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.
Medical tag
Quackery Charlatans
Quacks, mountebanks, false cures, satire of medicine.
Works
Huckleberry Finn tells his own story in the speech of a half-schooled Missouri boy, some forty or fifty years before the book appeared. After the treasure found at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the Widow Douglas has taken Huck in to civilize him, while her sister Miss Watson drills him in manners and spelling.
Hume first published this book in 1748 as Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, and gave it its present title in 1758. It is his deliberate second attempt at the material of Book I of the Treatise, written, he said, so that the argument would no longer fail through its manner.
Candide, ou l'Optimisme follows a guileless young man raised in the castle of the Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh in Westphalia, where the tutor Pangloss teaches that this is the best of all possible worlds and that everything is for the best. Candide is kicked out of the castle for kissing the Baron's daughter Cunégonde behind a screen, and the rest of the tale tests Pangloss's doctrine against an avalanche of catastrophe.
Characters is a collection of brief sketches of recognizable social types: the dissembler, flatterer, chatterer, boor, complaisant man, reckless man, tactless man, mean man, show-off, coward, oligarchic sympathizer, late learner, slanderer and many others. Each sketch begins with a definition and then offers small scenes in which the type reveals himself through repeated behavior.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. An impoverished hidalgo of about fifty, Alonso Quixano, reads chivalric romances until, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dries up and he loses his wits.
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.
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver, presents itself as the sober memoir of a ship's surgeon. In Part I, shipwrecked, Gulliver wakes on the shore of Lilliput tied down by people six inches tall.
Jude Fawley is an orphan boy raised by his great-aunt Drusilla in the downland village of Marygreen. When the schoolmaster Richard Phillotson leaves for the university city of Christminster, Jude fixes his hopes on following him.
Moby-Dick is Herman Melville's novel of the whaling voyage of the Pequod and of her captain's pursuit of a great white sperm whale. School Launch points readers to parent-chosen selections, while the library provides the complete text of the Etymology, Extracts, one hundred thirty-five chapters and Epilogue for those who want the whole voyage.
Natural History: A Selection introduces one of antiquity’s great encyclopedic minds. Pliny wants to collect nature and human use together: stars, lands, peoples, animals, plants, metals, pigments, stones, medicines, marvels and technologies all belong to one vast inventory.
The Novum Organum ('new instrument') is the second and only substantially completed part of Bacon's projected Instauratio Magna, a six-part plan to rebuild human knowledge from its foundations. Its title throws down a challenge to the Organon, the collection of Aristotle's logical works that had governed university teaching for centuries.
De Magnete, magneticisque corporibus, et de magno magnete tellure (On the Magnet, Magnetick Bodies Also, and on the Great Magnet the Earth) was published in London in 1600 by William Gilbert, a Colchester-born physician who became president of the College of Physicians that year. It is the first large book devoted to experimental study of magnetism and one of the earliest works of natural philosophy built on systematic, repeated experiment.
The Pensées ('Thoughts') are the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, found after Pascal's death in 1662 as nearly a thousand notes, many on slips of paper threaded together in bundles. Pascal had planned a work that would first unsettle the complacent unbeliever (the honnête homme of polite society) by showing the misery and contradiction of the human condition, then show that Christianity alone explains that condition and offers its remedy.
This volume pairs one of Plato's most literary dialogues with two letters attributed to him. The Phaedrus takes place outside the walls of Athens, where Socrates, who rarely leaves the city, walks with the young Phaedrus along the river Ilissus and sits under a plane tree on a hot summer day.
Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in London in November 1790, is cast as a long letter to a young Frenchman, Charles-Jean-François Depont, who had asked Burke's opinion of events in Paris. Its immediate occasion was the sermon A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, preached by the Dissenting minister Richard Price on 4 November 1789 to the Revolution Society at the meeting-house in the Old Jewry, and the society's address of congratulation to the French National Assembly.
Wesley's Sermons on Several Occasions and Primitive Physick make an unusually strong pairing for a medical classics library. The sermons define Methodist teaching on salvation, new birth, sanctification, practical holiness, the means of grace, Christian perfection, money, self-denial, and social responsibility.
Silas Marner is George Eliot's short novel of a lonely linen-weaver restored to human fellowship by a child. In his youth Silas belonged to a strict dissenting congregation at Lantern Yard in a northern manufacturing town, where he was respected for his piety and for the cataleptic fits the brethren took for spiritual visitations.
Structural Anthropology (Anthropologie structurale) is a collection of seventeen essays by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, published by Plon in Paris in 1958 and translated into English by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf for Basic Books in 1963. In his preface Lévi-Strauss explains that he chose them from roughly a hundred papers written over some thirty years; most had appeared in journals between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s, and two were printed for the first time in the book.
In a Tuscan village the carpenter Mastro Cherry finds a log that cries out when he strikes it, and gladly hands it to his poor friend Geppetto, who carves it into a marionette and names him Pinocchio. The puppet runs off before his feet are finished, gets Geppetto taken to jail, and kills the Talking Cricket with a hammer when it warns him that disobedient boys come to grief.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a comic and nostalgic novel of boyhood set in the 1840s in St. Petersburg, a small Missouri town on the Mississippi modelled on Twain's Hannibal. Tom is an orphan living with his kind, anxious Aunt Polly, his priggish half-brother Sid and his cousin Mary.
The Arabian Nights Entertainments is Andrew Lang's 1898 selection of the Thousand and One Nights for children, retold in English from Antoine Galland's early eighteenth-century French version. The frame story comes first.
The Comedy of Errors takes place in a single day in the Greek city of Ephesus, where two sets of identical twins, separated as babies, are mistaken for each other until the whole town seems bewitched. Egeon, an old merchant of Syracuse, has been arrested because the two cities are at war and any Syracusan found in Ephesus must pay a thousand marks or die.
The Commonwealth of Oceana, published in London in 1656 during Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, is a model constitution for a republic set in an island called Oceana, which is England under a thin disguise. Scotland is Marpesia, Ireland Panopea, London Emporium, and Cromwell himself appears as Olphaus Megaletor, the Lord Archon or sole legislator who founds the commonwealth and then gives up his power.
The 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.
Tom Jones tells the story of a foundling raised by a good country gentleman, his expulsion from home, his adventures on the road and in London, and his final restoration and marriage. The eighteen books are each opened by an essay in which the narrator talks with the reader about the art of writing, critics, love, or human nature.
The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus is the spiritual autobiography that the Carmelite nun Teresa of Avila wrote at the command of her confessors, so that they could judge whether the extraordinary graces she reported came from God. It follows her from childhood in Avila to the founding of the convent of St. Joseph in 1562, and in its middle chapters becomes a treatise on prayer.
The Misanthrope and Other Plays collects several of Molière's comedies; the edition translated by John Wood and David Coward includes The Misanthrope, The Sicilian, Tartuffe, A Doctor in Spite of Himself and The Imaginary Invalid. Together they show the range of Molière's art, from the verse comedy of character to farce, and his satire of hypocrisy, pretension and medicine.
The Popol Vuh, the Book of the Mat or Council Book, is the sacred and historical book of the K'iche' Maya of highland Guatemala, written in K'iche' by anonymous nobles in the 1550s and preserved in Francisco Ximénez's copy of about 1701. The library's text is not a full translation but Lewis Spence's 1908 English study, which retells and partly translates the first books from Brasseur de Bourbourg's French and Ximénez's Spanish and then comments on them.
The Princess and Curdie is George MacDonald's sequel to The Princess and the Goblin, set about a year after the goblins were defeated. Curdie, the miner's son, now nearly thirteen, has grown dull and doubtful; he half believes that Princess Irene's great-great-grandmother was only a child's dream.
Cicero wrote his two dialogues on the state in the troubled 50s BC, when the Roman Republic was strained by the private power of Pompey, Caesar and Crassus. On the Commonwealth (De re publica), published in 51 BC, imitates Plato's Republic but asks what the best constitution is for a real people, and answers with Rome itself.
The Satires of Horace and Persius brings together two Roman satiric voices separated by style, temperament and political world. Horace's Sermones, written after the civil wars and during the rise of Augustus, are conversational poems about greed, ambition, social climbing, sexual folly, legacy-hunting, literary quarrels, dinner parties and the art of living within limits.
The True Story of My Life is the autobiographical sketch Hans Christian Andersen wrote in 1846, at forty-one, for a collected edition of his works. He opens by calling his life a lovely story, happy and full of incident, and says it shows that a loving God directs all things for the best.
Dorothy lives on the grey Kansas prairie with her Uncle Henry, her Aunt Em and her little black dog Toto. When a cyclone strikes, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry reach the cellar, but Dorothy runs back for Toto, and the house is carried away with the two of them inside.
Passages
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Ch. 13, sect. 1
Fortune-tellers and magnetisers, with Wollstonecraft's account of regimen, air, exercise and medicine as the only sound means of restoring health.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter XIX
The duke and the king list their trades, including patent medicines, mesmerism, phrenology and faith healing.
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part II and notes
Reported miraculous cures at the tomb of the Abbé Pâris, with physicians and witnesses for and against, including the case of Mademoiselle Thibaut.
- Candide: Or Optimism, Ch. 22
In Paris Candide falls ill; doctors and others descend on him and his health worsens under their care.
- Don Quixote, Part I, Ch. 17
Don Quixote brews and drinks the balsam of Fierabras; he and Sancho are violently sick.
- Don Quixote, Part II, Ch. 47
As governor of Barataria, Sancho is denied his meals by the physician Pedro Recio de Agüero.
- Essays, Book II, Ch. XXXVII, 'Of the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers'
First-person account of kidney stone attacks, speculation on hereditary transmission from his father, and a long critique of physicians' contradictions and fees.
- Faust, Part One, Scene II, Before the City-Gate
Peasants thank Faust for his service during a plague; he tells Wagner how his father's alchemical medicine killed more than it cured.
- Faust, Part One, Scene IV, The Study
Mephistopheles, in Faust's gown, advises the Student on the faculties, including a cynical account of medical practice.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part III, Ch. 5
A Lagado physician treats colic by inflating the patient with bellows.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part III, Ch. 6
Political projectors propose physicians to diagnose senators and a surgical swap of half-brains between party leaders.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part IV, Ch. 6
Gulliver explains European physicians, purges, clysters and the habit of foretelling death to save reputation.
- Jude the Obscure, Part First, Ch. IV
Physician Vilbert, the road-physician, is introduced selling remedies to cottagers and fails to bring Jude the grammars he promised.
- Jude the Obscure, Part Sixth, Ch. X–XI
Jude's final illness after the rainy journey to Marygreen, Vilbert's return at his bedside, and his death alone during the college festivities.
- Moby-Dick, Chapter 100
The Samuel Enderby's Captain Boomer and Dr Bunger describe the loss of his arm to Moby Dick.
- Natural History: A Selection, Books 28–32
Animal-derived remedies and charms blur medicine, magic and credulity.
- Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism LXXXVII
Impostors who promise prolongation of life, retarding of old age, relief of pain and the exaltation of the intellect discredit honest natural philosophy.
- On the Magnet (De Magnete), Book I, Ch. XIV
Survey and criticism of medicinal claims for the loadstone: purging humours, causing melancholy, curing headaches, extracting arrowheads, and its use in wound plasters.
- Pensees, Fragment 82, Section II
Imagination as the 'mistress of error', able to make men healthy or sick; the philosopher sweating on a plank above a precipice; cats, rats and a crushed coal that 'unhinge the reason'; physicians in cassocks and mules; diseases that spoil judgment.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 268a–c
Socrates imagines a man claiming to be a physician because he knows how to induce vomiting and purging, without knowing when or for whom.
- Reflections on the Revolution in France, On the Assembly's new constitution
The physician of the state who, not content to cure distempers, undertakes to regenerate constitutions; the Assembly's members likened to empirics.
- Sermons on Several Occasions and Primitive Physick, Primitive Physick, preface and remedy lists
Wesley promotes simple remedies and access for the poor, revealing eighteenth-century lay medicine and its hazards.
- Silas Marner, Chapter II
Silas prepares foxglove for Sally Oates's heart disease and dropsy and is then besieged by neighbors seeking charms and cures.
- Structural Anthropology, Magic and Religion, The Sorcerer and His Magic
The career of Quesalid, the Zuni boy accused of sorcery who confesses and is spared, and the argument that magic is effective within a shared system of belief.
- The Adventures of Pinocchio, Chapter 16
The Fairy calls three doctors, a Crow, an Owl, and the Talking Cricket, to decide whether the hanged puppet is alive; the first two give circular verdicts and the Cricket answers with a moral diagnosis instead.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 6
Tom and Huck discuss folk cures for warts, including spunk-water and swinging a dead cat in a graveyard.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 12
Aunt Polly, infatuated with patent medicines, tries the water treatment and other remedies on a listless Tom, who gives the Pain-killer to the cat.
- The Arabian Nights Entertainments, The Adventures of Prince Camaralzaman and the Princess Badoura
Badoura is shut up as insane for refusing to marry, with a cure promised to any suitor; Marzavan, posing as an astrologer, brings the lovers together.
- The Arabian Nights Entertainments, The Enchanted Horse
The Princess of Bengal feigns madness; doctors are summoned from far and wide, and the prince gains access to her disguised as a physician.
- The Comedy of Errors, Act 4, Scene 4
Pinch feels the patient's pulse, attempts an exorcism, and has the husband and his servant bound and confined in a dark room.
- The Comedy of Errors, Act 5, Scene 1
Antipholus of Ephesus describes Pinch as a hollow-eyed mountebank and fortune-teller and tells how he gnawed through his bonds in the dark vault.
- The Commonwealth of Oceana, Part III, The Model (debate on the ballot and agrarian)
Epimonus's speech on urns, balls and the pills of quacksalvers; the agrarian as the cure of a desperate disease.
- The Golden Bough (abridged edition), Chapter III, section 2
Homoeopathic cures for jaundice and other illnesses from Vedic India, Pliny and Marcellus of Bordeaux.
- The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Book VII, Chapter xiii, and Book VIII, Chapter iii
The inn surgeon treats Tom's head wound with jargon and phlebotomy and quarrels when the patient refuses to be blooded again.
- The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, Chapter IV, §§ 6-8
Fainting fits and heart trouble after entering the convent; her father takes her to a place of cures, where she suffers harsh remedies.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, A Doctor in Spite of Himself, Act 2
Sganarelle, disguised as a physician, diagnoses Lucinde's feigned dumbness with Latin nonsense and reversed anatomy.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Imaginary Invalid, Act 3
Monsieur Purgon curses Argan with a cascade of diseases; Toinette, disguised as a doctor, prescribes absurd remedies; Argan feigns death to test his family.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Imaginary Invalid, final interlude
Burlesque Latin ceremony admitting Argan to the medical profession.
- The Popol Vuh (Lewis Spence's account), The myth of Vukub-Cakix (First Book)
Spence's summary of Vukub-Cakix's jaw wound and toothache and the disguised grandparents' false operation on his teeth and eyes.
- The Princess and Curdie, Chapter 23, Dr Kelman
The king tells of his despondency, sleeplessness, dreams and suspicion; the doctor fills the glass from a phial and takes out a lancet before Lina seizes him.
- The Republic and The Laws, Laws, Book II
Unjust enactments compared with the recipes of unskilful empirics who give poisons instead of medicines.
- The Satires of Horace and Persius, Horace, Satire 1.8
Canidia and Sagana's magic rites invoke poisons, corpses and bodily grotesquerie in a comic anti-witchcraft scene.
- The True Story of My Life, Chapter I
His father's delirium about Napoleon, the visit to a wise woman instead of a physician, and the father's death.
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Chapter XVI, The Magic Art of the Great Humbug
Oz fills the Scarecrow's head with bran, gives the Tin Woodman a silk heart and pours courage for the Lion, knowing the gifts work by belief.
Quotes
“These gentlemen understood nothing of my illness, therefore concluded I could not be ill”
Frequently cited
“He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers”
“But where are the portraits of those who have perished in spite of their vows”
“If magistrates had true justice, and if physicians had the true art of healing, they would have no occasion for square caps”
“I say that a wise doctor, when he does not know what he is talking about, should know enough to keep his mouth shut.”
“Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases”
“the cure depended neither on them nor their skill, but only on the princess herself.”
“Give me your hand, and let me feel your pulse.”
“Peace, doting wizard, peace; I am not mad.”
“Another beneficent use of homoeopathic magic is to heal or prevent sickness.”
“I remained there nearly a year, for three months of it suffering most cruel tortures--effects of the violent remedies which they applied.”