barber anoints the neck and removes the bone with forceps.
- The Thousand and One Nights (Lane's translation, Volume I), Chapter V, Story told by the Jewish Physician, with Note 47
The physician takes a pulse, prescribes, and is made superintendent of the hospital of Damascus; Lane's note on the first Muslim hospital (AD 706-7).
- The Thousand and One Nights (Lane's translation, Volume I), Notes to Chapter I, Note 5 (On Fate and Destiny)
Traditions on medicine and predestination, and a list of contagious and engendered diseases including melancholy, pestilence, leprosy, epilepsy and phthisis.
- 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 XV (history of Delhi)
Sultan Muizz al-Din Kaiqubad suffers a complaint that withers one side of his body and that the physicians cannot remedy.
- The Underdogs, Luis Cervantes joins the band
A former medical student enters the revolutionary group, linking educated medicine to political opportunism.
- The Wealth of Nations, Book I, ch. viii
Overwork by piece-rate workers leads to infirmities peculiar to each trade; Ramazzini's book on the diseases of artificers is cited.
- The Wealth of Nations, Book I, ch. x, Part I
The reward of physicians explained by the trust society places in them with health, and by the cost of their training.
- The Woman in White, Second Epoch, Marian Halcombe's diary and Mrs. Michelson's narrative
Marian's fever after the rain, the dispute in which Fosco calls the fever typhus against Mr. Dawson's opinion, Fosco's interference and Mrs. Rubelle's nursing.
- The Woman in White, Second Epoch, The Narrative of the Doctor
A brief death certificate recording the death of Lady Glyde from aneurism at St. John's Wood.
- Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, Chapter VII
Wounds at San Juan, malaria and dysentery in the army before Santiago, and the round robin to General Shafter.
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapters 28-29
Jem's arm is broken in the attack and Dr. Reynolds attends him.
- Treasure Island, Dr. Livesey's early scenes
Livesey combines physician, magistrate and gentlemanly courage, representing medicine as practical authority.
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Part I, Chapter XXIII, The Coral Kingdom
Aronnax, acknowledging his medical training, examines a crewman with a shattered skull and exposed brain and judges the wound fatal.
- Twenty Years at Hull-House, Chapter IV, The Snare of Preparation
Medical school, the spinal difficulty, Weir Mitchell's hospital, six months in bed, and years of nervous depression.
- Uncle Vanya, Act I
Astroff tells Marina of the typhoid epidemic at Malitskoi and the switchman who died under chloroform.
- Uncle Vanya, Act IV
Astroff demands the return of the morphine Vanya has taken from his medicine case, and Sonia persuades her uncle to give it back.
- Understood Betsy, Chapter I, Aunt Harriet Has a Cough
Aunt Frances's nightly dream interviews, her worry over the child's nerves and appetite, the doctor's verdict that the child is sound, and his alarm at Aunt Harriet's cough.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter V (justice and expediency)
A duty to steal medicine or compel the only qualified doctor to save a life; rights as protection of security; the injustice of sacrificing an individual without consent for others' benefit, raised in the discussion of punishment.
- Utopia, Book II, Of Their Traffic
The four public hospitals outside each city, isolation of infectious patients, attendance by physicians, and the steward's priority in the market.
- Utopia, Book II, Of the Travelling of the Utopians
Health as the foundation of bodily pleasure, and the Utopians' esteem for Hippocrates, Galen and the study of medicine.
- Villette, Ch. XVII
Dr. John questions Lucy about her nervous system and prescribes cheerful society and exercise, conceding the limits of medicine.
- Villette, Ch. XXII
Lucy sees the nun in the garret and Dr. John speaks of spectral illusion as a possible effect of long mental conflict.
- War and Peace, Book Three, Ch. XIX
Andrew, wounded at Austerlitz, is carried to a dressing station, probed, and commended by Napoleon to his surgeon Larrey, who judges him unlikely to recover.
- War and Peace, Book Nine, Ch. XVI
Natásha's illness after the broken engagement and Tolstoy's reflections on the limits of the doctors who attend her.
- Washington Square, Early Sloper household chapters
Dr. Sloper's grief over his wife and disappointment in Catherine establish a physician-father whose intelligence is emotionally punitive.
- Washington Square, Morris courtship chapters
Sloper evaluates Morris like a case, using social evidence and diagnostic confidence to predict mercenary motives.
- Washington: A Life, The first term (1789-1790)
The thigh abscess or tumour and the respiratory illness that twice put the new president's life in danger.
- Washington: A Life, Final chapter (December 1799)
The throat infection, the physicians' repeated bleeding and other remedies, and Washington's composed death.
- When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise and Fall of Islam's Greatest Dynasty, Chapter 9, Abbasid court culture
The patronage of learning and translation at the caliphal court, the context for the Arabic reception of Greek medicine.
- White Fang, Part V, Chapter V
The surgeon's examination and verdict after the fight with Jim Hall, the call for an X-ray and a San Francisco doctor, and the weeks of nursing in plaster casts and bandages.
- Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Chapter IX
A visit to the Barrack Hospital at Scutari and her meeting with Florence Nightingale.
- Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Chapter XIII
Her medical work among the troops from the British Hotel, with testimonials from army surgeons.
Quotes
Frequently cited
“I was not a little surprized to find many maniacs who at no period gave evidence of any lesion of the understanding, but who were under the dominion of instinctive and ab- stract fury”
“Women might certainly study the art of healing, and be physicians as well as nurses.”
Frequently cited
“it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge”
“If a comparison were required to express my idea of the science of life, I should say that it is a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen.”
“The principle of medical and surgical morality, therefore, consists in never performing on man an experiment which might be harmful to him to any extent, even though the result might be highly advantageous to science, i.e., to the health of others.”
“I consider hospitals only as the entrance to scientific medicine; they are the first field of observation which a physician enters; but the true sanctuary of medical science is a laboratory”
“These gentlemen understood nothing of my illness, therefore concluded I could not be ill”
“I followed this indication, and determined to cure myself or die without the aid of physicians and medicine”
“At length, notwithstanding all I could say and do, the physician triumphed, and the child died of hunger”
“it was said of him that he could tell what a person's sickness was by looking at the smoke of the house he was in; and he knew by looking at a wound what sort the person was that gave it.”
“The mischief is in the heart, and has communicated itself to the whole organism; there is no hope unless the cause of his grievous sadness be arrested.”
“I need only mention in reply what has been written by a physician of England, who has the honor of having broken the ice on this subject”
“for the mind is so intimately dependent upon the condition and relation of the organs of the body, that if any means can ever be found to render men wiser and more ingenious than hitherto, I believe that it is in medicine they must be sought for”
“The doctor put him in the dark of ether.”
“a man's own observation, what he finds good of, and what he finds hurt of, is the best physic to preserve health”
“Physicians are, some of them, so pleasing and conformable to the humor of the patient, as they press not the true cure of the disease; and some other are so regular, in proceeding according to art for the disease, as they respect not sufficiently the condition of the patient”
“he found the same operation and effect that those do who have taken one indeed”
“A kind rebuke, like fresh air in a fainting fit, is calculated to act upon a young mind with more effect, than stimulants of the greatest power”
“Witches and fairy doctors receive their power from opposite dynasties;”
“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”
“I am no beggar, mynheer”
“It is an ugly business, boy, this surgery”
“the changes take place inside, you know”
“For the languor clings to me, for causes that do not appear; worn out, I find no help in the physician’s art.”
“Indeed the whole matter may be stated thus, that no device was discovered by man to save himself”
“To pacify a nation, first attend to the King's illness.”
“Come, O Ukko, to my rescue, God of mercy, lend thy presence, Give these vapor-baths new virtues, Grant to them the powers of healing, And restore my dying people;”
“he will not prescribe for him until he has first convinced him”
Frequently cited
“This infirmity is the incurable outcome of a very common history of disease, to which we will provisionally give the name of Dementia Prcecox”
“Which Venime I will not doubt to compare to the biting of a mad Dogge, which is a disease the Physicians call Hydrophobia, or Fear Of Water”
“Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself?”
“Unnatural deeds Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets. More needs she the divine than the physician”
“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”
“Hippocrates after curing many diseases himself fell sick and died.”
“Think continually how many physicians are dead after often contracting their eyebrows over the sick”
“They worked day and night, and did not rest till all the wounded of our own troops as well as of the enemy were in safe and comfortable shelter”
“To the knight I applied a small poultice until the abscess opened and became well; and the woman I put on diet and made her humor wet.”
“I have, however, witnessed a case of their medicine which was quite different from that.”
Frequently cited
“Insanity, or mental alienation, is a cerebral affection, ordinarily chronic, and without fever ; characterized by disorders of sensibility, understanding, in- telligence, and will”
“Sir William said he never spoke of “madness”; he called it not having a sense of proportion.”
Frequently cited
“I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.”
“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”
“If magistrates had true justice, and if physicians had the true art of healing, they would have no occasion for square caps”
“Physicians will not heal thee, for thou wilt die at last. But it is I who heal thee, and make the body immortal”
“There was no wound, no blood, no visible bruise; but her eyes were closed, she breathed not, her face was like death”
“that little girl is better than a six-quart bottle of tonic any day”
“Now mistakes come to pass even in the operations of art : the grammarian makes a mistake in writing and the doctor pours out the wrong dose.”
“What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them.”
“My reason, the physician to my love, Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,”
“just as the physician, whether he cures us against our will or with our will, and whatever be his mode of treatment,--incision, burning, or the infliction of some other pain,--whether he practises out of a book or not out of a book”
“Cosmas and Damian are regarded as the patrons of physicians and surgeons and are sometimes represented with medical emblems”
“Having been cured of a dangerous illness by the intercession of Cosmas and Damian, Justinian, in gratitude for their aid, rebuilt and adorned their church at Constantinople, and it became a celebrated place of pilgrimage”
“The physician saints were called anargyroi, unmercenaries, because their legends remember them as healers who did not take payment for medicine”
“Swann's love had reached that stage at which the physician and (in the case of certain affections) the boldest of surgeons ask themselves whether to deprive a patient of his vice or to rid him of his malady is still reasonable, or indeed possible.”
“by the help of sleep and medicine, she and her physicians at length succeeded in winding up the untuned and jarring senses which the cruelty of his other daughters had so violently shaken.”
“In the worthy Cerimon, who restored Thaisa to life, we are instructed how goodness directed by knowledge, in bestowing benefits upon mankind, approaches to the nature of the gods.”
“The good Chiron taught his pupils how to play upon the harp, and how to cure diseases, and how to use the sword and shield”
“I say that a wise doctor, when he does not know what he is talking about, should know enough to keep his mouth shut.”
“Boys ought to know, after all, that medicine, taken in time, can save them from much pain and even from death.”
Frequently cited
“When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.”
“Nor could the physicians help, for the disease attacked them also, and the contact of the sick gave them infection”
“see how cruelty and injustice are punished.”
“the cure depended neither on them nor their skill, but only on the princess herself.”
“those that fall sicke by chaunce, make them to bee cured of Phisicions: bicause a capitain hath no reamedie, when he hath to faight with sicknesse, and with an enemie: but nothing is so profitable, to maintaine the armie in health, as is the exercise”
“They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick”
“Physician, heal thyself”
“When, in regard to medicine, we say that practice proceeds from theory, we do not mean that there is one division of medicine by which we know, and another, distinct therefrom, by which we act.”
“When you do not know the nature of a malady, leave it to Nature ; do not strive to hasten matters.”
“Give me your hand, and let me feel your pulse.”
“Which is as if a man should tell famous Harvey that he transcribed his circulation of the blood, not out of the principles of nature, but out of the anatomy of this or that body.”
“In that disease of grieved conscience, And well could cure the same; his name was Patience.”
“They were the direct predecessors, not merely of our physicians and surgeons, but of our investigators and discoverers in every branch of natural science.”
“he eventually told the doctors to form an opinion whether such cases of blindness and deformity could be remedied by human aid.”
“Dr Y. holding that he died of an apoplexy, and Dr Z. of an epilepsy.”
“I begin to sing of Asclepius, son of Apollo and healer of sicknesses.”
“if a surgeon operates on your slave, and then neglects altogether to attend to his cure, so that the slave dies in consequence, he is liable for his carelessness”
“I say to her: “If you still have pains, it is really only your own fault”
“I think that after all I must be overlooking some organic affection”
“being a seer and the first to devise the cure by means of drugs and purifications”
“I remained there nearly a year, for three months of it suffering most cruel tortures--effects of the violent remedies which they applied.”
“This, according to the statement of Ctesias the surgeon, who further states that he himself healed the wound.”
“appointed eight surgeons to attend to the many wounded”
Frequently cited
“there's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency.”
“as the physicians say it happens in hectic fever, that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult to cure”
“Then how doth one know there was poison given at all?”
“The doctors saw the bruises on his legs, behind, and were silent.”
“by a stupid and grievous mistake the three regular hospital barges, duly prepared for the reception of the wounded, had been towed across to the right bank”
“father was an enthusiast, and always said and believed that God and hard work were by far the best doctors.”
“Spare me, and so may God spare thee; and destroy me not, lest God destroy thee.”
“Physician, heal thyself: then wilt thou also heal thy patient”
“will our descendants two hundred years from now, for whom we are breaking the road, remember to give us a kind word?”
“Thus, to save a life, it may not only be allowable, but a duty, to steal, or take by force, the necessary food or medicine, or to kidnap, and compel to officiate, the only qualified medical practitioner”
“But they take more care of their sick than of any others; these are lodged and provided for in public hospitals.”
Frequently cited
“Medicine can give nobody good spirits. My art halts at the threshold of Hypochondria: she just looks in and sees a chamber of torture, but can neither say nor do much.”