A Burnt-Out Case follows Querry, a celebrated European architect of churches who has lost all feeling: for his work, for women, for God and for himself. Travelling as far as the river boats will take him, he arrives at a leproserie deep in the Belgian Congo run by a community of missionary fathers and by Dr Colin, an atheist physician devoted to his patients.
Medical tag
Disability Deformity
Disability, deformity, bodily difference and its social treatment.
Works
A Christmas Carol. In Prose.
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories gathers Flannery O'Connor's early fiction around Southern households where manners, piety, resentment, and violence collide. In the title story, a grandmother's nostalgia and manipulations help divert a family trip toward the Misfit, whose murders expose both her shallow goodness and her final reach toward kinship.
This collection pairs Melville's posthumous novella Billy Budd, Sailor with the best of the short fiction he published in magazines in the 1850s, usually including Bartleby, the Scrivener, Benito Cereno and The Encantadas (contents vary by edition). Bartleby (1853) is narrated by a comfortable Wall Street lawyer who hires a pale, quiet copyist.
Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, subtitled 'The Autobiography of a Horse', is narrated by a handsome black horse with a white star and one white foot. He grows up in a pleasant meadow under a kind master, Farmer Grey, and his mother Duchess teaches him to be gentle and good and to work willingly.
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.
Cannery Row is a loosely plotted, affectionate portrait of the sardine-cannery district of Monterey, California, during the Depression, built from short narrative chapters alternating with self-contained vignettes or 'inter-chapters'. Its centre is Doc, a gentle, learned marine biologist who runs the Western Biological Laboratory, collects specimens from the tide pools, listens to Gregorian chant and Bach, reads poetry, and is trusted by everyone on the Row.
City of God is Augustine’s monumental argument that Rome’s disaster does not discredit Christianity and that human history must be understood through two loves. The immediate occasion is the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, after which critics blamed Christians for weakening the old gods.
Modelled on Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, Hume's Dialogues are narrated by Pamphilus, a young man, to his friend Hermippus, and report a conversation at the house of Pamphilus's tutor, Cleanthes. Three speakers debate not whether God exists, which all profess to accept, but what can be known of God's nature by reason.
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.
Effi Briest opens at Hohen-Cremmen, the Brandenburg estate of the Briest family, where seventeen-year-old Effi, playful and still half a child, is suddenly engaged to Baron Geert von Innstetten, a thirty-eight-year-old district administrator who long ago courted her mother. Effi accepts, partly from ambition and partly from a wish for excitement, and the couple marry and move to Kessin, a small Baltic resort town in Pomerania.
Bacon's Essays, or Counsels, Civil and Moral, grew over almost thirty years from a slim volume of ten pieces in 1597 to fifty-eight in the final edition of 1625, the text used here. Bacon borrowed the name essay from Montaigne, but where Montaigne explored himself at leisure, Bacon compressed observation into dense, balanced sentences meant for men of business and government.
Evangelium Vitae is John Paul II's 1995 encyclical on the dignity and inviolability of human life. It opens with biblical meditation, especially the story of Cain and Abel, and then develops a moral analysis of what the pope calls threats to life in modern law, medicine, family life, and political culture.
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.
Charcot's lectures show clinical neurology becoming a public method: observe signs, localize lesions, correlate symptoms with anatomy, and teach by cases. The English volumes gather Salpetriere lectures on spinal cord disease, paralysis, tremor, sclerosis, locomotor ataxia, hysteria, epilepsy, and related nervous disorders.
My Ántonia is presented as a memoir written by Jim Burden, a successful New York railroad lawyer, about a Bohemian girl he knew in his Nebraska childhood; a brief introduction by an unnamed friend frames his manuscript. Orphaned at ten, Jim travels from Virginia to live with his grandparents on the prairie near the town of Black Hawk.
Of Mice and Men takes place over a few days on a ranch near Soledad in California's Salinas Valley during the Depression. George Milton, small and sharp, and Lennie Small, a huge, immensely strong man with an intellectual disability and the mind of a child, are itinerant ranch hands who travel together, unusual among solitary migrant workers.
This paired entry brings together Alan Turing's 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem and his 1950 essay Computing Machinery and Intelligence. The first paper attacks a precise mathematical problem: what does it mean for a number or function to be computable?
Persian Letters is an epistolary novel made up of letters exchanged between two Persian noblemen travelling in Europe, Usbek and his younger companion Rica, and their friends, servants and wives back home in Isfahan. The letters run from 1711 to 1720, covering the last years of Louis XIV, the Regency and the collapse of John Law's financial system.
Persuasion is Austen's last completed novel, a story of second chances. Anne Elliot is the overlooked middle daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, a vain and extravagant baronet of Kellynch Hall in Somerset.
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.
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.
St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles traces a murder into a medical archive.
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 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 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 Count of Monte Cristo is a vast novel of injustice and revenge. In 1815 Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseilles, returns from a voyage on which he carried a letter from Napoleon's island of Elba as a dying captain requested.
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 History of the Church tells the story of Christianity from the apostles to Eusebius’ own fourth-century world, where persecution gives way to imperial favor. Eusebius organizes the past through succession: bishops, teachers, heresies, writings, persecutions and martyrs.
The Nibelungenlied is a medieval German epic of courtship, deception, insult and catastrophic revenge. Its first half centers on Siegfried, prince of Xanten, who comes to Worms hoping to win Kriemhild, sister of the Burgundian kings Gunther, Gernot and Giselher.
The Old Man and the Sea follows Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without taking a fish, as he sails far into the Gulf Stream and hooks a marlin larger than his skiff. Hemingway narrows the plot until skill, endurance, hunger, memory, prayer, and pain are concentrated in one body at sea.
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 Portable Faulkner is not a single work in the usual sense but an edited map of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction. Malcolm Cowley arranged stories, novel excerpts, genealogical material and commentary so that readers could see Faulkner's invented county as one continuous historical field.
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.
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.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a philosophical prose-poem in four parts, written in the cadences of Luther's Bible. Its hero borrows the name of the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, whom Nietzsche chose because the first moralist should be the one to overturn morality.
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.
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
- A Burnt-Out Case, Early chapters (Part 1)
Dr Colin explains to Querry the meaning of a burnt-out case and describes the mutilations left after the disease has run its course.
- A Christmas Carol, Stave III
The Cratchit dinner and Tiny Tim's crutch and frail health; the spirit foresees his death if things remain unaltered.
- A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Grotesque households
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes disability, chronic illness, trauma, violence, family care, and the charged symbolism of bodily affliction
- Billy Budd and Other Stories, Billy Budd, early chapters
Billy's 'organic hesitancy', a stutter that seizes him under strong emotion.
- Black Beauty, Part II
Reuben Smith rides drunk, Beauty falls and breaks his knees, Smith is killed; Beauty is left scarred and devalued.
- Candide: Or Optimism, Ch. 4
Candide finds Pangloss disfigured by syphilis; Pangloss explains the genealogy of the disease and its 'necessity'.
- Candide: Or Optimism, Ch. 19
The enslaved man in Surinam missing a hand and a leg as punishment.
- Cannery Row, Chapters on Frankie
Frankie's devotion to Doc, his theft of a clock as a gift and his commitment to an institution.
- City of God, Book 22
Resurrection raises questions of bodily restoration, wounds, disabilities and identity.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 11
Four circumstances behind natural evil: pain as motive, general laws, frugal endowment of animals, inaccurate workmanship of nature (including excess or deficiency of humours and disease).
- Early Franciscan Sources, Life of St. Francis, Ch. XVII
The stigmata at La Verna are the major medieval case of sanctity written onto the body.
- Effi Briest, Kessin chapters
Friendship with the hunchbacked apothecary Gieshübler.
- Essays, Essays XLII–XLIV, Of Youth and Age, Of Beauty, Of Deformity
Stages of life and bodily appearance as influences on character; deformity as a spur to boldness and ambition.
- Evangelium Vitae, Medicine and law
Evangelium Vitae gives this tag concrete force through this is one of the batch's most explicit medical-ethics texts, addressing abortion, euthanasia, suffering, conscience, and care for the vulnerable
- Gulliver's Travels, Part II, Ch. 1 and 4
Magnified bodies: the nurse's breast, and beggars with a breast cancer, a monstrous wen and lice.
- Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, Neurological lectures
The lectures use clinical signs, lesion localization, and pathology to classify disorders of movement and sensation.
- My Ántonia, Book II
The blind Black pianist Samson d'Arnault performs at the hotel.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 1
George describes the incident at Weed and Lennie's compulsion to stroke soft things; he rehearses what Lennie must do if in trouble.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 4
Crooks rubs liniment into his crooked back in his solitary room.
- On Computable Numbers and Computing Machinery, 1950 essay, objections about nervous systems and disability
Turing's survey of objections shows how embodiment and impairment enter debates about intelligence.
- Persian Letters, Early seraglio letters (c. Letters 9 and following)
The Chief Eunuch describes his castration and his resentment of the women he guards.
- Persuasion, Vol. II, Ch. 5
Anne visits Mrs Smith, disabled by illness and attended by Nurse Rooke, a sick-nurse of the Bath lodging-house world.
- Ruth, Ch. 8
Abandoned, Ruth runs toward a pool to drown herself and is stopped by Benson.
- Second Treatise of Government, Ch. VI, §§57–61
Freedom tied to the age of reason; guardians must 'understand for' those without understanding; lunatics, 'ideots' and madmen remain under others' government.
- St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles, Benedict and William miracle collections
The collections record claims involving fever, blindness, paralysis, seizures, madness, leprosy, wounds, and accidents with unusually concrete social detail.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Victor Richardson)
Victor, blinded by a wound to the head, is visited in a London hospital before dying of his injuries.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Agesilaus 2–3
Agesilaus' lameness and the oracle warning Sparta against a 'lame kingship'.
- The Conquest of Gaul, Book VIII.44
Defenders of Uxellodunum have their hands cut off; the captive Drappes starves himself to death.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Paris section (Noirtier chapters)
Noirtier, paralysed and speechless, makes his will and his wishes known through eye signals.
- The Golden Legend: Popular Saints, Life of St. Lucy
Lucy's later eye patronage and martyrdom narratives make her important for the history of blindness devotion and ocular symbolism.
- The History of the Church, Books 8–9, Great Persecution
Executions, mutilations, mines and prisons under Diocletian dominate the late narrative.
- The Nibelungenlied, Aventiure 3
Siegfried's dragon-blood invulnerability leaves one concealed vulnerable spot, making the hero's body both magical and anatomically fragile.
- The Old Man and the Sea, The sharks
The Old Man and the Sea gives this tag concrete force through its medical lens is practical and bodily: age, cramps, hand wounds, exhaustion, starvation, pain tolerance, and the dignity of care between santiago and manolin
- The Persian Expedition, Book IV, Chapter V
The Armenian snows: deep drifts, a north wind, men dying overnight without fire or food, hunger-faintness, snow-blindness and frostbitten toes, with practical remedies.
- The Portable Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury selections
Benjy's sensory narrative, Caddy's absence and Quentin's breakdown foreground disability, grief, time disturbance and suicidal despair.
- The Secret Garden, Colin's room
Colin's confinement, fear of deformity and expectation of death show hypochondriacal and disability-anxiety themes.
- The Theban Plays, Oedipus the King, recognition
Jocasta dies by hanging and Oedipus blinds himself after discovering his birth and crimes.
- The Theban Plays, Oedipus at Colonus, opening
The blind, dependent Oedipus arrives guided by Antigone, reframing disability and exile.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, Discourse XLII: Redemption
Cripples and a hunchback ask Zarathustra to heal them; he replies with folk sayings on the costs of cure and describes 'reversed cripples' who are all ear or all eye.
- Treasure Island, Long John Silver throughout
Silver's one-legged body is central to his social performance, underestimated mobility and pirate image.
- Two Lives of Charlemagne, Notker's authorial tradition
Notker's remembered identity as the Stammerer raises questions about disability, voice and monastic authorship.
Quotes
“Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.”
“My arteries began beating so violently that I not only felt their motion, but even heard it, particularly that of the carotids, attended by a loud noise in my ears”
“A defect in the bladder caused me, during my early years, to suffer an almost continual retention of urine”
“The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children”
“Compared with the Moral Law the State is a crutch instead of a limb, an automaton instead of a man”
“when I behold a lump of deformity and diseases, both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my patience”
“And so lunatics and ideots are never set free from the government of their parents”
“Accordingly he cut off the hands of those who had borne arms against him. Their lives he spared, that the punishment of their rebellion might be the more conspicuous”
“Then they drew out their swords and smote her through the throat, but nevertheless she died not anon, but preached to the people”
“disabled soldiers, struck down with snow-blindness or with toes mortified by frostbite”