Frederic Henry, an American serving as a lieutenant in the ambulance service of the Italian army, tells the story of his war and his love in plain, retrospective first-person prose. In 1915-16 his unit is quartered in Gorizia, near the Isonzo front.
Medical tag
Plague Epidemic
Plague, pestilence, cholera, epidemics and contagion as social events.
Works
A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia is one of the most important public-health and Black-authored documents of the early United States. Written by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones after the devastating yellow fever epidemic of 1793, it answers Mathew Carey's published accusations that Black Philadelphians profited from disaster or behaved badly during the crisis.
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.
Apologia Pro Vita Sua is John Henry Newman's defence of his honesty, written in 1864 in reply to the novelist and clergyman Charles Kingsley, who had written in Macmillan's Magazine that truth for its own sake had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy and that Father Newman taught it need not be. After an exchange of letters and a pamphlet by Kingsley, Newman decided that the only adequate answer was a history of his own mind.
Black Ships Before Troy is Rosemary Sutcliff's prose retelling of the Trojan War for young readers, in nineteen short chapters. Although subtitled The Story of the Iliad, it begins long before Homer's poem and ends after it.
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.
City of God is Augustine’s monumental argument that Rome’s disaster does not discredit Christianity and that human history must be understood through two loves. The immediate occasion is the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, after which critics blamed Christians for weakening the old gods.
Death in Venice follows the last weeks of Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated German writer in his fifties, ennobled on his fiftieth birthday, whose prose epic on Frederick the Great and other works have made him a model of disciplined art. Thomas Mann published the novella in 1912, and it is told in five chapters by a narrator who comments on Aschenbach with a mixture of sympathy and irony.
Modelled on Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, Hume's Dialogues are narrated by Pamphilus, a young man, to his friend Hermippus, and report a conversation at the house of Pamphilus's tutor, Cleanthes. Three speakers debate not whether God exists, which all profess to accept, but what can be known of God's nature by reason.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Henry V follows the young King Henry, once the tavern-haunting Prince Hal, as he leads England to war with France and wins the battle of Agincourt in 1415. A Chorus opens each act, asking the audience to let their imaginations fill the small wooden theatre with the vasty fields of France.
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.
Homilies on the Statues records Chrysostom preaching to Antioch during a civic emergency in 387. After unpopular imperial taxes provoked unrest, a crowd in Antioch insulted and damaged statues of Emperor Theodosius and his family.
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.
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.
Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages, is the third of Thomas Bulfinch's books of legend, published in 1863. It retells in English prose the romances that grew up around Charlemagne and his twelve peers, or paladins, chiefly as the Italian Renaissance poets Luigi Pulci, Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto shaped them.
Les Misérables follows the convict Jean Valjean from his release in 1815 to his death in 1833, and through him a whole society of the poor, the lawful and the rebellious in Restoration and July Monarchy France. Valjean has served nineteen years in the galleys at Toulon, five for stealing a loaf of bread for his sister's hungry children and the rest for attempts to escape.
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.
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.
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives set the life of a famous Greek beside that of a famous Roman, so that each could be measured by the other. Twenty-three pairs survive, most closed by a short Comparison in which Plutarch weighs the two men, together with four single Lives: Aratus, Artaxerxes, Galba, and Otho.
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.
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.
Old Yeller is narrated by Travis Coates, who looks back on the year he was fourteen, in the late 1860s, on his family's homestead near the settlement of Salt Licks in the Texas Hill Country. After the Civil War cattle money is scarce, so Papa joins the other men of the settlement on a long drive to sell cattle in Kansas, leaving Travis as the man of the place with Mama and his little brother, Arliss.
On the Nature of the Universe, better known as De Rerum Natura, is a philosophical poem that tries to cure fear by explaining the world. Lucretius addresses Memmius and invokes Venus, then argues that religion has driven human beings to cruelty, as in the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
On War (Vom Kriege) is an unfinished philosophical inquiry into the nature of war, written by a Prussian staff officer who had lived through the Napoleonic transformation of warfare. It is organised in eight books, but Clausewitz left a note in 1827 saying that only the first chapter of Book I satisfied him, and he was revising the whole when he died.
Paradise Lost is John Milton's epic in twelve books of blank verse on the fall of man, written, as the opening invocation says, to assert Eternal Providence and justify the ways of God to men. It begins in the middle of things.
Pericles' Funeral Oration is the speech that the Athenian statesman Pericles delivered in the winter of 431/430 BC at the public burial of the citizens who had died in the first year of the Peloponnesian War against Sparta. It survives only in the History of Thucydides, who heard Pericles speak and who says of the speeches in his work that he kept as close as he could to the general sense of what was actually said.
The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant were written in a race against death. In the spring of 1884 the brokerage firm of Grant & Ward collapsed through his partner's fraud, leaving the former president living on borrowed money.
Principles of Geology is Charles Lyell's argument that the earth's past can be explained by the same causes that are acting on it now, working at their present intensity over immense periods of time. The first edition appeared in three volumes in 1830, 1832 and 1833, under a subtitle describing it as an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth's surface by reference to causes now in operation.
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of two young lovers from feuding families in Verona, compressed by Shakespeare into about four days. A sonnet Prologue announces that a pair of star-crossed lovers will end their parents' strife by their deaths.
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.
Selected Sermons and Reformation Treatises gathers the Luther who speaks from pulpit, classroom, controversy, and pastoral desk. The center is not one genre but a reformatory voice: the Ninety-Five Theses against indulgence abuse, The Freedom of a Christian, sermons on faith and good works, catechetical teaching, and occasional writings shaped by conflict.
St. Vitus and the Dancing Mania joins two histories that later language often confuses: the hagiographic cult of a youthful martyr and the medical naming of involuntary or epidemic movement. The saint layer is late antique and medieval.
Sts. Roch and Sebastian became plague saints through two different imaginative routes. Sebastian is an older martyr of the Roman persecution tradition.
This selection gathers six of Edgar Allan Poe's best-known tales, two of them detective stories and four of them tales of terror, written between 1839 and 1846 and printed here from the Raven Edition of his works. The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) opens with an essay on the analytical mind and introduces C. Auguste Dupin, a poor but brilliant Parisian gentleman who shares lodgings with the unnamed narrator.
The Aeneid tells how Aeneas, a Trojan survivor, travels from ruined Troy to Italy to found the lineage that will become Rome. The poem opens with storm and displacement: Juno hates the Trojans, Aeolus releases winds, and Aeneas reaches Carthage.
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.
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 Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872 when Nietzsche was a twenty-seven-year-old professor at Basel, argues that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two opposed artistic drives, which he names after the gods Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian is the drive toward clear form, measure and individuation, whose physiological analogue is the dream, in which every person is a perfect artist of images.
The Book of Enoch, usually called 1 Enoch, is a collection of five Jewish apocalyptic books gathered under the name of Enoch, the patriarch of Genesis 5 who walked with God and was not, for God took him. Written in stages during the Second Temple period, it presents Enoch as a righteous scribe who is shown the secrets of heaven, earth and the coming judgment and writes them down for his son Methuselah and for a remote generation.
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is a selection of Lovecraft's tales, edited with notes by the Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, tracing his development from early Poe-influenced pieces to the 'cosmic horror' for which he is known. Lovecraft's central idea is that humanity is an insignificant accident in a vast, indifferent universe, and that knowledge of this truth is enough to destroy sanity.
Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Civili, in three books, narrate the first two years of the war he fought against Pompey and the senatorial party, from January 49 BCE to the beginning of the Alexandrian war in late 48. The work is unfinished, breaking off in Alexandria, and it is the most openly political of his writings: its constant task is to show that Caesar was forced into war by a faction of personal enemies, that he repeatedly sought peace, and that he treated defeated fellow citizens with a mercy his opponents never showed.
The Door in the Wall is set in England in the fourteenth century, in the reign of Edward III, during the years of the Black Death. Robin, the ten-year-old son of the knight Sir John de Bureford and his wife Lady Maud, has been raised to expect the life of a nobleman's son: he is to go as a page to the household of Sir Peter de Lindsay, learn the arts of chivalry and one day become a knight like his father.
The 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.
This entry gathers the Golden Legend chapters and adjacent medieval traditions behind saints whose images still move through calendars, holidays, icons, hospitals, medals, advertising, and folklore. Jacobus de Voragine did not write critical biography in the modern sense.
Hugh Kennedy's book narrates the conquests by which Muslim Arab armies, within about a century of the Prophet Muhammad's death in 632, came to rule lands from Spain and Morocco to Central Asia and the Indus valley. It opens with a chapter on the sources, chiefly Arabic histories such as those of al-Baladhuri and al-Tabari, written down some two centuries after the events, and on how to use their mix of genealogy, heroic tale and administrative memory.
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.
Book VI of Polybius's Histories interrupts his narrative of the Second Punic War at its darkest moment for Rome, the defeat at Cannae in 216 BC, to explain how a city that had just lost an army could recover and, within fifty-three years, bring nearly the whole known world under its power. His answer is the Roman constitution.
Books I-V are the first pentad of Livy's vast history of Rome from its foundation, carrying the story from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy to the recovery of the city after the Gallic sack of about 390 BC. Livy opens with a preface that admits the earliest traditions are closer to poetry than to record, and then states his purpose: history sets before the reader examples of every kind of conduct, to be imitated or avoided, and Rome, he believes, was richer in good examples than any other state until luxury and avarice came late.
The History of the Church tells the story of Christianity from the apostles to Eusebius’ own fourth-century world, where persecution gives way to imperial favor. Eusebius organizes the past through succession: bishops, teachers, heresies, writings, persecutions and martyrs.
The 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.
The Iliad tells of a few weeks in the tenth year of the Greek siege of Troy, and its subject, announced in the first line, is the wrath of Achilles. A plague sent by Apollo ravages the Greek camp because Agamemnon, commander of the Achaeans, has refused to return the captive daughter of Apollo's priest Chryses.
The Journal of John Woolman is the spiritual autobiography of a New Jersey Quaker tailor and minister, begun in his thirty-sixth year and continued until a few days before his death. He opens in Northampton, Burlington County, where as a child he reads the twenty-second chapter of Revelation by the roadside and, soon after, kills a mother robin with a stone and then her nestlings, an act whose horror teaches him that God has placed in every mind a principle of goodness toward all creatures.
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 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 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.
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 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 Pimpernel opens in Paris in September 1792, at the height of the Revolution's Terror, where crowds gather at the city gates to watch aristocrats caught trying to flee. Sergeant Bibot boasts that no one will slip past him, yet the hideous old woman whose cart he waves through, after she hints that her grandson inside has smallpox, is the mysterious Englishman known as the Scarlet Pimpernel, and the Comtesse de Tournay and her children are hidden beneath the load.
The Secret Garden begins in imperial India, where Mary Lennox is a sickly, spoiled and emotionally neglected child. A cholera outbreak kills her parents and household, and Mary is sent to Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire to live with her reclusive uncle Archibald Craven.
The Secret History, in Greek the Anekdota or unpublished things, is a short work in thirty chapters in which Procopius sets out to tell what he says he could not safely write in his Wars while its subjects were alive: the hidden causes of events and the private conduct of the emperor Justinian, the empress Theodora, the general Belisarius and his wife Antonina. It is usually dated to about 550, though some scholars place it later in the 550s, and it was not circulated in Procopius's lifetime.
Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (De l'esprit des lois), published anonymously at Geneva in 1748 after many years of reading and travel, asks why the laws of different peoples differ and what makes them fit or unfit for those who live under them. His answer is that laws are relations: they must suit the form of government and also the climate and soil, the religion, commerce, manners and size of a nation.
The Theban Plays collects Sophocles’ tragedies about Oedipus and his children: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. They were not written as a trilogy, but together they form the most influential family disaster in Western drama.
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.
Olivia Coolidge's The Trojan War retells the whole legend of Troy, from its cause in heaven to the homecomings of the Greek kings, in 33 short chapters that can each be read as a story on its own. It begins with the golden apple thrown among the goddesses, the judgment of Paris, and the beauty of Helen, whom Paris carries off from her husband Menelaus of Sparta.
The Waning of the Middle Ages is a study of the forms of life, thought and art in France and the Burgundian Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Huizinga, a Dutch professor of history, published it in 1919 as Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen, literally the autumn-tide of the Middle Ages.
The War of the Worlds is told by an unnamed writer on philosophical subjects who lives on Maybury Hill near Woking in Surrey, looking back some years after the events. Book One, The Coming of the Martians, opens with astronomers seeing jets of gas leap from the surface of Mars.
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.
Hesiod's two complete poems are the oldest Greek attempts to explain, in verse, where the gods came from and how a man ought to live under them. Both are in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer, and both begin with the Muses.
Till We Have Faces, subtitled A Myth Retold, rewrites the story of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius's Golden Ass, told by one of Psyche's elder sisters. Orual, now an old queen of Glome, a small barbarian kingdom on the edge of the Greek world, writes her book as a formal accusation against the gods.
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.
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.
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 Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, Response to accusations and immunity assumptions
The pamphlet exposes how false medical claims about race shaped risk and blame.
- A Treatise on the Smallpox and Measles, Chapter I, §§5–8
The must-and-wine theory of smallpox as fermentation of children's blood, and why young and old are rarely attacked except in putrid air.
- Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Part VII
Mention of the Irish fever that cut off emigrants between Liverpool and Leeds, in a passage on Catholic clergy.
- Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Ullathorne letter (end of volume)
Newman and Ambrose St. John go to Bilston to minister during a cholera outbreak in place of other priests.
- Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of the Iliad, Chapter 3, Quarrel with the High King
Apollo sends plague on the Greek camp until Agamemnon returns Chryseis to her father, the priest Chryses.
- Cannery Row, Interchapter on the epidemic
Influenza hits the Row; Dora's girls and Doc care for sick families.
- Death in Venice, Chapter V
The English clerk's account of cholera's spread, its symptoms, mortality, the pesthouse, and the city's concealment of the epidemic.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10
Demea quotes Milton's lazar-house (stone, ulcer, colic, frenzy, melancholy, madness, atrophy, marasmus, pestilence) and catalogues disorders of the mind; a hospital full of diseases as a specimen of the world's ills.
- Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, Book II, ch. V
Plague, famine and flood as heaven-sent causes that destroy populations and the memory of the past.
- Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, Book I, ch. XXXVIII
A pestilence at Rome tempts the Aequians and Volscians to attack, and the Senate's response is examined.
- Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book III, Chapters XXIII, XXVII and XXX
Cedd and his companions die at Lastingham; the pestilence of 664 spreads through southern England, Northumbria and Ireland; the East Saxons lapse into idolatry during the plague.
- Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book IV, Chapter XIV
A pestilence in a South Saxon monastery ends after a boy's vision of Saints Peter and Paul and the intercession of King Oswald.
- Essays, Book III, Ch. XII, 'Of Physiognomy'
Montaigne and his household flee plague and civil war; he admires how ordinary people meet death without philosophy.
- 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.
- Henry V, Act 3, Scene 6
Fluellen describes Bardolph's face as all bubukles and whelks just before he is hanged; Henry admits his people are much enfeebled with sickness.
- History of the Wars, Books I-II (The Persian War), Book II, ch. 22
Origin at Pelusium, spread along coasts, apparitions and dreams before onset, the mild fever and the appearance of swellings.
- History of the Wars, Books I-II (The Persian War), Book II, ch. 22
Coma and delirium, the exhaustion of attendants, observation that carers and buriers did not catch the disease by contact.
- John Adams, Part I
Adams's smallpox inoculation of 1764 and Abigail's inoculation of the children in Boston in 1776.
- Kalevala, Rune XLV
Loviatar bears the nine diseases, which Louhi sends upon Kalevala; Väinämöinen heals the people with the sauna, ointments and prayers.
- Legends of Charlemagne, Death of Rinaldo
The besieged garrison of Montalban eats its horses; later a pestilence near Cologne is stayed by Rinaldo's prayers.
- Les Misérables, Volume V, Book 2, The Intestine of the Leviathan
Hugo's history of the Paris sewers, the engineer Bruneseau's survey, the cholera of 1832, and the argument for using sewage as fertilizer.
- Letters of Napoleon, Letters and orders from Egypt and Syria (1798–1799)
Plague in the Army of the Orient, quarantine measures, and the siege of Acre; context for the disputed Jaffa opium episode.
- Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 29
Memphis's sewer system as the lesson of the yellow-fever epidemic, with Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg's description of the deserted, dying city.
- Life on the Mississippi, Chapters 42-43
New Orleans cemeteries, a report on burial and epidemic mortality, and an undertaker's frank view that epidemics are good for trade.
- Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (Volume 1), Life of Andrea di Cione Orcagna
The Company of Orsanmichele builds a shrine with the gifts given to its Madonna during the mortality of 1348.
- Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Life of Pericles
Pericles, sick in the plague years, shows a friend an amulet the women had hung on him, as a sign of how far illness had worn him down.
- Meditations, Book 9.2
Corruption of the mind is a worse pestilence than any plague of the air.
- Metamorphoses, Book VII
Aeacus describes the plague at Aegina: fever, thirst, corpses and the failure of medicine.
- Metamorphoses, Book XV
Aesculapius comes from Epidaurus to Rome as a serpent to end a pestilence.
- Middlemarch, Book VII, Chapter LXXI
The town debates Lydgate's certificate of delirium tremens; the public meeting on sanitary measures against cholera where Bulstrode is accused.
- Old Yeller, Burn Sanderson's visit
Sanderson warns the family that hydrophobia is loose in the country and describes how it spreads among animals.
- On the Nature of the Universe, Book 6, plague of Athens
The poem ends with fever, thirst, sores, despair, contagion-like care and burial breakdown.
- On War, Introductory memoir (Graham/Maude edition)
Clausewitz's death from cholera at Breslau in November 1831, apparently contracted with the army of observation on the Polish frontier.
- Paradise Lost, Book XI
Michael's vision of the lazar-house lists the diseases, madness and melancholy that will afflict Adam's descendants.
- Personal Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XIV
Cholera at Cruces and Panama in 1852; hospital hulk and tents; roughly a third of Grant's party dead and a seventh of the regiment lost overall.
- Principles of Geology, Book II, Ch. XXVIII
Deaths after the Calabrian earthquake of 1783 from epidemics attributed to insufficient food, exposure and malaria from new stagnant lakes.
- Principles of Geology, Book III, Ch. XL–XLI
Epidemic disease and famine from locust swarms discussed as causes of population loss and extinction.
- Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Scene 2
Friar John explains that the searchers sealed him in a house where pestilence was suspected, so the letter never reached Romeo.
- Ruth, Ch. 32–33
Typhus epidemic in Eccleston; Ruth volunteers as matron-nurse in the fever ward of the hospital.
- Selected Sermons and Reformation Treatises, Plague counsel
His advice about remaining, fleeing, and caring for neighbors during epidemic disease combines prudence with vocation.
- Sts. Roch and Sebastian: Plague Saints, Roch at Aquapendente and Piacenza
Roch tends plague victims and then contracts plague himself, making the healer's exposure central to the legend.
- Sts. Roch and Sebastian: Plague Saints, Sebastian's arrows
Arrow wounds become a plague symbol, translating invisible epidemic danger into an image a viewer can recognize and pray before.
- Sts. Roch and Sebastian: Plague Saints, Council of Constance plague procession
The Roch tradition links public prayers and processions to epidemic cessation, showing ritual as civic plague response.
- Tales (Selection), The Masque of the Red Death, opening paragraph
The Red Death is described by its symptoms, sharp pains, sudden dizziness, profuse bleeding at the pores and death within half an hour, and by the abandonment of the sufferers.
- 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 Age of Fable, Chapter XXXIV, Oracle of Aesculapius
The sick sleep in the temple at Epidaurus to receive healing responses; Bulfinch compares the cure to mesmerism and tells how the god's serpent came to Rome in a time of pestilence.
- The Arthashastra, Book 4 (remedies against national calamities)
State measures against fire, flood, epidemic disease, famine and pests.
- 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 Samuel 24
A pestilence kills seventy thousand after David's census.
- The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch), Chapter X
Raphael is sent to bind Azazel and to heal the earth that the angels have corrupted.
- 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 Civil War, Book II.22
Massilia's surrender after famine and a fatal pestilence attributed to confinement and old millet and barley.
- The Civil War, Book III.87
Labienus describes Caesar's veterans as wasted by autumn pestilence in Italy, with invalid cohorts at Brundisium.
- The Door in the Wall, Opening chapters
Robin falls ill and loses the use of his legs as plague spreads through London and his servants abandon the house.
- 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 Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Chapter 4, The Old Age of the World
The Plague of Cyprian and the hypothesis of a hemorrhagic viral fever; drought and the third-century crisis.
- The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Chapter 6, The Wine-Press of Wrath
The first bubonic plague pandemic from 541, its biology, routes and mortality, alongside the volcanic cooling of the 530s.
- The Golden Bough (abridged edition), Chapters LV-LVI
The transference of illness to objects and animals, and public expulsions of evils, including measures against epidemics.
- The Golden Legend: Popular Saints, Lives of plague and danger saints in the Golden Legend tradition
Roch, Sebastian, Barbara, and Christopher show how sudden communal or occupational risks were organized through saints before modern public health.
- The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, The foundations of conquest
Plague and the long Roman-Persian war as causes of imperial weakness before the conquests.
- The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, The conquest of Syria and Palestine
The plague of Amwas among the Muslim armies in Syria.
- The Histories, Book 8.115
Plague and dysentery afflict Xerxes' army on its retreat through Thrace.
- The Histories, Book V, ch. 3
Tacitus reports a hostile origin legend in which a disfiguring plague in Egypt leads to an expulsion.
- The Histories, Book VI, Book VI, ch. 5
The cycle begins after floods, pestilences or failures of crops have nearly destroyed mankind.
- The History of Rome, Books I-V, Book I, ch. 31
A pestilence strikes under Tullus Hostilius, and the warlike king, himself falling ill, turns anxiously to neglected rites.
- The History of Rome, Books I-V, Book III, chs. 6-8 and 32
Pestilence kills consuls, augurs and much of the people while the Aequi and Volsci press on the city; later plague and famine come together.
- The History of Rome, Books I-V, Book IV, ch. 25; Book V, ch. 13
A temple vowed to Apollo for the health of the people, and the first lectisternium held to end an intractable pestilence.
- The History of Rome, Books I-V, Book V, ch. 48
Disease among the Gauls camped in the ruined city amid ashes and unburied dead during the siege of the Capitol.
- The History of the Church, Book 9, crisis and relief
Social catastrophe, famine and disease imagery accompany persecution and political upheaval.
- 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 Iliad, Book 1.43–52
Apollo shoots his arrows into the Greek camp, killing first mules and dogs and then men, for nine days.
- The Journal of John Woolman, Journal, Chapter XI (closing minutes)
Friends at York record the progress of his smallpox, his prayers, the attempts at medicine, his talk with the apothecary and his death.
- The Mabinogion, The Story of Lludd and Llevelys
Three plagues afflict Britain; the second, a shriek every May-eve, makes men lose colour and strength, women lose their children, and the young lose their senses; Lludd later keeps himself awake with a vessel of cold water.
- The Muqaddimah, Introduction (on the changes in the world after the plague)
The plague of the mid-fourteenth century described as emptying cities and weakening dynasties in East and West.
- The Muqaddimah, Chapter 3 (end of dynasties)
Famine and plague increasing at the end of a dynasty, attributed in part to the corruption of the air in crowded cities.
- The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium, Chapters on Justinian and the sixth century
The arrival of plague in 541–542 and its demographic and political effects.
- The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium, Chapters on the Palaiologan period
The Black Death of 1347 at Constantinople amid civil war.
- The Plague, Part I
The appearance of dying rats in buildings and streets, the concierge Michel's fever and swollen glands, and his death.
- The Plague, Part IV
The death of Othon's young son after an injection of Castel's serum, watched at the bedside by Rieux, Castel, Tarrou and Paneloux.
- The River War, Chapter VII: The Recovery of the Dongola Province
Cholera creeps up the Nile from Cairo; case-fatality near 80 per cent among the first thousand cases; detailed casualty figures; profound depression across the army.
- The Roman History, Book XIX, ch. 4
Unburied dead at Amida breed pestilence; Ammianus explains the causes and three kinds of plague and the garrison's recovery after rain.
- The Scarlet Pimpernel, Ch. I
The old woman at the West Barricade mentions smallpox in her cart, and Bibot steps hastily back and lets her through.
- The Secret Garden, Ch. 1
The cholera outbreak kills Mary's parents and household, revealing imperial neglect and epidemic vulnerability.
- The Secret History, Chapter 4
During Justinian's illness from the plague, talk among the generals about a successor leads to the disgrace of Belisarius and the imprisonment of Buzes.
- The Spirit of the Laws, Book XIV, ch. 11
Laws in relation to the distempers of the climate: leprosy and the laws of Moses, the disease brought from America, and the military cordon against plague.
- The Theban Plays, Oedipus the King, opening
Thebes suffers plague, failed crops, infertility and public supplication before Oedipus.
- 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, Chapter V (Damascus)
The people of Damascus gather at the Mosque of the Footprint to pray against plague amid thousands of deaths a day.
- The Trojan War, Chapter 11, The quarrel
The quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles, which in Homer arises from Apollo's plague on the camp.
- The Waning of the Middle Ages, Chapter XI, The Vision of Death
The dance of death, the macabre image of decomposition and the call to remember mortality.
- The War of the Worlds, Book Two, Chapter VIII (Dead London)
The Martians found dead of putrefactive and disease bacteria, with the narrator's explanation of human resistance acquired through natural selection.
- The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Chapters 18-19
Fever spreads through the town, children die, Mercy lies near death, and a mob blames Hannah Tupper's witchcraft.
- Theogony and Works and Days, Works and Days, ll. 90-105
Before Pandora men lived free from heavy sickness; after the jar is opened, silent diseases roam by day and night.
- Theogony and Works and Days, Works and Days, ll. 225-247
The just city knows no famine; the unjust city suffers famine and plague sent by Zeus, and its women bear no children.
- Till We Have Faces, Part One, Chapters 4-5
Fever spreads through Glome; Psyche touches and blesses the sick, and the people's gratitude turns to fear as the plague continues.
- Twenty Years at Hull-House, Chapter XIV, Civic Cooperation
The smallpox epidemic after the World's Fair, garments finished in infected houses, and Julia Lathrop's visits to the pest house.
- Uncle Vanya, Act I
Astroff tells Marina of the typhoid epidemic at Malitskoi and the switchman who died under chloroform.
- Washington: A Life, The war years (1777)
The decision to inoculate the Continental Army against smallpox.
- Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Chapter IV
Cholera at Cruces: her treatments, the deaths, the examination of an infant's body to learn about the disease, and her own attack of cholera.
Quotes
“At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.”
“Denied and glossed over, death was eating its way along the narrow streets”
“they are nothing in comparison of those which arise within ourselves, from the distempered condition of our mind and body”
“Indeed the whole matter may be stated thus, that no device was discovered by man to save himself”
“those of the population who had formerly been members of the factions laid aside their mutual enmity and in common they attended to the burial rites of the dead”
“all who had the good fortune to be in health were sitting in their houses, either attending the sick or mourning the dead.”
“breathed typhus through its crowded schoolroom and dormitory, and, ere May arrived, transformed the seminary into an hospital.”
“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;”
“About one-third of the people with me died, either at Cruces or on the way to Panama”
Frequently cited
“A plague o’ both your houses.”
“At Piacenza, he himself was stricken with the plague”
“Everywhere the terrible scourge disappeared before his miraculous power”
“Diocletian, cruel emperor of Rome, commanded that Sebastian should be led into the middle of a field and there bound to a stake, and that his archers should shoot at him till he was as full of arrows as an urchin is full of pricks”
Frequently cited
“And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
“Nor could the physicians help, for the disease attacked them also, and the contact of the sick gave them infection”
“There are some, who, from lack of experience or obtuseness, will turn away from such phenomena as "folk-diseases" with a smile of contempt or pity prompted by the consciousness of their own health”
“And heal the earth which the angels have corrupted, and proclaim the healing of the earth, that they may heal the plague,”
“struggling moreover with a fatal pestilence, from their long confinement and change of victuals (for they all subsisted on old millet and damaged barley, which they had formerly provided and laid up in the public stores against an emergency of this kind”
“many fell victims to the autumnal pestilence in Italy, many returned home, and many were left behind on the continent. Have you not heard that the cohorts at Brundisium are composed of invalids”
Frequently cited
“there's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency.”
Frequently cited
“what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”
“But of the first thousand cases between Assuan and Suarda nearly eight hundred proved fatal”
“The violence of the battle may be cheaply braved, but the insidious attacks of disease appal the boldest”
“Both philosophers and skilful physicians agree that excess of cold, or of heat, or of moisture, or of drought, all cause pestilences;”
“I myself was present at this mosque in the year 746 (A.D. 1345), when the people were assembled for the purpose of prayer against the plague : which ceased on that very day.”
“By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers”
“Of themselves diseases come upon men continually by day and by night, bringing mischief to mortals silently; for wise Zeus took away speech from them.”