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
Heredity Degeneration
Heredity, inherited madness or disease, degeneration theory, eugenics.
Works
Subtitled 'Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future', Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche's attempt to restate in plain argumentative prose, divided into 296 numbered sections and a closing poem, the ideas that Thus Spoke Zarathustra had put in prophetic form. The preface opens by supposing that truth is a woman and that dogmatic philosophers, with their clumsy seriousness, have never known how to win her.
Maudsley's Body and Mind argues that mental life cannot be separated from bodily organization, nervous function, heredity, and disease. Based on the Gulstonian Lectures, the book brings Victorian psychiatry, physiology, and evolutionary thought into one frame.
Bleuler's Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias reworks Kraepelin's deteriorating psychosis into a broader and more psychologically complex group of disorders. Its most famous act is terminological: Bleuler introduces schizophrenia to name a splitting or disjunction in psychic functions, not a split personality in the popular sense.
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.
East of Eden is a multigenerational saga set mainly in the Salinas Valley of California from the Civil War to the First World War, which retells the story of Cain and Abel through two families: the Trasks and the Hamiltons, the latter being the narrator's own maternal ancestors. Samuel Hamilton, a poor, inventive, generous Irish immigrant farmer and blacksmith, raises a large family on barren land.
Montaigne called his pieces essais, 'trials' or 'attempts', and the word names both a method and a new literary genre. The book gathers 107 chapters in three books, ranging from one-page notes on thumbs, smells and names to the sprawling 'Apology for Raymond Sebond', which fills a sixth of the whole.
Essays and Aphorisms is the title of the selection translated by R. J.
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.
Kraepelin's Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry introduces readers to psychiatric diagnosis through bedside cases and disease course. Rather than beginning with abstract definitions, the lectures proceed from patients: mood disturbance, excitement, confusion, delusions, hallucinations, deterioration, alcoholism, epilepsy, paralysis, dementia praecox, manic-depressive insanity, and other clinical groupings.
Griesinger gives nineteenth-century psychiatry a somatic and medical program. Mental Pathology and Therapeutics treats insanity as a disorder of the brain, even while admitting how little pathological anatomy could yet prove.
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.
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.
Psychopathia Sexualis is a medico-forensic taxonomy of sexual behavior written for physicians and lawyers. Krafft-Ebing organizes case histories under categories such as hyperaesthesia, anaesthesia, paraesthesia, sadism, masochism, fetishism, and contrary sexual feeling, using the language of degeneration, neuropathic heredity, and criminal responsibility.
The Antichrist is Nietzsche's most direct assault on Christianity as a moral and cultural force. It argues that Christianity reverses life-affirming values, sanctifies weakness, elevates pity, falsifies psychology, and turns resentment into virtue.
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.
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is a selection of Lovecraft's tales, edited with notes by the Lovecraft scholar S. T.
The Descent of Man applies evolutionary theory to human beings and develops Darwin's account of sexual selection. Darwin argues that humans share ancestry with other animals and that differences between human and animal mental faculties are differences of degree rather than absolute kind.
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 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 Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. Instead of studying churches, creeds or theology, James studies personal religious experience as a psychologist, drawing on a large collection of first-person documents: diaries, autobiographies, letters and replies to questionnaires.
Twilight of the Idols is Nietzsche in compressed diagnostic form. Subtitled How to Philosophize with a Hammer, it tests inherited idols by sounding them for hollowness.
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.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Three, §62
Religions as protectors of the 'defective, diseased, degenerating'; the passage expresses selectionist views that later eugenic readers exploited.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Six, §208
Scepticism diagnosed as 'nervous debility' produced by mixing of classes and races, an example of degeneration theory applied to culture.
- Body and Mind, Heredity sections
The discussion of inherited predisposition shows Victorian psychiatry moving toward degeneration theory.
- Dracula, Ch. 25
Mina and Van Helsing describe Dracula as a criminal type in the terms of Nordau and Lombroso.
- East of Eden, Part One (Cathy's early chapters)
The narrator's reflections on Cathy as a 'monster' born without conscience, and her killing of her parents.
- Essays, Book II, Ch. XXXVII, 'Of the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers'
First-person account of kidney stone attacks, speculation on hereditary transmission from his father, and a long critique of physicians' contradictions and fees.
- Essays and Aphorisms, On Human Nature, 'Government', 'Free-will and Fatalism' and 'Character' (stored text)
Character inherited from the father, innate and unalterable; intellectual differences grounded in brain and nervous system.
- Heart of Darkness, Part I (the Company office)
The doctor measures Marlow's cranium, asks whether there is madness in his family and notes that he never sees those who go out return.
- Notes on the State of Virginia, Selected Letters, and The Jefferson Bible, Notes on Virginia, queries on population and race
Jefferson's racial claims show Enlightenment classification entering political arguments about slavery, bodily difference, and human equality.
- On the Origin of Species, Variation under domestication
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
- Psychopathia Sexualis, Case-history sections
The cases show the power and danger of translating desire into degenerative pathology.
- The Antichrist, Opening aphorisms
Nietzsche uses health, decadence, and instinct as evaluative language against Christian morality.
- 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 Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family'
A family history of madness and 'taint' culminating in Arthur Jermyn's self-immolation.
- The Descent of Man, Race and inheritance sections
Victorian heredity and racial assumptions show both the influence and the danger of evolutionary medicine.
- The Portable Faulkner, Light in August selections
Joe Christmas's alienation and the violence around racial identity invite discussion of trauma, heredity myths and social pathology.
- The Portable Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! selections
Sutpen's dynastic design and its collapse link racial violence, obsession, family secrets and intergenerational damage.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture I: Religion and Neurology
Critique of medical materialism; acknowledgement that religious leaders often show nervous instability, and the argument that origin does not determine value.
- Twilight of the Idols, Skirmishes sections
Health, sickness, strength, and decline become tools of cultural criticism.
Quotes
“skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain many-sided physiological temperament, which in ordinary language is called nervous debility and sickliness”
“A man's character, as my readers are aware, assuredly comes to him from his father”
“the changes take place inside, you know”
“Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult—at least I have found it so—than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind”
Frequently cited
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one”
Frequently cited
“from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”
“There was consumption in my father's family, two of his brothers having died of that disease, which made my symptoms more alarming”
“might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of weariness, of disease, of anarchically disintegrating instincts”
“Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic”