Ceremony follows Tayo, a young man of mixed Laguna and white ancestry, who returns to the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico after the Second World War deeply ill in body and mind. In the Philippines he fought alongside his cousin Rocky, the family's favoured son, and endured the Bataan Death March; Rocky died of his wounds during the march, and Tayo could not save him.
Medical tag
Ancient Medicine
Hippocratic, Galenic, Ayurvedic or other pre-modern medical systems and their practitioners (non-humoral specifics).
Works
De Anima asks what soul is by beginning with the observable powers of living things. Aristotle reviews earlier accounts from thinkers such as Democritus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Plato, then rejects explanations that make soul either a wandering body, a harmony, or a separate passenger inside the organism.
De Materia Medica is an ancient pharmacopoeia: a systematic guide to plants, animals, minerals, wines, oils and manufactured preparations used as medicines. Dioscorides does not write a narrative.
The Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences was published anonymously in Leiden in 1637 as a preface to three scientific essays, the Dioptrics, the Meteors and the Geometry. Descartes wrote it in French rather than Latin so that readers using their natural reason, including women, could judge it without scholastic training, and he presented it not as a treatise but as a history or fable of his own mind.
The Essays volume is a selection from the Moralia, the miscellaneous body of some seventy-eight surviving treatises attributed to Plutarch, alongside his famous Lives. Where the Lives teach ethics through the example of great men, the Moralia address readers directly, offering practical moral philosophy in the form of lectures, letters, dialogues and consolations.
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.
Heraclitus's book does not survive; what remains are roughly 130 short sayings preserved as quotations by later authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus and Diogenes Laertius. Modern editions number them according to Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (DK), and the reference edition presents them in a fresh translation with commentary.
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.
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.
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.
Macbeth opens on a Scottish heath where three witches plan to meet Macbeth. Returning from victory over rebels and Norwegian invaders, Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo meet the witches, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and future king, and tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings.
The Meditations, which Marcus Aurelius may have titled simply 'To Himself', is a private notebook of philosophical reflections written in Greek, probably during his military campaigns on the Danube in the 170s CE. It was not intended for publication and consists of twelve books of entries ranging from single sentences to short essays, often repeated and varied as exercises to fix principles in the mind.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin poem in fifteen books of dactylic hexameter, about 12,000 lines, that strings together some 250 myths of transformation from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus. Its unifying thread is change of form: gods, humans and nymphs become animals, plants, stones, stars and springs, usually at moments of extreme passion, violence or divine punishment.
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.
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.
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 Making of Man is Gregory of Nyssa's theological anthropology, written as an extended reflection on Genesis and the claim that human beings are made in the image of God. Gregory combines scriptural exegesis, Platonizing philosophy, and late antique physiology to ask why humanity is embodied, rational, sexual, mortal, and capable of divine likeness.
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.
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.
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 Summa Theologiae, traditionally called the Summa Theologica, is Aquinas's unfinished synthesis of Christian theology, written, as its prologue says, for beginners who were confused by the disorder and repetition of existing textbooks. It contains some 512 questions divided into about 2,600 articles, each built on the same disciplined form inherited from university disputation.
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.
The Age of Alexander is a collection of nine of Plutarch's Lives covering the Greek world in the fourth and early third centuries BCE, from the decline of Sparta and Thebes through the rise of Macedon and the conquests of Alexander to the struggles of his successors. Removed from their original Roman pairings, they read as a sequence of Greek history told through character.
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 Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, forming part of the sixth book of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic of the war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra at the moment before battle begins.
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 Conquest of Gaul is a common English title for Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, seven books narrating his campaigns of 58 to 52 BCE, completed by an eighth book written after his death by his officer Aulus Hirtius. Each book covers one campaigning year, and Caesar speaks of himself throughout in the third person, a device that makes political self-advertisement read like a dispatch.
The Histories is the first great work of prose history in the Western tradition, an inquiry (historia) into the causes and course of the wars between the Greeks and the Persian Empire. Herodotus states his purpose in the opening: to preserve the memory of great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and barbarians, and especially the reason why they fought one another.
The 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 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 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 Lais of Marie de France are twelve short narrative poems in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, preserved together in one manuscript (British Library, Harley 978) with a general prologue in which Marie dedicates them to a 'noble king', probably Henry II. She says she has heard Breton lais, songs commemorating adventures, and has put them into verse so they will not be forgotten.
The Last Days of Socrates gathers four dialogues by Plato that together tell the story of Socrates' trial and death in Athens in 399 BCE: the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. In the Euthyphro, Socrates meets Euthyphro outside the court where Socrates must answer an indictment for impiety and corrupting the young.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's long return from Troy to Ithaca and of the household that must survive his absence. The poem opens not with Odysseus but with disorder: his son Telemachus is growing up under the pressure of suitors who consume the estate and demand that Penelope choose a new husband.
Les Passions de l'âme, published in Amsterdam and Paris in November 1649, was Descartes's last book and his fullest account of how mind and body interact in emotional life. It grew out of his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, who in 1643 had asked him how an immaterial thinking soul could move a body, and who later pressed him on the regulation of grief and the good life.
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 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.
Timaeus offers Plato's most elaborate cosmological account, framed by Socrates' wish to see the ideal city in motion and Critias's story of ancient Athens and Atlantis. Timaeus then delivers a likely story about the cosmos, not a demonstration with mathematical certainty.
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.
Passages
- Ceremony, Ku'oosh's visit
The elder's traditional ceremony and his recognition that some war sicknesses are beyond it.
- Ceremony, Betonie's hogan, Gallup
Betonie's ceremony, sand painting and teaching that ceremonies must change.
- De Anima, Powers of life
De Anima gives this tag concrete force through the work matters to medicine because perception, touch, appetite, and bodily organization become the basis for thinking about life and mind
- De Materia Medica, Books 1–5, wine and oils
Medicated wines, oils and resins show drug delivery through everyday substances.
- Discourse on Method, Part V
Detailed mechanical account of cardiac motion, valves and auricles, explained by heat rarefying the blood, with an invitation to dissect the heart of a large animal.
- Essays, Advice about Keeping Well (Moralia; may not be in this selection)
A dialogue of health advice on diet, exercise and moderation, especially for intellectual workers.
- Fathers and Sons, Ch. 20–21
Vassily Ivanovich's old-fashioned country practice and his pride in his son's modern medical training.
- Fragments, DK 117–118
The drunk man with a moist soul led by a boy; the dry soul as wisest.
- Fragments, DK 58
Physicians who cut and burn the sick and demand a fee, given as an example of good and ill being one.
- Fragments, Diogenes Laertius, Lives IX.3–4 (ancient testimony)
Account of Heraclitus's dropsy, his riddle to the physicians and his attempt to cure himself with dung.
- Galen: Selected Works, On the Natural Faculties, Book 1
Galen argues that organs possess faculties such as attraction, retention and expulsion, grounding physiology in active powers.
- Galen: Selected Works, On the Natural Faculties, Books 2–3
Digestion, nutrition and bodily transformation are explained as ordered natural processes rather than chance.
- Galen: Selected Works, Anatomical Procedure traditions
Animal dissection and vivisection traditions support claims about nerves, organs and bodily function.
- Hippocratic Writings, On the Sacred Disease 1–2
The writer rejects divine special status for epilepsy and argues that it has a natural cause like other diseases.
- Hippocratic Writings, Epidemics, Books 1 and 3
Case notes track fever, delirium, sleep, stools, urine, crisis days and death or recovery across seasons.
- Hippocratic Writings, On Fractures and On Joints
Manuals give practical instructions for traction, splints and bandages in injuries and dislocations.
- 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 17, Herod's final illness
Herod's last disease includes severe pain, feverish decline, abdominal and genital symptoms, physicians and desperate therapies before death.
- Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3
An English doctor describes King Edward curing 'the evil' (scrofula) by touch.
- Meditations, Book 1.17
Marcus thanks the gods for remedies given in dreams, including for spitting of blood and giddiness.
- Metamorphoses, Book VII
Aeacus describes the plague at Aegina: fever, thirst, corpses and the failure of medicine.
- Metamorphoses, Book XV
Aesculapius comes from Epidaurus to Rome as a serpent to end a pestilence.
- Natural History: A Selection, Books 20–27
Medicinal plants are cataloged with uses for pain, sleep, wounds, digestion and mental disturbance.
- Natural History: A Selection, Books 28–32
Animal-derived remedies and charms blur medicine, magic and credulity.
- Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism LXVI
Bacon criticises the doctrines of elementary qualities and occult specific powers while commending physicians' attention to attraction, astringency, maturation and other secondary qualities of medicines.
- Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism LXXIII
Citing Celsus, Bacon observes that medical experiments came first and philosophical causes were assigned afterward, using medicine as evidence against speculative systems.
- On Medicine, Book 1, Preface
The history of medical schools frames medicine as a debate between reason, experience and practical method.
- On Medicine, Book 2
Fever, crisis, prognosis and evacuations structure the management of acute illness.
- On Medicine, Book 8
Fractures, dislocations and bone injuries require traction, setting, splints and careful aftercare.
- On the Making of Man, Body, senses, and mind
On the Making of Man gives this tag concrete force through its medical lens includes anatomy, generation, bodily organs, sex difference, mortality, resurrection, and the porous border between medicine and theology
- On the Origin of Species, Difficulties and consequences
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
- 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.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 270c–d
Appeal to Hippocrates: understanding the body, like the soul, requires understanding the nature of the whole.
- Sts. Cosmas and Damian: Physician Saints, Byzantine shrine incubation
Patients sleep at or near shrines, receive dream instructions, and report cures, blending ritual, expectation, and therapeutic authority.
- Summa Theologica, I, Q. 91, Art. 3
The fitness of the human body: equable temperament, the largest brain relative to body size, upright posture, and the trade-off with smell and speed.
- 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 Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 8
Aristotle's teaching gives Alexander a taste for medicine; he treats his friends when they are ill.
- The Arthashastra, Book 4 (examination of sudden death)
Procedures for inspecting a corpse to determine whether death resulted from hanging, drowning, poison or violence.
- The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 17.7–17.10
Foods classified as sattvic, rajasic and tamasic, with their effects on health, mood and vitality.
- The Bible, 2 Kings 20:1–7 / Isaiah 38
Hezekiah's mortal illness and the lump of figs laid on his boil.
- The Conquest of Gaul, Book VI.13–16
Druid teaching on memory and the soul's survival; those suffering severe diseases vow human sacrifices to win back the gods' favour.
- The Histories, Book 1.197
The Babylonians, having no physicians, carry the sick into the market so passers-by can advise them.
- The Histories, Book 2.84–88
Egyptian medical specialization and the three grades of embalming, with removal of brain and viscera.
- The Iliad, Book 5
Diomedes' rampage: detailed anatomical wounds, and the healing of the wounded gods by the divine physician Paieon.
- The Jewish War, Book 1, late Herod narrative
Herod the Great's final illness is described through bodily pain, feverish symptoms, ulceration and futile attempts at relief before his death.
- The Koran, Sura 3:49; 5:110
Jesus heals the blind and the leper and raises the dead by God's permission.
- The Koran, Sura 16:68–69
Bees produce a drink of varying colours in which there is healing for people.
- The Koran, Sura 38:41–44
Job, afflicted by Satan with distress and suffering, is told to strike the ground and finds cool water to wash and drink.
- The Lais of Marie de France, 'Les Deus Amanz'
A strengthening potion from a relative at Salerno; the lover refuses it and dies of exhaustion at the summit.
- The Last Days of Socrates, Crito 47a–48a
Analogy of the trainer and physician: one should heed the expert, not the many, about health of body and soul.
- The Odyssey, Book 4
Helen mixes a drug into wine that suppresses grief and anger, a striking ancient fantasy of pharmacological emotional control.
- The Odyssey, Book 10
Circe's potion transforms men into swine; Hermes provides moly as protective antidote before Odysseus confronts her.
- The Passions of the Soul, Part One, opening articles (c. Art. 7–16)
Brief description of the body's parts: the heat in the heart, circulation of the blood, the animal spirits formed in the brain and travelling through the nerves to move the muscles.
- The Satires of Horace and Persius, Horace, Satire 1.5
The journey to Brundisium includes bodily discomforts, travel ailments and comic attention to digestion and irritation.
- The Satires of Horace and Persius, Persius, Satire 3
The poem frames moral laziness and bad education through imagery of illness, treatment and the need for philosophical discipline.
- The Twelve Caesars, Julius Caesar
Reports of Caesar's falling sickness and bodily habits show illness incorporated into political biography.
- The Twelve Caesars, Claudius
Descriptions of Claudius's gait, speech and bodily difference connect disability, mockery and political underestimation.
- Timaeus, The civic frame
Timaeus gives this tag concrete force through timaeus is unusually rich for medical history because it links soul, body, marrow, organs, disease, diet, and psychic disorder inside a single cosmic anatomy
- Two Lives of Charlemagne, Einhard, personal habits section
Charlemagne's clothing, diet, moderation, exercise and swimming present health as part of royal discipline.
Quotes
“A man, when he gets drunk, is led by a beardless lad, tripping, knowing not where he steps, having his soul moist.”
“The dry soul is the wisest and best”
“Hippocrates after curing many diseases himself fell sick and died.”
“thus of all animals he has the least sense of smell. For man needs the largest brain as compared to the body”
“Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities”
“they who are troubled with unusually severe diseases and they who are engaged in battles and dangers, either sacrifice men as victims, or vow that they will sacrifice them, and employ the Druids as the performers of those sacrifices”
Frequently cited
“Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt”