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
Surgery
Operations, amputation, wound surgery, the surgeon's craft.
Works
Paul Bäumer, a young German infantryman not yet twenty, tells in the present tense of his last two years in the Great War. He and his classmates Albert Kropp, Müller and Leer enlisted together, urged on by their schoolmaster Kantorek, and now serve in a company that has just come out of the line with eighty men left of a hundred and fifty.
Claude Bernard published this book in Paris in 1865 as the opening of a larger treatise on experimental medicine that he never completed. It sets out, for physicians, the method by which he had made his own discoveries, and argues that medicine must become a science grounded in physiology and the laboratory.
Dracula is told through journals, letters, phonograph diaries, telegrams and newspaper cuttings assembled by its characters. Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to Transylvania to arrange the purchase of a London property, Carfax, for Count Dracula.
Francis of Assisi reaches modern popular culture through birds, wolves, poverty, brown robes, garden statues, animal blessings, Christmas cribs, and an almost ecological tenderness. The early sources are more demanding.
This volume joins Robert Frost's first three books of poems, all written about New England farm country and published between 1913 and 1916. A Boy's Will (London, 1913) is a book of short lyrics arranged in three parts, and the library text keeps the original contents page, where each title is followed by an italic gloss in the third person describing what the youth of the book is feeling: in Into My Own he imagines stealing away into dark trees and believes those who follow will find him only more sure of all he thought was true; in Storm Fear he is afraid of his own isolation; in The Tuft of Flowers a mower finds a patch of butterfly weed spared by the man who scythed the field before him and decides that men work together whether they work together or apart; and in Mowing a scythe whispers in the hay while the speaker concludes that fact is the sweetest dream labor knows.
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.
Fathers and Sons is set in the Russian countryside in the spring and summer of 1859, two years before the emancipation of the serfs. Arkady Kirsanov, a newly graduated student, returns to his father's modest, poorly run estate, Maryino, bringing his friend and mentor Yevgeny Bazarov, a brusque, brilliant medical student of humble origins who calls himself a nihilist: he accepts no principle on authority and values only what is useful, especially natural science.
Galen: Selected Works introduces a physician whose ambition was encyclopedic. The surviving Galenic corpus ranges from technical anatomy and pulse lore to philosophical defenses of method, from therapeutics and compound drugs to autobiography and polemic against rivals.
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.
Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), translated by Abbott as Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, is a short book with a narrow and ambitious aim: to identify and establish the supreme principle of morality. It does not offer a full ethical system, which Kant postponed to the Metaphysics of Morals of 1797, but clears the ground by asking what must be true of moral obligation if it is to bind every rational being without exception.
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver, presents itself as the sober memoir of a ship's surgeon. In Part I, shipwrecked, Gulliver wakes on the shore of Lilliput tied down by people six inches tall.
On a cold December morning in Holland, fifteen-year-old Hans Brinker and his twelve-year-old sister Gretel skate on the canal near the village of Broek on wooden runners Hans has carved himself. Their family is very poor.
Henry IV, Part 1 shows King Henry IV, who took the crown from Richard II, troubled by rebellion and by his own son. In Act I the king, hoping to lead a crusade to atone for Richard's fall, hears instead of war on the Welsh and Scottish borders, and envies the Earl of Northumberland his son Harry Percy, called Hotspur, who has won a victory at Holmedon, while his own heir, Prince Hal, wastes his days in the taverns of Eastcheap with the fat old knight Sir John Falstaff.
Hippocratic Writings is not a single book but a library of early Greek medicine: case histories, ethical rules, theoretical essays, surgical manuals, dietetic advice, aphorisms and polemics against rival healers. Its strongest works begin from the sickbed.
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.
David McCullough's John Adams is a full narrative biography of the second president of the United States, built largely on the Adams family papers and especially on the letters between John and Abigail Adams. It follows Adams from his boyhood on a farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, where he was born in 1735, through Harvard College, schoolteaching in Worcester and the law, to his marriage in 1764 to Abigail Smith, whom McCullough presents as his closest adviser and equal partner.
Johnny Tremain follows a Boston apprentice from the summer of 1773 to the first day of the American Revolution in April 1775. Johnny, fourteen, is the most gifted of the three apprentices in the silversmith shop of old Ephraim Lapham, a pious man who warns him about pride by having him read Leviticus 26:19; the next two chapters take their titles from that verse.
Le Morte d'Arthur is Thomas Malory's English prose gathering of the Arthurian legend, from the hero's conception to the death of the last knights of the Round Table. Uther Pendragon, with Merlin's help, begets Arthur on Igraine, and the child is raised secretly by Sir Ector.
Meditationes de prima philosophia, published in Paris in 1641, compresses Descartes's metaphysics into six meditations, each imagined as a day's reflection by a solitary thinker seated by the fire in a dressing gown. The book was issued with six sets of Objections from learned readers (Caterus, Mersenne's circle, Hobbes, Arnauld, Gassendi and others) and Descartes's Replies, which are longer than the Meditations themselves; a second edition (Amsterdam, 1642) added the Jesuit Bourdin's Seventh Objections.
Sherman's Memoirs, published in two volumes in 1875 and revised in 1886, present themselves less as history than as testimony; in the preface to the second edition he says he writes as a witness before the tribunal of history, supplying material for some future historian. The first volume, the text stored in this library, runs from his Ohio boyhood to the Meridian campaign of February 1864.
Usama ibn Munqidh dictated these reminiscences, known in Arabic as the Kitab al-I'tibar (the Book of Learning by Example), when he was nearly ninety lunar years old and living in Damascus under Saladin's patronage. The book is not a continuous autobiography but a sequence of anecdotes, grouped loosely by subject and linked by association, meant to teach that the length of each life is fixed by God and that neither daring nor caution can change it.
On Medicine, or De Medicina, is the most important surviving Latin medical work before late antiquity. Celsus organizes medicine into diet, drugs and surgery, giving Roman readers a lucid account of Greek medical learning without the dense polemic of specialist schools.
De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Seven Books on the Fabric of the Human Body) was printed at Basel by Johannes Oporinus in 1543, when its author, Andreas Vesalius, professor at Padua, was twenty-eight. Its seven books describe the bones and cartilages, the ligaments and muscles, the veins and arteries, the nerves, the organs of nutrition and generation, the heart and the organs of the chest, and the brain and the senses.
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.
The Second Treatise, subtitled 'An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government', is the constructive half of Locke's Two Treatises. The First Treatise demolishes Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, which derived the absolute power of kings from Adam's fatherly dominion.
The Statesman (Politikos) is one of Plato's late dialogues, usually dated to the 360s or 350s BC. It continues the conversation of the Sophist, held the day before: a visitor from Elea, a follower of Parmenides, has defined the sophist, and now, at Socrates' request, he undertakes to define the statesman or king.
Sts. Cosmas and Damian are the physician saints par excellence: twin or paired martyrs, healers without payment, patrons of doctors and surgeons, and subjects of one of medieval art's strangest surgical miracles. The historical core is modest.
Testament of Youth is Vera Brittain's memoir of the years 1900 to 1925, centred on the First World War, written to show what the war meant to a generation of women. It begins with her provincial girlhood in Buxton, where she chafes against the expectations placed on a middle-class daughter, educates herself, and fights to be allowed to sit the entrance examination for Oxford.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collects the first twelve short stories about the consulting detective of 221B Baker Street, each narrated by his friend Dr. John Watson. In A Scandal in Bohemia the King of Bohemia hires Holmes to recover a compromising photograph from the singer Irene Adler; Holmes, disguised first as a groom and then as a clergyman, tricks her into revealing its hiding place, but she sees through him and escapes with her new husband, leaving Holmes the admiring loser.
The 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 Complete Poems of Walt Whitman gathers the evolving work of a poet who made the self expansive enough to contain a democracy. The center is Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised across multiple editions until Whitman's death.
Around AD 117 the Ninth Legion, the Hispana, marched north from Eboracum into Caledonia to put down a rising of the tribes and was never seen again; its bronze eagle standard was lost with it. Some years later Marcus Flavius Aquila, whose father commanded the legion's First Cohort and vanished with it, arrives as a young centurion to command a cohort of auxiliaries at the frontier fort of Isca Dumnoniorum in the far southwest of Britain.
The Fall of the Roman Republic is a selection of six of Plutarch's Roman Lives, arranged to tell the story of the Republic's collapse in the century before Augustus: Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar and Cicero. Read in sequence, they show how military glory, personal ambition and civil war destroyed Rome's traditional government.
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.
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 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 Institutes of Justinian is a short official textbook of Roman law, issued at Constantinople on 21 November 533 and given the force of law, together with the Digest, from 30 December of that year. It was written for first-year law students: the preface, addressed to the youth desirous of studying the law, explains that the emperor, having reconquered Africa and set in order both the imperial constitutions and the writings of the old jurists, has commissioned Tribonian, Theophilus and Dorotheus to compose an elementary book so that beginners may learn the law as it is actually in force.
The Library is the only complete handbook of Greek mythology to survive from antiquity. In plain, compressed prose it tells the traditional stories of the gods and heroes in order, from the beginning of the world to the death of Odysseus, organized chiefly by family lines.
The Merchant of Venice joins two stories, a bond for a pound of flesh and a lottery of caskets, and moves between the commercial city of Venice and Belmont, the country estate of the heiress Portia. Antonio, a wealthy merchant, opens the play sad without knowing why.
The Persian Expedition, known in Greek as the Anabasis or 'march up-country', is Xenophon's account of the campaign of 401–399 BCE in which about ten thousand Greek mercenaries followed Cyrus the Younger into Mesopotamia and then fought their way home. Cyrus, younger son of Darius II, gathers an army in Sardis on the pretext of a war against Pisidian raiders, while his real aim is to unseat his brother, King Artaxerxes II.
The 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.
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.
On a camping trip in the Canadian woods, eleven-year-old Sam Beaver, a Montana rancher's son who loves wild things and keeps a journal that ends each night with a question, discovers a pair of trumpeter swans nesting on a hidden pond. He keeps their secret, and when a fox creeps up on the sitting pen he drives it off with a stick.
The Twelve Caesars offers biographies of Julius Caesar and the first eleven Roman emperors from Augustus through Domitian. Suetonius does not write history as Tacitus does, with sustained analysis of institutions and causation.
The Underdogs follows Demetrio Macias, a peasant from Juchipila who joins the Mexican Revolution after conflict with federal soldiers makes ordinary life impossible. At first Demetrio's rebellion is local and personal: he flees with a band of men into the hills, fights effectively and becomes a leader because of courage, terrain knowledge and charisma.
Amory Blaine, the only son of the wealthy, eccentric Beatrice Blaine and her ineffectual husband Stephen, is raised in luxury, travels with his mother, and grows up handsome, clever and sure of his own superiority. After two years in Minneapolis and a spell at a New England boarding school, where he is unpopular and then a football hero, he goes to Princeton, drawn by its glamour.
Treasure Island is narrated mainly by Jim Hawkins, the son of an innkeeper whose ordinary life is transformed when the old pirate Billy Bones comes to the Admiral Benbow inn. Bones brings a sea chest, a map and danger in the form of former shipmates, including Black Dog and the blind beggar Pew.
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.
War and Peace follows several Russian noble families from 1805 to 1820, through the wars against Napoleon and the French invasion of 1812. It opens at a St. Petersburg soirée given by Anna Pávlovna Schérer in July 1805, where talk of Bonaparte mixes with gossip about inheritances.
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.
White Fang follows a wolf-dog from his birth in a cave in the frozen North to a sunny estate in California. The novel opens with two men, Bill and Henry, hauling a coffin across the Yukon wilderness while a starving wolf pack trails them.
Passages
- A Farewell to Arms, Book II, Chapters XIV-XVI
The Milan hospital: X-rays, the three doctors who advise waiting six months, and Dr. Valentini's decision to operate on the knee at once.
- A Farewell to Arms, Book V, Chapter XLI
Catherine's long labour with gas, the doctor's advice to perform a Caesarean, the stillborn son, the repeated haemorrhages and her death.
- All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapters I-II
Kemmerich in the field hospital after the amputation of his leg; the orderly refuses morphia; Kemmerich's death and the passing on of his boots.
- All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter X
The surgeons' table, Paul's fear of chloroform and amputation, the nuns' ward, the Dying Room, tetanus deaths, traction, X-rays, and Albert's amputation.
- An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, Part Two, Chapter II
Bernard sets out which experiments on human beings are forbidden, permitted or obligatory, and defends vivisection while discussing the pain of animals and the objections of its critics.
- Dracula, Ch. 10–12
Van Helsing performs successive blood transfusions on Lucy from Arthur, Seward, himself and Quincey, and treats her with garlic and opiates.
- Dracula, Ch. 21
Renfield is found with a broken back and depressed skull fracture; Van Helsing operates (trephining) to relieve pressure so that he can speak before he dies.
- Early Franciscan Sources, Life of St. Francis, Ch. XIX
Doctors use cautery for Francis's eye disease, providing a vivid premodern treatment scene.
- Early Poems: A Boy's Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval, Mountain Interval, "Out, Out--"
A boy's hand is cut by the buzz-saw; he begs that the doctor not amputate, is put under ether, and his pulse fades while watchers listen at his heart.
- Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book IV, Chapter XIX
The physician Cynifrid recounts opening Ethelthryth's tumour beneath the jaw, her death, and the healed wound seen at her translation.
- Fathers and Sons, Ch. 24
After the duel, Bazarov examines and bandages Pavel's leg wound.
- Galen: Selected Works, Anatomical Procedure traditions
Animal dissection and vivisection traditions support claims about nerves, organs and bodily function.
- Germ Theory Papers (Pasteur and Lister), Lister, On the Antiseptic Principle, opening
Lister links Pasteur's work on putrefaction to suppuration in wounds and introduces carbolic acid.
- Germ Theory Papers (Pasteur and Lister), Lister, On the Antiseptic Principle, compound fractures and abscesses
Cases at the Glasgow Infirmary, including a boy treated eight and a half hours after injury, and the method of opening abscesses without admitting germs.
- Germ Theory Papers (Pasteur and Lister), The Germ Theory and Its Applications (1878)
Serial culture of anthrax, the anaerobic septic vibrio, septic dust, and combined infections with the microbe of pus.
- Germ Theory Papers (Pasteur and Lister), On the Extension of the Germ Theory (1880), sections I–II
Cultures from recurrent furuncles and from the trephined tibia of a twelve-year-old girl with osteomyelitis.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Second Section (formula of humanity, duties to oneself)
One may not mutilate, damage or kill oneself; Kant defers the question of amputating limbs to preserve life to a future ethics.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part I, Ch. 1
Gulliver's training as a surgeon and apprenticeship under a London surgeon before going to sea.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part III, Ch. 6
Political projectors propose physicians to diagnose senators and a surgical swap of half-brains between party leaders.
- Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, Chapter 32, The Crisis
Dr. Boekman discusses the case with his assistant Vollenhoven, explains the risk to Hans, obtains the mother's consent and begins the operation.
- Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, Chapter 47, Broad Sunshine
Hans praises surgery as the grandest thing on earth and Dr. Boekman offers to train him as his successor.
- Henry IV, Part 1, Act 5, Scenes 1, 3 and 4
The catechism on honour and surgery, Blunt's death, Falstaff's ragged men peppered, and Hal wounded but refusing to leave the field.
- Hippocratic Writings, On Fractures and On Joints
Manuals give practical instructions for traction, splints and bandages in injuries and dislocations.
- Jane Eyre, Chapters XXVIII and XXXVI-XXXVII
Jane's starvation on the moors; the account of the fire, Bertha's death, the amputation of Rochester's hand and his blindness, and his partial recovery of sight.
- John Adams, Part III
Nabby's mastectomy in 1811, her death in 1813, and Abigail's death in 1818.
- Johnny Tremain, Chapter 12
Rab dies of his Lexington wound; Dr. Warren examines Johnny's hand and offers to cut the scar.
- Le Morte d'Arthur, Book VIII, Chs. VIII-IX
Marhaus dies of a sword fragment no surgeon can remove; Tristram's poisoned spear wound is healed by Isoud, a noble surgeon, in Ireland.
- Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation VI
Phantom pain felt by those whose arm or leg has been amputated, used to show that the senses can mislead about the location of pain.
- 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 of Usama ibn Munqidh, Section I, ch. 8, 'Their curious medication'
Thabit's poultice and diet; the Frankish amputation by axe and the scalp incision of a woman judged possessed; both patients die.
- Memoirs of Usama ibn Munqidh, Section I, ch. 9
A man faints at gushing blood, another at bloodletting; a man saws his own leg; a dropsy case relieved by a wound to the abdomen.
- On Medicine, Book 7
Operations for cataract, fistula, bladder stone and damaged body parts show technical Roman surgery.
- On Medicine, Book 8
Fractures, dislocations and bone injuries require traction, setting, splints and careful aftercare.
- On the Fabric of the Human Body (Preface), Preface to Charles V
The division of medicine among physicians, apothecaries and barbers, and its consequences for knowledge of the body.
- Personal Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XXIV
Shiloh: bruised and sleepless after his horse falls, Grant takes refuge in a log-house used as a hospital, where amputations go on all night, and returns to the rain.
- Statesman, 293a–c
The physician who heals with or against the patient's will, by cutting or burning, as the model of rule by knowledge.
- Sts. Cosmas and Damian: Physician Saints, Miracle of the black leg
The saints perform a miraculous limb replacement, making medieval viewers imagine diseased tissue, surgical instruments, donor bodies, and postoperative identity.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Camberwell)
First experiences as a VAD at the First London General Hospital, learning to dress wounds and confronting the realities of injury.
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb
Victor Hatherley comes to Watson's surgery near Paddington with his thumb cut off by a cleaver; Watson cleans and dresses the wound while the patient tells his story.
- The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Book I, Chapters CVIII-CIX
The escape down a rope of sheets, the broken leg and its treatment.
- The Complete Poems, Drum-Taps
The Civil War poems move through camps, hospitals, wounds, deathbeds and nursing care.
- The Eagle of the Ninth, Calleva chapters (around Chapters VII–VIII)
A surgeon at Calleva reopens and cleans the badly healed wound in a painful operation that finally lets it mend.
- The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Life of Marius 6
Marius has the varicose veins of one leg cut out without restraint, then refuses surgery on the other.
- The Histories, Book 3.129–137
Democedes of Croton heals Darius' dislocated ankle and Atossa's breast growth, then escapes to Greece.
- The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Book IV, Chapter xiv
A surgeon arrives after Tom saves Sophia, advises that she be blooded after her fall, and sets Tom's broken arm.
- 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 Iliad, Book 4.190–219
Machaon is summoned to treat Menelaus' arrow wound: he draws the arrow, sucks out the blood and applies healing herbs.
- The Iliad, Book 11.828–848
Patroclus cuts the arrow from Eurypylus' thigh, washes the wound, and applies a bitter, pain-killing root.
- The Institutes of Justinian, Book IV, Title 3.6-7
Liability of a surgeon who neglects aftercare, operates unskilfully or gives the wrong medicines.
- The Library (Bibliotheca), Book III.10.3-4
Asclepius learns healing from Chiron, raises the dead with the Gorgon's blood, and is struck down by Zeus.
- The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1
Antonio bares his breast as a tainted wether; Portia asks for a surgeon to stop his wounds and rules on flesh without blood.
- The Persian Expedition, Book III, Chapter IV
Eight surgeons are appointed; the army halts three days for its many wounded, and so many men are carrying the wounded that marching and fighting become impossible together.
- 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 Thousand and One Nights (Lane's translation, Volume I), Chapter V, Story of the Humpback and its conclusion
A fishbone apparently kills the humpback; a Jewish physician believes he caused the death; the barber anoints the neck and removes the bone with forceps.
- The Trumpet of the Swan, Chapter 11: Camp Kookooskoos
The web of Louis's foot is slit so that he can press the trumpet's valves.
- The Underdogs, Camp and march episodes
The fighters' drinking, hunger, fatigue and casual violence create a field medicine atmosphere without stable institutions.
- This Side of Paradise, Book One, Ch. 1
Amory's appendix bursts on an ocean liner, the ship turns back, and after the operation Beatrice suffers a 'nervous breakdown' the narrator likens to delirium tremens; Amory is sent to Minneapolis.
- Treasure Island, Stockade fighting
The loyal party deals with gunshot wounds, field treatment, fever risk and pain during the island conflict.
- Uncle Vanya, Act I
Astroff tells Marina of the typhoid epidemic at Malitskoi and the switchman who died under chloroform.
- War and Peace, Book Five, Ch. XVII
Nicholas visits Denísov in a crowded military hospital where typhus is raging and amputees lie untended.
- War and Peace, Book Ten, Ch. XXXVII
The surgeons' tent after Borodinó, where Andrew sees Anatole's leg amputated.
- We, Great Operation records
The surgical removal of imagination turns medicine into political pacification.
- White Fang, Part V, Chapter V
The surgeon's examination and verdict after the fight with Jim Hall, the call for an X-ray and a San Francisco doctor, and the weeks of nursing in plaster casts and bandages.
Quotes
Frequently cited
“A hospital alone shows what war is.”
“A friend of mine knew one perfectly cured of madness by a very harsh and offensive operation”
“The principle of medical and surgical morality, therefore, consists in never performing on man an experiment which might be harmful to him to any extent, even though the result might be highly advantageous to science, i.e., to the health of others.”
“Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.”
“The doctors, having exhausted the therapeutic arsenal of the time, decided to resort to cauterization; it was decided to draw a rod of white-hot iron across his forehead”
“Brother fire," he said, "you are beautiful above all creatures; be favorable to me in this hour; you know how much I have always loved you; be then courteous to-day”
“The doctor put him in the dark of ether.”
Frequently cited
“Say what God tells thee, Mother”
“It is an ugly business, boy, this surgery”
“It calls for wisdom, too, and a reverence for God’s work.”
Frequently cited
“Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? A word.”
“They worked day and night, and did not rest till all the wounded of our own troops as well as of the enemy were in safe and comfortable shelter”
Frequently cited
“Which wouldst thou prefer, living with one leg or dying with two?”
“The sight was more unendurable than encountering the enemy's fire, and I returned to my tree in the rain”
“Cosmas and Damian are regarded as the patrons of physicians and surgeons and are sometimes represented with medical emblems”
“Swann's love had reached that stage at which the physician and (in the case of certain affections) the boldest of surgeons ask themselves whether to deprive a patient of his vice or to rid him of his malady is still reasonable, or indeed possible.”
“if a surgeon operates on your slave, and then neglects altogether to attend to his cure, so that the slave dies in consequence, he is liable for his carelessness”
“having become a surgeon, and carried the art to a great pitch, he not only prevented some from dying, but even raised up the dead”
“appointed eight surgeons to attend to the many wounded”