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
Fever Infection
Fevers (typhus, scarlet, 'brain', 'nervous' fever), infection, sepsis.
Works
A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia is one of the most important public-health and Black-authored documents of the early United States. Written by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones after the devastating yellow fever epidemic of 1793, it answers Mathew Carey's published accusations that Black Philadelphians profited from disaster or behaved badly during the crisis.
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.
The Confessions is a prayer in thirteen books addressed to God, in which Augustine recounts his life up to his mother's death and then turns to philosophical reflection on memory, time and the creation narrative of Genesis. Books I to IX are autobiographical.
Crime and Punishment follows Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished former student in St. Petersburg, as he murders the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta while testing an idea about extraordinary persons who may step over ordinary law.
Daisy Miller: A Study is told in close third person through Frederick Winterbourne, a young American who has lived most of his life in Geneva and has grown, in his aunt's phrase, too used to European ways. At a hotel in Vevey on Lake Geneva he meets Annie 'Daisy' Miller, a pretty, rich and uninhibited girl from Schenectady, New York, travelling with her vague, dyspeptic mother and her brash little brother Randolph, accompanied by a courier, Eugenio, whom they treat almost as a member of the family.
Death Comes for the Archbishop follows Jean Marie Latour and Joseph Vaillant, French missionary priests sent to the newly annexed American Southwest to organize the Catholic Church in New Mexico. Cather shapes the novel less as a conventional plot than as a sequence of remembered journeys, encounters, hardships, and acts of pastoral administration.
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.
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.
Washington's Farewell Address and selected letters present leadership as restraint, reputation, and institutional precedent. The Farewell Address, published in 1796 near the end of his presidency, warns against sectional division, party spirit, foreign entanglement, public debt, and attacks on constitutional authority.
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.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a frame narrative told through the letters of Robert Walton, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice. Walton rescues a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing a gigantic figure across the frozen sea, and who tells his story as a warning to a man whose ambition resembles his own.
Heart of Darkness is told by an unnamed narrator aboard the yawl Nellie, anchored in the Thames estuary at dusk, who reports a story told by his companion, the seaman Charles Marlow. Marlow begins by observing that the Thames, too, was once one of the dark places of the earth when the Romans came.
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.
Napoleon dictated or wrote tens of thousands of letters, often several dozen a day, to generals, ministers, prefects, bishops, kings, his family and the women he loved. Napoleon III's government published a thirty-two-volume Correspondance de Napoléon Ier between 1858 and 1870, pruning letters that embarrassed the dynasty; the Fondation Napoléon's complete edition, begun in 2004, runs to more than forty thousand items.
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil was published in London in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, and its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny subjects, holding a sword and a bishop's crozier above a peaceful town. The Introduction states the governing analogy: as art can make automata with springs for hearts and strings for nerves, so human art creates the commonwealth, an artificial man whose soul is sovereignty.
Sulpitius Severus's Life of St. Martin made Martin of Tours one of the defining saints of the Latin West.
Little Women follows the four March sisters growing up in a New England town during and after the American Civil War, while their father serves as an army chaplain. Meg, the eldest, is pretty and longs for fine things; Jo, a tomboyish aspiring writer with a quick temper, is the heart of the book; Beth is shy, gentle and musical; and Amy, the youngest, is artistic and vain.
Lord Jim begins with an omniscient narrator describing Jim, a young English parson's son who went to sea after reading light holiday literature and dreams of heroic deeds. Injured by a falling spar, he recovers in an Eastern port and takes a berth as chief mate of the Patna, a decrepit steamer carrying eight hundred Muslim pilgrims across the Arabian Sea.
Mansfield Park follows Fanny Price, the timid daughter of a poor, overburdened family in Portsmouth, who at ten is taken in by her wealthy aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, at Mansfield Park in Northamptonshire. Her other aunt, the officious and mean Mrs Norris, never lets her forget her dependent status, and her cousins Tom, Maria and Julia treat her with indifference.
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.
Northanger Abbey follows Catherine Morland, the unremarkable seventeen-year-old daughter of a country clergyman, whom the narrator teasingly insists no one would have supposed born to be a heroine. Catherine is a devoted reader of Gothic novels, especially Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.
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 Nature of the Universe, better known as De Rerum Natura, is a philosophical poem that tries to cure fear by explaining the world. Lucretius addresses Memmius and invokes Venus, then argues that religion has driven human beings to cruelty, as in the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
On the Road is narrated by Sal Paradise, a young writer living with his aunt in New Jersey, and records a series of journeys back and forth across the United States and into Mexico between 1947 and 1950. The engine of the book is Dean Moriarty, a fast-talking, car-stealing, endlessly restless young man from Denver who seems to Sal the embodiment of a wild, joyous American energy.
On War (Vom Kriege) is an unfinished philosophical inquiry into the nature of war, written by a Prussian staff officer who had lived through the Napoleonic transformation of warfare. It is organised in eight books, but Clausewitz left a note in 1827 saying that only the first chapter of Book I satisfied him, and he was revising the whole when he died.
The Personal Memoirs of U. S.
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.
Sense and Sensibility follows two sisters whose temperaments represent the opposed values of its title. When Henry Dashwood dies, Norland Park in Sussex passes to John, his son by a first marriage, who promises to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters but is talked out of any real generosity by his grasping wife Fanny.
Donne's Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions bring the metaphysical imagination into pulpit and sickroom. The sermons, including Death's Duel, display a preacher fascinated by mortality, judgment, resurrection, the body, and the unstable boundary between private self and Christian community.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence's account of his two years with the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, from his first visit to the Hejaz in October 1916 to the entry into Damascus in October 1918. It opens with an introductory chapter that admits the book's political bad conscience: Lawrence knew that Britain and France had already divided the Arab lands in the Sykes–Picot agreement while he encouraged the Arabs to fight for independence.
St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles traces a murder into a medical archive.
Sts. Roch and Sebastian became plague saints through two different imaginative routes.
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.
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 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 Art of War is a short treatise of thirteen chapters, around six thousand Chinese characters, written as a sequence of terse sayings introduced by the formula 'Sun Tzu said'. It begins by declaring war a matter of life and death for the state, to be studied through five constant factors: the moral law that binds people to their ruler, heaven (weather and seasons), earth (terrain and distance), the commander's qualities, and method and discipline.
Dell'arte della guerra, printed in Florence in 1521, is the only one of Machiavelli's political works published in his lifetime. It is a dialogue in seven books, set in 1516 in the Orti Oricellari, the shaded garden of Cosimo Rucellai, where the humanist circle that Machiavelli frequented met to discuss Livy and republican government.
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872 when Nietzsche was a twenty-seven-year-old professor at Basel, argues that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two opposed artistic drives, which he names after the gods Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian is the drive toward clear form, measure and individuation, whose physiological analogue is the dream, in which every person is a perfect artist of images.
Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Civili, in three books, narrate the first two years of the war he fought against Pompey and the senatorial party, from January 49 BCE to the beginning of the Alexandrian war in late 48. The work is unfinished, breaking off in Alexandria, and it is the most openly political of his writings: its constant task is to show that Caesar was forced into war by a faction of personal enemies, that he repeatedly sought peace, and that he treated defeated fellow citizens with a mercy his opponents never showed.
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.
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.
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 Peloponnesian War is Thucydides’ unfinished account of the war between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 411 BCE. Unlike Herodotus’ broad storytelling, Thucydides narrows his gaze to power, fear, interest, decision and the deterioration of civic language under pressure.
Die Traumdeutung appeared in November 1899 with the date 1900 on its title page, and Freud regarded it as his most important book. Its central claim is that dreams are meaningful psychic acts that can be interpreted, and that every dream, properly analysed, proves to be the fulfilment of a wish.
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 Meek One (Krotkaya), also translated as A Gentle Creature, is a long short story that Dostoyevsky published in his one-man journal A Writer's Diary in November 1876, prompted by newspaper reports of suicides, including that of a young seamstress who leapt from a window holding an icon. In a short preface Dostoyevsky calls it a 'fantastic' story, explaining that it is realistic in every respect except its form: it imagines the inner monologue of a man as though a stenographer could record his chaotic thoughts.
The Metaphysical Poets is Helen Gardner's anthology of English poets of the seventeenth century who wrote in the style that Samuel Johnson, borrowing a phrase from Dryden, called 'metaphysical'. Johnson complained that in their verse the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked by violence together; T.
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 Power and the Glory is set in an unnamed Mexican state during an anticlerical campaign that has outlawed or driven out Catholic priests. Its central figure is the last active priest in the region, a fugitive known as the whisky priest because of his alcoholism and moral failures.
The Prince is a short treatise in twenty-six chapters that Machiavelli wrote in 1513, shortly after losing his post in the Florentine chancery, and dedicated, in its final form, to Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino. In the dedication he offers the Medici what he calls his knowledge of the actions of great men, gained from long experience of modern affairs and continual reading of ancient ones.
The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan is the young Winston Churchill's history of the Anglo-Egyptian campaigns of 1896–1899 that destroyed the Mahdist state in the Sudan. Churchill begins with geography and the Nile, which he presents as the thread on which the whole story hangs, and then with the rebellion of Muhammad Ahmad, a Dongolawi boat-builder's son and Sufi ascetic who proclaimed himself the Mahdi in 1881.
The Vampyre is a brief but enormously influential Gothic tale that turns the vampire from folkloric corpse into a fashionable aristocratic predator. Aubrey, a young gentleman of imagination and moral seriousness, enters London society and becomes fascinated by Lord Ruthven, a mysterious nobleman whose charm is inseparable from coldness.
The Voyage of the Beagle is Darwin's account of his five-year journey around South America, the Pacific, Australia, and the Atlantic aboard HMS Beagle. It is a travel book before it is an evolutionary treatise: Darwin describes landscapes, fossils, earthquakes, volcanoes, coral reefs, animals, plants, Indigenous peoples, imperial violence, slavery, disease, and the practical hardships of field observation.
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.
Wuthering Heights is a violent family romance told through layered narration. Mr.
Passages
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, A Doll's House, Act 1
Nora reveals that Torvald's life was saved by a year in Italy prescribed by doctors, paid for with the secret loan.
- A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, Defense of Black caregivers
Allen and Jones describe dangerous care work performed by Black residents during the epidemic.
- Black Beauty, Part I (Birtwick chapters)
Joe Green gives the overheated Beauty cold water and no blanket; Beauty falls seriously ill and is treated by the horse doctor and nursed by John.
- Black Beauty, Part IV (London)
Jerry Barker falls ill with bronchitis from exposure and must give up cab work.
- Confessions, Book I.11
As a boy Augustine falls ill with a fever and stomach pains and begs for baptism, which is postponed when he recovers.
- Confessions, Book IX.10–13
Monica's fever and death at Ostia and Augustine's struggle to restrain his tears.
- Crime and Punishment, Confession and exile
Crime and Punishment gives this tag concrete force through this is a major psychiatric novel: fever, delirium, obsession, dissociation, alcoholism, suicide, trauma, and moral injury drive the action
- Daisy Miller, Part II (Colosseum scene)
Winterbourne warns Daisy of the danger of the Roman fever from the night air.
- Daisy Miller, Part II (closing pages)
Daisy's illness, the doctor's attendance, her death and burial in the Protestant cemetery.
- Death Comes for the Archbishop, Appointment and arrival
Death Comes for the Archbishop gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes travel hardship, hunger, fever, aging, deathbed care, and the bodily cost of missionary life in an arid landscape
- Don Quixote, Part II, Ch. 74
Don Quixote falls into a fever, sleeps, wakes sane, renounces chivalry and dies.
- Dracula, Ch. 8–9
Sister Agatha writes from Budapest that Jonathan has been suffering from a violent brain fever.
- Farewell Address and Selected Letters, Revolutionary War letters on army health
Camp disease, supply shortages, and inoculation decisions show public health as military necessity.
- Fathers and Sons, Ch. 27
Bazarov cuts himself during a post-mortem on a typhus victim; he describes his symptoms clinically, accepts his death and sends for Odintsova.
- Frankenstein, Vol. I, Ch. I–II (1818) / Ch. 2–3 (1831)
Victor's youthful reading of Agrippa, Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus; his mother dies of scarlet fever caught while nursing Elizabeth.
- Frankenstein, Vol. I, Ch. IV (1818) / Ch. 5 (1831)
Animation of the creature, Victor's nightmare of Elizabeth turning into his mother's corpse, flight, and months-long nervous fever nursed by Clerval.
- Frankenstein, Vol. III, Ch. IV (1818) / Ch. 21 (1831)
Imprisoned in Ireland after Clerval's death, Victor suffers prolonged fever and delirium; on the voyage home he relies on laudanum to sleep.
- Heart of Darkness, Part I (Central Station)
The manager's only qualification: he is never ill, in a place where Europeans die of fever.
- Heart of Darkness, Part III
Kurtz's emaciation and illness, his midnight crawl toward the forest, and his death.
- Heart of Darkness, Part III (the return)
Marlow wrestles with death in a long fever and returns to Europe irritable and estranged.
- Hippocratic Writings, Epidemics, Books 1 and 3
Case notes track fever, delirium, sleep, stools, urine, crisis days and death or recovery across seasons.
- 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.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 19, Agrippa I's death
The sudden illness and death of Agrippa I are framed as divine judgment, showing how acute disease becomes political theology.
- Letters of Napoleon, Russian campaign letters and bulletins (1812)
Reports from Moscow and the retreat that understate losses to cold, hunger and disease.
- Leviathan, Part I, Ch. VIII
Madness as excessive passion; rage and melancholy; the man in Bedlam who claims to be God the Father; drunkenness; the Abdera fever epidemic and the hanging maidens of a Greek city.
- Leviathan, Part II, Ch. XXIX
Diseases of the commonwealth compared to epilepsy, hydrophobia, ague, pleurisy, intestinal worms (ascarides) and bulimia.
- Life of St. Martin, Life, Ch. 7: fever and apparent death
The catechumen's fever and death become the first major healing miracle, blending sickroom detail with resurrection narrative.
- Little Women, Part One, Ch. 15
A telegram reports Mr March seriously ill in Washington; Marmee leaves to nurse him and Jo sells her hair.
- Little Women, Part One, Ch. 16–18
Beth nurses the poor Hummel family's sick baby, who dies of scarlet fever; Beth catches it; Amy is sent away; Dr Bangs attends.
- Little Women, Part One, Ch. 19–20
The crisis of Beth's fever passes; Marmee returns.
- Mansfield Park, Vol. III, Ch. 13–14 (Ch. 44–45)
News that Tom has fallen dangerously ill with fever after a drinking bout and a fall; his return home and nursing.
- Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XIV (October 1863)
Willie's typhoid on the steamer Atlantic, the attending army surgeon's warning, death at the Gayoso Hotel, and Sherman's self-reproach and midnight letter.
- Northanger Abbey, Vol. II, Ch. 8–9
Catherine's suspicions about Mrs Tilney's death and Henry's account of her illness and the physicians who attended her.
- On Medicine, Book 2
Fever, crisis, prognosis and evacuations structure the management of acute illness.
- On Medicine, Book 3
Inflammation is described through redness, swelling, heat and pain, a durable clinical formula.
- On the Nature of the Universe, Book 6, plague of Athens
The poem ends with fever, thirst, sores, despair, contagion-like care and burial breakdown.
- On the Road, Part Three
Dean's injured thumb becomes infected and is treated, a recurring image of his self-inflicted damage.
- On the Road, Part Four (Mexico City)
Sal falls ill with fever and dysentery and is left behind by Dean.
- On War, Book V, Ch. 12, Marches (continued)
Sickness in crowded quarters versus on the road; soldiers drinking cold water after heat exhaustion; Napoleon's losses of 95,000 to sickness and straggling on the march to Smolensk in 1812.
- On War, Introductory memoir (Graham/Maude edition)
Clausewitz's death from cholera at Breslau in November 1831, apparently contracted with the army of observation on the Polish frontier.
- Personal Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XVI
A year-long attack of fever and ague in 1858 that undermines his farming.
- Personal Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XXXII
The flooded winter before Vicksburg: malarial fevers, measles and smallpox among troops, hospital arrangements Grant credits with limiting deaths, and orders establishing general hospitals between Duckport and Milliken's Bend.
- Ruth, Ch. 5–7
Bellingham's fever in Wales; his mother takes over the sickroom and excludes Ruth.
- Ruth, Ch. 34–35
Ruth nurses Donne through the fever, falls ill herself and dies in delirium.
- Sense and Sensibility, Vol. III, Ch. 6–7
Marianne's fever at Cleveland after walks in the wet; Mr Harris the apothecary attends, fears of infection send the Palmers' baby away, and Elinor nurses her through the crisis.
- Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Devotions, opening meditations
Donne observes the onset of illness and turns bodily vulnerability into spiritual inquiry.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book III (Wadi Ais, March 1917)
Ill with dysentery and fever and covered in boils, Lawrence lies in a tent for some ten days and thinks out the theory of guerrilla war.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book X (Damascus, October 1918)
Lawrence finds a Turkish military hospital full of dead and dying men and organises its cleaning and burials amid the chaos of the city's first days.
- St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles, Water of St. Thomas
Blood mixed with water becomes a portable contact relic used externally and internally in healing stories.
- 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.
- Sts. Roch and Sebastian: Plague Saints, Roch at Aquapendente and Piacenza
Roch tends plague victims and then contracts plague himself, making the healer's exposure central to the legend.
- Summa Theologica, I, Q. 84, Arts. 7–8
Understanding depends on phantasms; lesions in frenzy and lethargy impair it; sleep, vapours, fever-dreams and partly lucid dreams explained physiologically.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Malta)
Nursing in Malta, including her own illness during service there.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 22
Tom is laid up with measles for weeks while a revival sweeps the town.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 19
Alexander falls ill after bathing in the cold Cydnus and drinks his physician Philip's draught while showing him an accusation of poisoning.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 72
Hephaestion dies of fever after eating against his doctor's orders; Alexander has the physician executed and mourns extravagantly.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 75–77
Alexander's final fever at Babylon, day by day from the royal journals, with Plutarch's discussion of poisoning rumours.
- The Art of War, Ch. IX.11–12
Armies prefer high, sunny ground; camping on hard ground near water and pasture keeps the army free from disease; commentators call low ground damp and unhealthy.
- The Art of War, Book VI
How Roman generals avoided disease: fleeing fens and injurious winds, reading local inhabitants' complexions, shelter, shade, water, timing of marches, physicians, and daily exercise.
- The Birth of Tragedy, Attempt at Self-Criticism, §1
Nietzsche recalls convalescing from a disease brought home from the war and asks whether Socratism and scientific optimism are symptoms of decline and disease.
- The Civil War, Book III.47–49
Dyrrachium: Caesar's troops eat chara bread and bark; Pompey's army suffers from foul smells, carcasses, hard labour and lack of water after Caesar dams the streams.
- The Civil War, Book III.87
Labienus describes Caesar's veterans as wasted by autumn pestilence in Italy, with invalid cohorts at Brundisium.
- The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Life of Sulla 36
Sulla's final illness, described as an infestation of lice and an internal ulcer, ending in a haemorrhage.
- The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Life of Pompey 57
Pompey's serious illness at Naples and Italy-wide celebrations at his recovery.
- The Golden Legend: Popular Saints, Life of St. George
The healing fountain attached to George's church shows how martyr cult could become a site for illness narratives.
- The History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 2.47–54
The plague enters Athens and produces fever, inflamed eyes, throat distress, ulcers, thirst, diarrhea and high mortality.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter II, the dream of Irma's injection
A patient with hysterical symptoms, a throat examination revealing white patches, colleagues diagnosing infection and blaming an injection given with an unclean syringe; Freud's analysis of his own professional guilt.
- 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 Meek One, Part Two, Ch. 1
Her prolonged fever; the narrator arranges a doctor and nursing care; her silent withdrawal afterwards.
- The Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, 'A Fever'
The poet addresses his feverish mistress, arguing that the world will perish if she dies.
- The Prince, Chapter III
The extended analogy between foreseeing political trouble and the physicians' maxim about hectic fever: easy to cure but hard to detect early, easy to detect but hard to cure late.
- The Prince, Chapter VII
Borgia explains that he had planned for everything at his father's death except being himself at the point of death at the same time; illness, not lack of ability, ruins him.
- The Prince, Chapter XIII
Machiavelli recalls the hectic-fever analogy: the scanty wisdom of man cannot discern the poison hidden in a policy that looks good at first.
- The River War, Chapter III: The Dervish Empire
The Mahdi falls ill in June 1885; public prayers are offered; he dies of what his attendants recognise as typhus within days.
- The River War, Chapters IV–V
Reforms of the Egyptian army include hospital care for the sick (Ch. IV); the Suakin garrison (Ch. V) suffers malaria, liver abscess, bursati sores in animals and invaliding of a quarter of British officers.
- The River War, Chapter XII: The Battle of the Atbara
Wounded soldiers in high fever carried on a thirty-hour march back to camp without sleep.
- The River War, Chapters XVII–XVIII
Pestilential Fashoda and the Blue Nile operations, where malarial fever affects every European and at one time hundreds of men are sick.
- The Vampyre, Aubrey's return to England
Aubrey suffers fever, terror and apparent mental disorder after Ruthven returns and the oath prevents disclosure.
- The Voyage of the Beagle, imperial encounters
Darwin's observations of slavery in Brazil, frontier warfare in Argentina, and disease among peoples the ship visited set his natural history within the voyage's human world.
- Treasure Island, Stockade fighting
The loyal party deals with gunshot wounds, field treatment, fever risk and pain during the island conflict.
- Two Lives of Charlemagne, Einhard, health and death
Charlemagne's fevers, aging and final illness make the emperor's body a political and moral subject.
- Wuthering Heights, Catherine's illness and childbirth
Catherine's emotional crisis becomes feverish illness, delirium, childbirth and death.
Quotes
“As I have heard tell of a certain Spanish poet, who had been seized with sickness, and though he recovered therefrom yet remained so oblivious of his past life, that he would not believe the plays and tragedies he had written to be his own”
“This was the commencement of a nervous fever which confined me for several months”
“Which Venime I will not doubt to compare to the biting of a mad Dogge, which is a disease the Physicians call Hydrophobia, or Fear Of Water”
“the Blood in a Pleurisie, getting into the Membrane of the breast, breedeth there an Inflammation, accompanied with a Fever, and painfull stitches”
“But, after the lapse only of a few days, the catechumen, seized with a languor, began to suffer from a violent fever”
“I could not help reproaching myself for having consented to his visit in that sickly region in the summer-time”
“How many trifling illnesses by that means become serious, how many serious ones become mortal”
“I managed to keep along very well until 1858, when I was attacked by fever and ague”
“Having been cured of a dangerous illness by the intercession of Cosmas and Damian, Justinian, in gratitude for their aid, rebuilt and adorned their church at Constantinople, and it became a celebrated place of pilgrimage”
“At Piacenza, he himself was stricken with the plague”
“If, however, the evaporation be somewhat less, phantasms appear, but distorted and without sequence; thus it happens in a case of fever”
“Then for to avoide infirmitie, thei did flie from places Fennie, or subjecte to hurtfull windes: whiche thei knewe not so well, by the qualitie of the situacion, as by the face of the inhabitours: for when thei sawe theim evill coloured, or swollen, or full of other infeccion, thei would not lodge there”
“and camp on hard ground, the army will be free from disease of every kind”
“slowly recovering from a disease brought home from the field, made up his mind definitely regarding the "Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of _Music”
“that they themselves were not in good health from their confinement within so narrow a compass, from the noisome smell, the number of carcasses, and the constant fatigue to them, being men unaccustomed to work, and labouring under a great want of water”
“many fell victims to the autumnal pestilence in Italy, many returned home, and many were left behind on the continent. Have you not heard that the cohorts at Brundisium are composed of invalids”
“The king established a church there in honor of Our Lady and of Saint George, in which there flows to this day a fountain of living water that heals sick people who drink from it”
“Father, don’t you see that I am burning”
“as the physicians say it happens in hectic fever, that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult to cure”
“Presently those who attended him could doubt no longer that he was attacked by typhus fever”
“The columns were encumbered with wounded, most of whom were already in a high state of fever, and whose sufferings were painful to witness”
“delirium falsifies perception, madness the thoughts”