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.
Medical tag
Syphilis Venereal
Syphilis, venereal disease, inherited 'taint'.
Works
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.
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.
Maupassant's stories, written mostly between 1880 and 1890, are compact, ironic and often brutal studies of French life: Norman peasants, Parisian clerks, prostitutes, bourgeois families, soldiers and the provincial gentry. This selection gathers many of the best known, which typically include the following.
Shakespeare's Sonnets is a sequence of 154 fourteen-line poems, nearly all in the form now named after him: three quatrains rhyming abab cdcd efef and a closing couplet gg, in iambic pentameter. The sequence has no plot in the ordinary sense, but readers since the eighteenth century have traced a loose story.
The 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.
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.
Thomas Kuhn's essay argues that the sciences do not grow by steady accumulation of facts but pass through long periods of settled work broken by revolutions in which the framework of a field is replaced. It was first published in 1962 by the University of Chicago Press as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, and a second edition of 1970 added a Postscript answering critics.
Passages
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, A Doll's House, Act 2
Dr Rank speaks of the inherited disease destroying his spine and of the final examination he is making on himself.
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, Ghosts, Act 2
Osvald recounts the Paris doctor's verdict that he was born with a worm-eaten constitution, and reveals he carries morphine powders.
- A Farewell to Arms, Book III, Chapter XXV
Rinaldi, worn out by the summer's operations, drinks heavily and fears he has syphilis.
- Candide: Or Optimism, Ch. 4
Candide finds Pangloss disfigured by syphilis; Pangloss explains the genealogy of the disease and its 'necessity'.
- Sonnets, Sonnets 153-154
Cupid's torch heats a cool well into a healing bath for sick men; the speaker goes there for cure and finds none.
- The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Book I, Chapters XXVII-XXX
Plague in Rome and Cellini's work for the surgeon Giacomo da Carpi, famous for treating the French disease.
- The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Book I, Chapter LIX
Cellini's own case of the French disease and his fifty-day cure by guaiac wood and abstinence.
- 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 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Preface
Kuhn acknowledges Fleck's monograph on the history of the concept of syphilis as anticipating many of his own ideas.
Quotes
Frequently cited
“Mother, give me the sun”
“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.”