A Christmas Carol. In Prose.
Medical tag
Public Health Sanitation
Sanitation, quarantine, urban disease, social medicine.
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.
A Modest Proposal is Swift's savage 1729 pamphlet on Irish poverty under British rule, written in the voice of a projector who treats hunger, tenancy, children, and mothers as items in a national account. The speaker begins with beggars and starving children in Dublin streets, then adopts the language of calculation: numbers of infants, costs of nursing, market value, culinary uses, and benefits to landlords.
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.
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.
Franklin's Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack present the founding era through self-fashioning, practical wisdom, and the culture of improvement. The Autobiography narrates Franklin's movement from Boston apprentice to Philadelphia printer, civic organizer, scientist, and public man.
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.
Centesimus Annus marks the hundredth anniversary of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum and reads the social question through the upheavals of the twentieth century. John Paul II returns first to 1891: industrial labor, socialist agitation, private property, wages, association, and the rights of workers.
Freud's late essay, in German Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ('the uneasiness in culture'), asks why civilized people, who have built so much for their own protection, are so often unhappy. It is written in eight short chapters in a conversational, self-questioning style.
This Paine anthology gathers the pamphlets that made revolutionary argument feel urgent, portable, and democratic. Common Sense, published in January 1776, attacks monarchy, hereditary succession, reconciliation with Britain, and political hesitation.
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.
De Regno is Aquinas's unfinished treatise on kingship, addressed to the king of Cyprus and concerned with why political rule exists, how it can serve the common good, and how it can decay into tyranny. Aquinas begins from the social nature of human beings.
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.
Democracy in America is Tocqueville's great comparative study of democratic society. The first volume examines American political institutions: township government, federalism, courts, associations, parties, newspapers, religion, and the habits that sustain self-government.
Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council's declaration on religious freedom, argues that the human person has a right not to be coerced by individuals, groups, or the state in religious matters. The document grounds that right in dignity, conscience, and the nature of truth, while insisting that the right concerns immunity from coercion rather than indifference about religious truth.
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.
Early Black Church Sermons and Addresses is an anthology concept rather than one single-author book: it gathers public religious speech from Black Christian leaders before 1950, using only public-domain sermons, convention addresses, ordination sermons, and printed appeals. Its center is the Black church as pulpit, school, refuge, protest platform, mutual-aid network, and political institution.
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.
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.
Washington's Farewell Address and selected letters present leadership as restraint, reputation, and institutional precedent. The Farewell Address, published in 1796 near the end of his presidency, warns against sectional division, party spirit, foreign entanglement, public debt, and attacks on constitutional authority.
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.
Hard Times, subtitled For These Times, is Dickens's shortest and most concentrated novel, set in Coketown, a smoky northern mill town of red brick, black canals, and identical streets. Thomas Gradgrind, a retired hardware merchant and later a member of Parliament, runs a model school and his own household on a single principle: children must be taught Facts and nothing else.
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 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.
I Am Prepared to Die is Nelson Mandela's statement from the dock during the Rivonia Trial in 1964. Facing charges that could lead to death, Mandela uses the courtroom not primarily to plead for mercy but to explain the political history and moral logic of resistance to apartheid.
Frederick wrote the treatise known in English as Instructions for His Generals in the winter of 1746–1747, after the first two Silesian Wars had won and held the rich Austrian province of Silesia. Its French title was Les Principes généraux de la guerre; a German version, Die General-Principia vom Kriege, was printed in 1748 in a small number of copies for Prussian generals, who were bound to keep it secret.
A Massachusetts statute authorized the board of health of any city or town to require the vaccination of its inhabitants when it judged that necessary for public health or safety, and provided a five-dollar penalty for adults who refused; children certified by a physician as unfit for vaccination were exempt. In February 1902, during a smallpox outbreak, the Cambridge board of health ordered all inhabitants who had not been vaccinated since 1897 to be vaccinated, and offered vaccination without charge.
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.
Just So Stories is Rudyard Kipling's collection of comic tales that explain, in the voice of a father talking to a child he calls O Best Beloved, how things in the world came to be the way they are. Each story is followed by a poem.
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.
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.
Cedric Errol is a curly-haired American boy of seven, living with his widowed mother in a modest side street of New York. He calls her Dearest, as his father did, and his best friends are Mr. Hobbs, the corner grocer who rails against earls as grasping tyrants, and Dick Tipton, a bootblack.
In 1895 New York passed the Bakeshop Act, which regulated the sanitation of bakeries and provided that no employee could be required or permitted to work in a bakery more than sixty hours a week or ten hours a day. The hours provision was carried into the state's Labor Law of 1897.
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.
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.
Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance and Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention show him as both principled advocate and institutional anatomist. Memorial and Remonstrance, written in 1785 against a Virginia religious assessment bill, argues that religion must be free from state coercion because conscience is prior to civil society and cannot be surrendered to government.
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.
In March 2010 Congress passed and President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Two provisions drew constitutional challenge.
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.
Jefferson's selected writings show the range and tensions of the revolutionary Enlightenment in America. Notes on the State of Virginia began as answers to questions from a French diplomat, but it became Jefferson's most sustained book: a survey of Virginia's geography, natural history, laws, economy, population, slavery, Indigenous peoples, education, religion, and politics.
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.
On the Origin of Species argues that species are not fixed, separately created kinds but populations changed over time by variation, inheritance, struggle, natural selection, and descent with modification. Darwin begins with variation under domestication, using pigeons, livestock, and cultivated plants to show how small differences can be preserved and accumulated.
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.
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.
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.
Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts) was written as a textbook for his Berlin lectures on law, ethics and the state. Its preface is dated June 1820, and the book appeared in Berlin late that year with 1821 on the title page.
Politics examines the polis as the community ordered toward living well. Aristotle begins with the household, including relations of master and slave, husband and wife, parent and child, and then argues that the city exists by nature because human beings possess speech about justice and advantage.
Rerum Novarum, issued by Pope Leo XIII on 15 May 1891 and addressed to the bishops of the Catholic world, takes its Latin title from its opening words about the spirit of revolutionary change. Its English title is On the Condition of the Working Classes.
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.
Latimer's Selected Sermons bring the English Reformation into a rough, vivid, public idiom. Unlike a systematic theologian, Latimer often sounds like a moral witness standing before court and commons at once.
Whitefield's Selected Sermons preserve the voice of the eighteenth century's most famous evangelical itinerant. His preaching emphasized new birth, heartfelt conversion, human sin, Christ's mercy, and the immediate demand that hearers respond.
Sermons and Letter from Birmingham Jail brings together Martin Luther King Jr.'s public theology and civil-rights argument at their most concentrated. The sermon tradition behind King includes the Black church, biblical prophecy, social gospel, liberal theology, and the cadences of African American sacred speech.
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.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence's account of his two years with the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, from his first visit to the Hejaz in October 1916 to the entry into Damascus in October 1918. It opens with an introductory chapter that admits the book's political bad conscience: Lawrence knew that Britain and France had already divided the Arab lands in the Sykes–Picot agreement while he encouraged the Arabs to fight for independence.
In March 1869 the Louisiana legislature passed an act entitled "An act to protect the health of the city of New Orleans," which chartered the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company and gave it for twenty-five years the sole right to maintain stock landings and slaughterhouses in the parishes of Orleans, Jefferson and St. Bernard. Every butcher in that district of over a thousand square miles had to bring his animals to the company's slaughterhouse below the city and pay its fees.
St. Dymphna and the Geel Colony is less a single book than a layered dossier: a thirteenth-century Latin Vita by Pierre of Cambrai, a medieval shrine in the Brabant town of Geel, and a centuries-long practice of boarding mentally ill people with local families. The legend tells of an Irish princess whose widowed father, deranged by grief and desire, attempts to marry his daughter because she resembles her dead mother.
Patrick's own writings are the narrow bridge between the global St. Patrick's Day figure and a real late Roman Christian voice. The Confessio begins with a self-portrait of abasement: Patrick calls himself a sinner, unlearned, rustic, and contemptible to many.
St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles traces a murder into a medical archive. Becket's political story is familiar: the brilliant royal chancellor becomes archbishop of Canterbury, clashes with Henry II over ecclesiastical liberty and royal jurisdiction, goes into exile, returns under tense compromise, and is killed in the cathedral on 29 December 1170 by knights acting in the atmosphere of the king's fury.
Sts. Roch and Sebastian became plague saints through two different imaginative routes. Sebastian is an older martyr of the Roman persecution tradition.
The Anti-Federalist Papers are not a single coordinated book but a body of pamphlets, essays, speeches, and newspaper pieces opposing or demanding amendments to the proposed Constitution. Their writers differed among themselves, but they shared alarm about the scale and power of the new federal government.
The Art of the Commonplace gathers Wendell Berry's agrarian essays on land, household, work, food, technology, economy, conservation, and the moral scale of community. The collection's title points to Berry's method: he resists abstraction by returning arguments to farms, watersheds, kitchens, tools, soil, neighbors, and inherited obligations.
The Art of War is a short treatise of thirteen chapters, around six thousand Chinese characters, written as a sequence of terse sayings introduced by the formula 'Sun Tzu said'. It begins by declaring war a matter of life and death for the state, to be studied through five constant factors: the moral law that binds people to their ruler, heaven (weather and seasons), earth (terrain and distance), the commander's qualities, and method and discipline.
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 Athenian Constitution (Athenaion Politeia) is a short treatise in two parts on the government of Athens, written in the 330s or 320s BC by Aristotle or by a member of his school as one of the 158 constitutions the Lyceum is said to have collected. It was known only from quotations until a papyrus roll, copied on the back of farm accounts from Roman Egypt, was acquired by the British Museum and identified by Frederic G. Kenyon, who published the text and his translation in 1891.
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 Chemical History of a Candle prints six lectures that Michael Faraday gave to a 'juvenile audience' at the Royal Institution in London over the Christmas season of 1860–61. Faraday opens by declaring that no door into natural philosophy is more open than the burning candle, and he keeps the whole course tied to that single object while it leads him through heat, chemistry, the air and the living body.
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 Communist Manifesto presents modern history as the history of class struggle and casts the bourgeoisie as both revolutionary and exploitative. Marx and Engels argue that capitalism has dissolved feudal relations, expanded world markets, concentrated production, remade family and nation, and subjected older loyalties to cash exchange.
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 Federalist Papers are eighty-five essays written to persuade New York voters to ratify the proposed United States Constitution. Published under the shared pseudonym Publius, they defend a stronger federal union against fears that centralized power would destroy liberty.
The Founding Documents gathers the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights as one civic anthology. The Declaration, adopted by the Continental Congress in July 1776, announces separation from Britain by appealing to the laws of nature and of nature’s God, to the self-evident truths that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, and to government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed.
This entry gathers the Golden Legend chapters and adjacent medieval traditions behind saints whose images still move through calendars, holidays, icons, hospitals, medals, advertising, and folklore. Jacobus de Voragine did not write critical biography in the modern sense.
The 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.
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 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 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 Koran, or Quran ('recitation'), is the central scripture of Islam. It consists of 114 chapters called suras, of very unequal length, each made up of verses (ayat).
The Moffats follows a year in the life of a family with little money and a great deal of fun in the small Connecticut town of Cranbury, around the time of the First World War. Mama, a widow, earns their living as a dressmaker in the rented yellow house on New Dollar Street, where she lives with her four children: Sylvie, the eldest, gentle and grown-up; Joey, the steady older brother who does the heavy chores; Jane, the imaginative middle girl through whose eyes much of the book is seen; and Rufus, five and a half and always in the middle of something.
The Natural History of Selborne is a book of letters about one Hampshire parish, written by its curate over about twenty years to two learned correspondents: the zoologist Thomas Pennant and the lawyer and antiquary Daines Barrington. White opens with the place itself: its position among the chalk downs and sandy heaths of east Hampshire, its soils, springs and beech hanger, the deep hollow lanes worn into the rock, the forest of Wolmer and its decayed deer.
The 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 Old Regime and the Revolution (L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution), published in Paris in June 1856, is Alexis de Tocqueville's study of France before 1789. Its argument is that the Revolution, which its makers believed had broken French history in two, in fact completed a work the monarchy had long been doing: the concentration of power in a central administration and the levelling of the French into similar, separated individuals.
The 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 Quiet American is narrated by Thomas Fowler, a weary British journalist in French-controlled Vietnam during the First Indochina War. The novel begins after the death of Alden Pyle, a young American official whose innocence, confidence and political theories have made him dangerous.
The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan is the young Winston Churchill's history of the Anglo-Egyptian campaigns of 1896–1899 that destroyed the Mahdist state in the Sudan. Churchill begins with geography and the Nile, which he presents as the thread on which the whole story hangs, and then with the rebellion of Muhammad Ahmad, a Dongolawi boat-builder's son and Sufi ascetic who proclaimed himself the Mahdi in 1881.
The Road to Serfdom is a short book by the Austrian-born economist F. A. Hayek, written in London during the Second World War and published by Routledge in March 1944 and by the University of Chicago Press that September. Hayek dedicated it to the socialists of all parties.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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 Voyage of the Beagle is Darwin's account of his five-year journey around South America, the Pacific, Australia, and the Atlantic aboard HMS Beagle. It is a travel book before it is an evolutionary treatise: Darwin describes landscapes, fossils, earthquakes, volcanoes, coral reefs, animals, plants, Indigenous peoples, imperial violence, slavery, disease, and the practical hardships of field observation.
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.
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.
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.
Two Lives of Charlemagne pairs Einhard's Life of Charlemagne with Notker the Stammerer's later anecdotes about the emperor. Einhard writes as a court insider shaped by classical biography, especially Suetonius.
Uncle Vanya, subtitled Scenes from Country Life, takes place over a few months on a provincial Russian estate. For twenty-five years Ivan Petrovich Voitski, Uncle Vanya, has managed the property with his niece Sonia, sending its income to her father, Professor Alexander Serebrakoff, the widower of Vanya's sister, whom Vanya once revered as a great scholar.
Up from Slavery is Booker T. Washington's account of his rise from a slave cabin in Virginia to the leadership of Tuskegee Institute. He begins with what he does not know: the exact date of his birth, about 1858 or 1859 as he gives it, and the name of his white father.
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.
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.
We is presented as the diary or record of D-503, mathematician and builder of the spaceship Integral in the OneState, a glass-walled totalitarian society ruled by the Benefactor. Citizens, called Numbers, live by tables of hours, regulated labor, monitored sex, prescribed walks and transparent architecture.
We Hold These Truths collects John Courtney Murray's essays on the American constitutional experiment, natural law, religious liberty, pluralism, and the conditions of civil conversation. Murray argues that the American order depends on moral truths that public argument must continue to articulate, not merely procedural agreement or private preference.
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 Christmas Carol, Stave III
The allegorical starving children Ignorance and Want under the spirit's robe.
- 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 Modest Proposal, The cannibal policy
A Modest Proposal gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes starvation, infant mortality, public health, reproductive exploitation, and the dehumanizing language of population management
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Ch. 12
Ignorant child-rearing blamed for infant deaths, and women mocked for following physicians' advice on the care of infants.
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Ch. 13, sect. 5
The rearing of children as laying a foundation of sound health of body and mind, and the cost of ignorance in nurseries.
- Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack, Civic institution passages
Franklin's public projects belong to the history of urban improvement and health infrastructure.
- Bleak House, Chapters XVI and XLVI
Descriptions of Tom-all-Alone's as a source of fever that spreads to every class of society.
- Centesimus Annus, Looking back to Rerum Novarum
Centesimus Annus gives this tag concrete force through its medical lens is social: work, poverty, family wages, consumerism, and solidarity all shape health before clinical care begins
- Civilization and Its Discontents, Ch. III
Civilization's protections against disease and nature, including hygiene and cleanliness; technology as prosthetic organs; the footnoted speculation about the control of fire.
- Common Sense, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and The American Crisis, Rights of Man, social welfare proposals
Paine proposes public measures for poverty and old age, anticipating later welfare and public-health arguments.
- Daisy Miller, Part II (Colosseum scene)
Winterbourne warns Daisy of the danger of the Roman fever from the night air.
- De Regno, Why rule is needed
De Regno gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens is analogical: tyranny appears as a disorder of the body politic, and prudent rule resembles care ordered toward communal health
- 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.
- Dignitatis Humanae, Civil order
Dignitatis Humanae gives this tag concrete force through its medical relevance is bioethical and institutional: conscience, coercion, dignity, and religious liberty matter in hospitals and public health policy
- Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, First Part, on sickness
Rousseau lists the diseases produced by inequalities of labour, diet and passion and argues that most of our ills are of our own making.
- Early Black Church Sermons and Addresses, Addresses on education, temperance, and mutual aid
Institutional care appears as a response to excluded and endangered bodies.
- Elements of Chemistry, Part II, Sect. III
Light is necessary to the health of plants and of people, who decline in sedentary manufactures and crowded houses and improve in open-air labour.
- 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.
- Farewell Address and Selected Letters, Revolutionary War letters on army health
Camp disease, supply shortages, and inoculation decisions show public health as military necessity.
- Germ Theory Papers (Pasteur and Lister), Lister, On the Antiseptic Principle, closing
Ward health before and after antiseptic treatment: nine months without pyaemia, hospital gangrene or erysipelas.
- Germ Theory Papers (Pasteur and Lister), On the Extension of the Germ Theory (1880), section III
Observations of women with puerperal fever at the Lariboisière and recommendations for boric acid compresses after confinement.
- Hard Times, Book the First, Chapter V
Description of Coketown's smoke, black canal, and river running purple with dye.
- Heart of Darkness, Part I (Outer Station)
The grove of death where sick, starving African labourers lie dying in the shade.
- History of the Wars, Books I-II (The Persian War), Book II, ch. 23
Four months of epidemic in Constantinople, daily deaths in thousands, burial organised by Theodorus, bodies placed in the towers of Sycae, cessation of trade, and Justinian's own swelling of the groin.
- Instructions for His Generals, Articles on camps
Choice of camp sites for water, wood and defensibility, and arrangements that also bear on sanitation and the health of an army at rest.
- Jacobson v. Massachusetts, Opinion of the Court, on the board of health: Upon the principle of self-defense, of paramount necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members.
Harlan grounds the authority of a local board of health in a community's right of self-protection during an epidemic, the core public-health principle of the case.
- Jacobson v. Massachusetts, Opinion of the Court, on medical evidence: Since, then, vaccination, as a means of protecting a community against smallpox, finds strong support in the experience of this and other countries
The Court rests on the accumulated experience of vaccination programs abroad and at home rather than on trial testimony, illustrating how law treated medical consensus in 1905.
- Jacobson v. Massachusetts, Opinion of the Court, on exemptions: making an exception in favor of children certified by a registered physician to be unfit subjects for vaccination
The statute's medical exemption for children, and the Court's discussion of whether adults in like condition must also be excused, show early legal treatment of physician certification in public-health law.
- Jane Eyre, Chapters V and IX
Lowood's scant, spoiled food and damp situation; the spring typhus epidemic; Helen Burns's death from consumption; the public inquiry and reform that follow.
- Jewish Antiquities, Books 3-4, Mosaic legislation
Josephus summarizes laws about purity, childbirth, skin disease, bodily emissions and priestly inspection, translating ritual categories for Greek readers.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 7, famine traditions
Famine in biblical history is treated as social crisis and divine judgment, linking hunger, public order and survival.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 20, late provincial unrest
Crowding, executions, famine relief and social disorder in the later books reveal the bodily cost of unstable governance.
- Just So Stories, How the Alphabet Was Made
Tegumai draws the signs for yo, bad black swamp-water that gives fever, so that Taffy will know not to drink from a marked pool.
- 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.
- 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.
- Little House on the Prairie, Chapter 15, "Fever 'n' Ague"
The whole family falls ill with chills and fever; Dr. Tan arrives, gives medicine, and Mrs. Scott nurses them; the watermelon and night-air theories of the illness are debated.
- Little House on the Prairie, Chapter 12, "Fresh Water to Drink"
Mr. Scott is overcome by bad air in the well and hauled out; Pa tests the air with a candle before resuming the digging.
- Little Lord Fauntleroy, Chapter IX
Cedric describes Earl's Court, where houses are falling down, the rain comes in, and children die of fever; the narrator lists bad drainage, damp walls and leaking roofs.
- Mansfield Park, Vol. III, Ch. 7–8 (Ch. 38–39)
The noise, dirt and close air of the Price household in Portsmouth affect Fanny's health and spirits.
- 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. XII (Memphis)
Letters on regimental and general hospitals, the use of freed people as hospital attendants and nurses, and requisition of buildings for patients.
- Memorial and Remonstrance and Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention, Convention Notes on federal powers
Debates over national and state authority shape later public-health law and emergency governance.
- 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.
- National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, Opinion of Chief Justice Roberts, Part I, paragraph beginning The second provision of the Affordable Care Act directly challenged here is the Medicaid expansion
Describes Medicaid's origins in 1965, its universal adoption by the states by 1982, and the expansion's extension of coverage to adults up to 133 percent of the poverty level.
- National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, Opinion of Justice Ginsburg, Part I-A and I-B, paragraphs beginning In 2009, approximately 50 million people were uninsured
Sets out national health-expenditure figures, the scale of uncompensated care, and how the costs of treating the uninsured are passed on to insured patients and providers.
- Notes on the State of Virginia, Selected Letters, and The Jefferson Bible, Notes on climate and natural history
Environmental observation links health, geography, and early American science.
- On Liberty, Ch. IV, Of the Limits to the Authority of Society
The United Kingdom Alliance's case for prohibition and its doctrine of 'social rights' against the drink trade, which Mill rejects.
- On the Origin of Species, Natural selection
On the Origin of Species gives this tag concrete force through darwin matters to medicine through heredity, variation, adaptation, population thinking, and later debates over degeneration, eugenics, and disease ecology
- On War, Book V, Ch. 12, Marches (continued)
Sickness in crowded quarters versus on the road; soldiers drinking cold water after heat exhaustion; Napoleon's losses of 95,000 to sickness and straggling on the march to Smolensk in 1812.
- 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.
- Personal Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XXXII
The flooded winter before Vicksburg: malarial fevers, measles and smallpox among troops, hospital arrangements Grant credits with limiting deaths, and orders establishing general hospitals between Duckport and Milliken's Bend.
- 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 Right, §§236–241 and Additions
Public authority's care for streets, markets, health and the poor in the civic community.
- Politics, Household and city
Politics gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens appears by analogy: aristotle often treats constitutions as healthy or diseased orders, requiring diagnosis, regimen, and proportion
- Rerum Novarum, The duties of the State, on hours of labor
Hours to be fitted to the worker's strength, the nature of the work and the season; shorter hours for those in mines and quarries.
- Rerum Novarum, The duties of the State, on children and women
Children not to be put to factory work before their bodies and minds are developed; work to be suited to sex and age.
- 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, Court sermons on negligent officials
Social disorder is treated as a public disease requiring correction by rulers and clergy.
- Sermons on Several Occasions and Primitive Physick, Sermons on works of mercy
Visiting the sick and caring for bodies become duties within Methodist holiness.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book X (Damascus, October 1918)
Lawrence finds a Turkish military hospital full of dead and dying men and organises its cleaning and burials amid the chaos of the city's first days.
- St. Dymphna and the Geel Colony, Nineteenth-century psychiatric visits to Geel
Alienists and reformers used Geel as evidence in debates over asylum limits, moral treatment, and whether chronic mental illness required institutional segregation.
- St. Patrick's Writings, Confessio I
Patrick's capture at roughly sixteen provides a rare late antique first-person account of adolescent enslavement.
- St. Patrick's Writings, Letter to Coroticus
Patrick's denunciation of killing and trafficking baptized captives preserves a moral response to slave-raiding and communal trauma.
- St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles, Water of St. Thomas
Blood mixed with water becomes a portable contact relic used externally and internally in healing stories.
- 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.
- The Anti-Federalist Papers, Brutus on judicial and national power
Concerns over expansive federal authority anticipate later disputes about courts, rights, and public-health power.
- The Art of the Commonplace, Agrarian membership
The Art of the Commonplace gives this tag concrete force through his medical relevance lies in public health broadly conceived: food systems, labor, ecological damage, loneliness, and the social conditions of flourishing
- The Art of War, Ch. IX.11–12
Armies prefer high, sunny ground; camping on hard ground near water and pasture keeps the army free from disease; commentators call low ground damp and unhealthy.
- 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 2 (superintendent of liquor)
Regulation of the production and sale of alcoholic drinks and the conduct of drinking houses.
- The Arthashastra, Book 4 (remedies against national calamities)
State measures against fire, flood, epidemic disease, famine and pests.
- The Athenian Constitution, Part 50
City commissioners prevent building into the streets and drains emptying into them, and remove corpses from the streets with public slaves.
- The Athenian Constitution, Part 51
Market commissioners see that goods offered for sale are pure and unadulterated.
- The Bible, Leviticus 13–14
Laws for priestly diagnosis, isolation outside the camp and purification of 'leprosy' in people, garments and houses.
- The Chemical History of a Candle, Lecture VI
Breathing into a closed jar extinguishes a taper; Faraday applies the result to poorly ventilated houses where air is breathed over and over.
- The Civil War, Book I.81–84
The Pompeian army in Spain, cut off from water and forage, kills its baggage animals and surrenders.
- 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.47–49
Dyrrachium: Caesar's troops eat chara bread and bark; Pompey's army suffers from foul smells, carcasses, hard labour and lack of water after Caesar dams the streams.
- The Communist Manifesto, Bourgeois and proletarians
The Communist Manifesto gives this tag concrete force through its medical relevance lies in social medicine: labor conditions, poverty, urbanization, family disruption, and the political diagnosis of suffering
- The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Chapter 2, The Happiest Age
Endemic disease, mortality, stature and the health of Roman populations at the Antonine peak.
- The Federalist Papers, Federalist 51
Checks and balances are presented as structural safeguards against predictable human impulses.
- The Founding Documents, Constitution, federal and state powers
The division of authority becomes central to American public-health law and emergency power.
- The Golden Legend: Popular Saints, Life of St. George
The healing fountain attached to George's church shows how martyr cult could become a site for illness narratives.
- The Histories, Book II, ch. 93
Vitellian soldiers settle in the unhealthy Vatican quarter by the Tiber; disease and mortality rise among the Germans and Gauls.
- The History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 2.51–53
Caregivers die, laws lose force, burial customs collapse and despair spreads through the crowded city.
- The Jewish War, Book 5, Jerusalem under siege
Crowding, corpses, factional violence and the shrinking food supply turn Jerusalem into a public health crisis before the final assault.
- The Journal of John Woolman, Journal, Chapter X
In the crowded steerage he finds breathing difficult and stands near the hatchway at midnight for fresh air, and observes the sailors' wet and close quarters.
- The Koran, Sura 2:183–185
Fasting in Ramadan, with exemptions for the sick and travellers.
- The Moffats, Chapter 7, Another Sign on the Yellow House
Rufus has scarlet fever, the house is quarantined, and Mama nurses him while the older children keep house.
- The Natural History of Selborne, To Pennant, Letter V
White notes that the village, though surrounded by trees and damp, is healthy and free from agues.
- The Natural History of Selborne, To Barrington, Letter LXV
White records the strange haze, heat and storms of the summer of 1783 and their effects in the parish.
- The Old Regime and the Revolution, Book II, chs. 12 and 17
The peasant's condition in years of dearth, and the intendants' relief measures, which publicized the misery they meant to ease.
- 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 II
Tarrou's proposal of volunteer sanitary squads and the discussion with Rieux and Rambert about duty, decency and the doctor's job.
- The Plague, Part III
The summer peak: the closing of cemeteries, burial in lime pits, the crematorium and the trams carrying the dead at night.
- The River War, Chapters IV–V
Reforms of the Egyptian army include hospital care for the sick (Ch. IV); the Suakin garrison (Ch. V) suffers malaria, liver abscess, bursati sores in animals and invaliding of a quarter of British officers.
- The 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 River War, Chapter XVI: The Fall of the City
Bombarded Omdurman: mangled civilians, houses crammed with wounded, decomposing bodies and animal carcasses.
- The Road to Serfdom, Ch. 3, Individualism and Collectivism
Regulation of poisonous substances, working hours and sanitary arrangements accepted as compatible with a competitive system.
- The Road to Serfdom, Ch. 9, Security and Freedom
Support for a guaranteed minimum of food, shelter and clothing and for social insurance against sickness and accident.
- The Secret Garden, Ch. 1
The cholera outbreak kills Mary's parents and household, revealing imperial neglect and epidemic vulnerability.
- The Social Contract, Book III, Chapter IX
Rousseau names the increase of population, without colonies or naturalisation, as the decisive mark of good government and dismisses tranquillity that hides depopulation.
- 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 Story of My Boyhood and Youth, Chapter VI
The near-fatal choke-damp at the bottom of the Hickory Hill well and William Duncan's methods for clearing the gas.
- The Theban Plays, Oedipus the King, opening
Thebes suffers plague, failed crops, infertility and public supplication before Oedipus.
- 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 Voyage of the Beagle, imperial encounters
Darwin's observations of slavery in Brazil, frontier warfare in Argentina, and disease among peoples the ship visited set his natural history within the voyage's human world.
- 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. viii
Poverty and child mortality in the Highlands of Scotland; the poor bear many children but rear few.
- The Wealth of Nations, Book V, ch. i, Part III, Art. II
Mental torpor from repetitive work likened to mutilation, and public instruction compared to preventing a leprosy from spreading among the people.
- Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, Chapter VI
Night tours of the tenement districts with Jacob Riis and the work of the police and health boards.
- Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, Chapter XII
Inspection of the packing-houses and the passage of the meat inspection law and the Pure Food and Drugs Act.
- Twenty Years at Hull-House, Chapter XIII, Public Activities and Investigations
Addams as garbage inspector of the nineteenth ward and the women of the neighborhood who thought it was not a lady's job.
- Twenty Years at Hull-House, Chapter XIII, Public Activities and Investigations
The typhoid epidemic of 1902 and the residents' investigation of plumbing near clusters of cases.
- Uncle Vanya, Act I
Astroff tells Marina of the typhoid epidemic at Malitskoi and the switchman who died under chloroform.
- Up from Slavery, Chapter III
At Hampton he learns the use of the bath, the toothbrush and sheets, and explains their value for health and self-respect.
- Up from Slavery, Chapter XI
The gospel of the tooth-brush and the teaching of bathing and sleeping between sheets at Tuskegee.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter II (the removable evils)
Poverty and disease presented as largely conquerable by education, social institutions, 'proper control of noxious influences' and science; those who care for others keep their interest in life on the eve of death.
- 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 Their Traffic
Butchering and washing of beasts done outside the town so the air is not corrupted.
- Washington: A Life, The war years (1777)
The decision to inoculate the Continental Army against smallpox.
- We, Early records
D-503 praises rational happiness and describes regulated sex, time and transparent living as healthful social order.
- We Hold These Truths, Church and state
We Hold These Truths gives this tag concrete force through its medical relevance appears where conscience, institutional freedom, public reason, and contested moral goods affect health law and care
- 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
“If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
“This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy”
“Denied and glossed over, death was eating its way along the narrow streets”
Frequently cited
“It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it”
Frequently cited
“Upon the principle of self-defense, of paramount necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members.”
“We are not prepared to hold that a minority, residing or remaining in any city or town where smallpox is prevalent, and enjoying the general protection afforded by an organized local government, may thus defy the will of its constituted authorities, acting in good faith for all, under the legislative sanction of the state.”
“breathed typhus through its crowded schoolroom and dormitory, and, ere May arrived, transformed the seminary into an hospital.”
“If poisons were never bought or used for any purpose except the commission of murder, it would be right to prohibit their manufacture and sale”
“How many trifling illnesses by that means become serious, how many serious ones become mortal”
“About one-third of the people with me died, either at Cruces or on the way to Panama”
“Those who work in mines and quarries, and extract coal, stone, and metals from the bowels of the earth, should have shorter hours in proportion as their labor is more severe and trying to health.”
“Then for to avoide infirmitie, thei did flie from places Fennie, or subjecte to hurtfull windes: whiche thei knewe not so well, by the qualitie of the situacion, as by the face of the inhabitours: for when thei sawe theim evill coloured, or swollen, or full of other infeccion, thei would not lodge there”
“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”
“and camp on hard ground, the army will be free from disease of every kind”
“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”
“that they themselves were not in good health from their confinement within so narrow a compass, from the noisome smell, the number of carcasses, and the constant fatigue to them, being men unaccustomed to work, and labouring under a great want of water”
Frequently cited
“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles”
“But of the first thousand cases between Assuan and Suarda nearly eight hundred proved fatal”
“As it is the business of legislators to watch over the health of the citizens, it would have been a wise part in them to have stopped this communication by laws made on the plan of those of Moses.”
“Even that most intractable of enemies, disease, may be indefinitely reduced in dimensions by good physical and moral education, and proper control of noxious influences”
“But they take more care of their sick than of any others; these are lodged and provided for in public hospitals.”