Characters is a collection of brief sketches of recognizable social types: the dissembler, flatterer, chatterer, boor, complaisant man, reckless man, tactless man, mean man, show-off, coward, oligarchic sympathizer, late learner, slanderer and many others. Each sketch begins with a definition and then offers small scenes in which the type reveals himself through repeated behavior.
Medical tag
Hypochondria
Imagined or exaggerated illness; the malade imaginaire.
Works
Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel parodying the overwrought rural fiction of the early twentieth century, the 'loam and lovechild' school associated with writers such as Mary Webb and D. H.
Parker's Complete Poems gathers the light verse that made her one of the best-selling poets of the 1920s and 1930s. The core of the volume is her three collections, Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931), which were combined in Not So Deep as a Well (1936), together with uncollected and early verse published in magazines from the 1910s onward.
Rousseau's Confessions is the founding text of modern autobiography. It promises to show 'a man in all the integrity of nature', the author himself, concealing nothing.
Kant's first Critique asks whether metaphysics is possible as a science, and answers by examining reason's own powers before trusting any of its claims about God, the soul or the world as a whole. The first-edition preface describes human reason as burdened by questions it cannot dismiss and cannot answer, and the second-edition preface proposes a Copernican experiment: instead of assuming that knowledge must conform to objects, suppose that objects must conform to the forms of our knowing.
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.
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.
Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind is often called the first American psychiatry textbook. Benjamin Rush gathers observations, classifications, causes, and treatments for mania, melancholy, hypochondria, derangement, moral faculties, memory, and related conditions.
The Pensées ('Thoughts') are the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, found after Pascal's death in 1662 as nearly a thousand notes, many on slips of paper threaded together in bundles. Pascal had planned a work that would first unsettle the complacent unbeliever (the honnête homme of polite society) by showing the misery and contradiction of the human condition, then show that Christianity alone explains that condition and offers its remedy.
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.
Pride and Prejudice turns courtship into a discipline of moral interpretation. Elizabeth Bennet first judges Fitzwilliam Darcy by his proud refusal to dance and by Wickham's persuasive account of injury, while Darcy judges Elizabeth through the embarrassment of her family, the inferiority of her connections, and his own rank.
The Anatomy of Melancholy presents itself as a medical treatise, laid out in the scholastic manner of partitions, sections, members and subsections, on 'what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it'. It is also an encyclopedia of Renaissance learning, a compendium of quotation from more than a thousand authors, a satire on human folly, and a consolation for its author and readers.
The Misanthrope and Other Plays collects several of Molière's comedies; the edition translated by John Wood and David Coward includes The Misanthrope, The Sicilian, Tartuffe, A Doctor in Spite of Himself and The Imaginary Invalid. Together they show the range of Molière's art, from the verse comedy of character to farce, and his satire of hypocrisy, pretension and medicine.
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 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.
Passages
- Cold Comfort Farm, Early chapters and passim
Aunt Ada keeps to her room and controls her family through the memory of the woodshed.
- Cold Comfort Farm, Penultimate chapters
Flora's long conversation with Ada, which ends her self-imposed confinement.
- Complete Poems, 'Symptom Recital' (Sunset Gun or Death and Taxes)
A list of complaints of mood, sleep and temper presented as symptoms, revealed as signs of falling in love.
- Confessions, Book VI
The attack of pounding arteries and tinnitus with permanent partial deafness; insomnia; 'the vapors'; reading anatomy and imagining a polyp of the heart; the journey to the physicians of Montpellier and their waters and whey.
- Daisy Miller, Part I
Mrs Miller's dyspepsia and her faith in her doctor at home in Schenectady.
- Pensees, Fragment 109, Section II
Health and sickness each produce their own desires; we take medicine cheerfully when ill; our fears come from imagining a state we are not in.
- Persuasion, Vol. I, Ch. 6–7
Mary's complaints of illness at Uppercross; her son's dislocated collarbone after a fall and the household's response.
- Pride and Prejudice, Letters and reversals
Pride and Prejudice gives this tag concrete force through its medical angle is modest but present in nerves, hypochondriacal comedy, domestic stress, and the social management of women's bodies and futures
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 1, Sect. 3, Memb. 1, Subs. 2; Memb. 2
Symptoms in the mind: fear, sorrow, suspicion, jealousy, fixed delusions such as believing oneself made of glass, and the windy hypochondriacal melancholy.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Imaginary Invalid, Act 1, Scene 1
Argan audits his apothecary's bill for enemas, purges and draughts.
- The Secret Garden, Colin's room
Colin's confinement, fear of deformity and expectation of death show hypochondriacal and disability-anxiety themes.
Quotes
“I saw something nasty in the woodshed!”
“It is certain my disorder was in a great measure hypochondriacal”
“I could not read the description of any malady without thinking it mine, and, had I not been already indisposed, I am certain I should have become so from this study”
“These gentlemen understood nothing of my illness, therefore concluded I could not be ill”
“She makes men happy and sad, healthy and sick, rich and poor”