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
Madness Psychosis
Insanity, delusion, hallucination, raving, loss of reason (non-drug).
Works
A Midsummer Night's Dream begins in Athens with a legal crisis: Egeus demands that Hermia marry Demetrius, while Hermia loves Lysander and faces punishment under Theseus's law. The lovers flee into the wood, followed by Demetrius and Helena, and the play transfers civic conflict into a night world governed by Oberon, Titania, Puck, and the flower whose juice alters desire.
Hume subtitled his first book 'an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects', and he meant it literally: as Newton had explained the heavens by a few observed principles, Hume would explain belief, emotion and morality by a few principles of the mind. Book I, Of the Understanding, begins by dividing all perceptions into vivid impressions and fainter ideas, and holds that every simple idea is copied from a prior impression.
Pinel presents insanity as a medical and moral problem rather than a condition to be met chiefly with chains, spectacle, or punishment. The treatise moves between nosology, institutional observation, and therapeutic counsel.
Hume first published this book in 1748 as Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, and gave it its present title in 1758. It is his deliberate second attempt at the material of Book I of the Treatise, written, he said, so that the argument would no longer fail through its manner.
Locke says in the Epistle to the Reader that the Essay began when five or six friends meeting in his rooms found themselves at a standstill over questions of morality and revealed religion, and he proposed that they first examine what objects human understanding is fitted to deal with. Nearly twenty years later the result was a long, patient survey of where ideas come from, how they combine, how words signify them and how far knowledge and probable belief can reach.
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.
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.
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.
Chess (Schachnovelle, also translated as The Royal Game or Chess Story) is narrated by a passenger on a liner sailing from New York to Buenos Aires shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. Aboard is the world chess champion Mirko Czentovic, a stolid, almost illiterate son of a poor Danube boatman who was raised by a village priest, revealed an uncanny talent for chess, and now plays mechanically and greedily for money, showing no curiosity about anything else.
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.
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.
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.
David Copperfield is the first-person autobiography of a novelist looking back on his life. David is born at Blunderstone in Suffolk six months after his father's death, on a night when his formidable great-aunt Betsey Trotwood storms out on learning he is not a girl.
Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem covers the last twenty-four hours or so of Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old travelling salesman, interwoven with his memories and imaginings of the past. Willy returns early to his small Brooklyn house, now hemmed in by apartment buildings, because he can no longer keep the car on the road: his mind keeps drifting.
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.
Tuke describes the York Retreat, a Quaker institution founded after scandals in local madhouse care, as an alternative to fear, neglect, and routine coercion. The book gives the Retreat a history, an architecture, a daily rhythm, and a theory of treatment.
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.
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.
Early Christian Lives gathers late antique biographies of saints, monks and holy figures, often including Athanasius’ Life of Antony and Jerome’s lives of Paul, Hilarion and Malchus. These works do not present biography as neutral chronology.
Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order is set out like Euclid: definitions, axioms, numbered propositions, proofs, corollaries and the discursive notes (scholia) where Spinoza speaks most freely. Its five parts lead from God to human blessedness.
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.
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.
Humboldt's Gift is narrated by Charlie Citrine, a successful middle-aged Chicago writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and made a fortune from a Broadway hit about the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron von Trenck, which was also made into a film. Now in his fifties, Charlie is distracted, spiritually restless and steadily losing his money.
King Lear begins with a political and familial error: Lear divides Britain according to a public love test, accepts the fluent flattery of Goneril and Regan, rejects Cordelia's plain truth, and banishes Kent for trying to correct him. The abdication leaves Lear with the name of king but without the substance of rule, and the tragedy strips away retinue, shelter, authority, sanity, and finally family.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Medea and Other Plays centers on Euripides’ art of making the socially powerless terrifyingly articulate. Medea begins after Jason has abandoned his foreign wife and children to marry the Corinthian princess.
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.
Meditationes de prima philosophia, published in Paris in 1641, compresses Descartes's metaphysics into six meditations, each imagined as a day's reflection by a solitary thinker seated by the fire in a dressing gown. The book was issued with six sets of Objections from learned readers (Caterus, Mersenne's circle, Hobbes, Arnauld, Gassendi and others) and Descartes's Replies, which are longer than the Meditations themselves; a second edition (Amsterdam, 1642) added the Jesuit Bourdin's Seventh Objections.
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.
Esquirol expands Pinelian alienism into a more elaborate clinical and institutional system. Mental Maladies surveys insanity as a family of disorders marked by disturbances of perception, judgment, passion, volition, and bodily function.
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.
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.
On Liberty asks what limits there are on the power society may legitimately exercise over the individual. Mill opens by observing that the old struggle between subjects and rulers has been transformed by democracy.
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.
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.
Maupassant's stories, written mostly between 1880 and 1890, are compact, ironic and often brutal studies of French life: Norman peasants, Parisian clerks, prostitutes, bourgeois families, soldiers and the provincial gentry. This selection gathers many of the best known, which typically include the following.
Sixty Stories is Donald Barthelme's own selection of his short fiction from roughly two decades, drawn from collections such as Come Back, Dr. Caligari, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, City Life, Sadness, Amateurs and Great Days, together with some previously uncollected pieces.
St. Dymphna and the Geel Colony is less a single book than a layered dossier: a thirteenth-century Latin Vita by Pierre of Cambrai, a medieval shrine in the Brabant town of Geel, and a centuries-long practice of boarding mentally ill people with local families.
St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles traces a murder into a medical archive.
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 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 Bacchae and Other Plays presents Euripides at his most dangerous: gods are real, but that does not make them gentle. The Bacchae begins when Dionysus arrives at Thebes in disguise to punish the royal house for denying his divinity and slandering his mother Semele.
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 Brothers Karamazov centers on the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a sensual, neglectful father whose sons embody conflicting responses to desire, faith, reason, and guilt. Dmitri is passionate, impulsive, indebted, and publicly at war with his father over inheritance and Grushenka.
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 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 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.
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 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 Master and Margarita interweaves two stories: the visit of the Devil to Soviet Moscow in the 1930s and a novel about Pontius Pilate written by an unnamed author known as the Master. On a hot spring evening at Patriarch's Ponds, the literary bureaucrat Mikhail Berlioz and the young poet Ivan Bezdomny are discussing the non-existence of Jesus when a mysterious foreigner joins them.
The New York Trilogy gathers three linked short novels: City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room. Each begins from the materials of detective fiction and then dissolves the detective plot into questions of identity, authorship, language and mental disintegration.
The Oresteia follows the House of Atreus from inherited blood guilt to the foundation of civic justice. Agamemnon opens at Argos, where a watchman sees the beacon announcing Troy’s fall.
The Principles of Psychology is a two-volume, 1,400-page textbook that William James spent twelve years writing for Henry Holt's American Science Series. It sets out to treat psychology as a natural science of mental life, studying feelings, desires, cognitions and decisions together with their bodily conditions, while refusing to reduce the mind to physiology or to dissolve it into atoms of sensation.
Jung's Psychology of Dementia Praecox attempts to make psychotic speech and behavior psychologically intelligible. Working from the Burgholzli clinic, word-association studies, Bleuler's dementia praecox, and Freud's ideas about complexes, Jung argues that seemingly senseless symptoms may express emotionally charged complexes.
The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening was published in Copenhagen on 30 July 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, with Kierkegaard named as editor. ' The introduction argues that for the Christian even death is not the sickness unto death, since there is hope beyond it; the true sickness unto death is despair, a condition in which one cannot die and cannot live, a perpetual dying without end.
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.
The trial records of Joan of Arc are not a saint's life in the ordinary devotional sense. They are hostile legal documents that accidentally preserve one of the most vivid medieval voices.
This volume pairs two of Henry James's most intense short fictions about possession, interpretation and moral trespass. The Turn of the Screw is framed as a manuscript read aloud during a country-house gathering.
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 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.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, translated by Haldane and Kemp as The World as Will and Idea, is Arthur Schopenhauer's single, systematic statement of a philosophy that he claimed expressed one thought from four sides. It appeared in December 1818 (dated 1819) in four books with an appendix criticising Kant, and in 1844 he added a second volume of fifty supplementary chapters keyed to the first.
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.
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.
Twelfth Night begins with shipwreck, loss, and disguise. Viola believes her brother Sebastian drowned, enters Illyria as Cesario, and serves Duke Orsino, who sends her to woo Olivia.
We is presented as the diary or record of D-503, mathematician and builder of the spaceship Integral in the OneState, a glass-walled totalitarian society ruled by the Benefactor. Citizens, called Numbers, live by tables of hours, regulated labor, monitored sex, prescribed walks and transparent architecture.
Passages
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, Ghosts, Act 3
Osvald's mental collapse at sunrise; his mother stands with the morphine he made her promise to give him.
- A Midsummer Night's Dream, The wedding play
A Midsummer Night's Dream gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens is early modern psychology: love-melancholy, altered perception, sleep, dreams, and the boundary between enchantment and madness
- A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part III, Sect. 9–10
Repetition, education and lying give ideas the vivacity of belief; a lively imagination can degenerate into madness when a ferment of the blood and spirits makes fictions indistinguishable from memories.
- A Treatise on Insanity, Introduction and Ch. 1
Pinel frames mental alienation as a medical subject requiring observation, classification, and reform of custodial habits.
- A Treatise on Insanity, Nosology chapters
The divisions of mania, melancholia, dementia, and idiotism show early nineteenth-century diagnostic language before modern mood and psychotic categories.
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section II
Ideas can approach the vividness of sensations only when the mind is disordered by disease or madness.
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. XI, §12–13
Difference between 'naturals' (intellectual disability) and madmen; delusions such as believing oneself a king or made of glass; partial madness in otherwise sober people.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Four, §§68, 154, 156, 157
Memory yielding to pride; health versus pathology of thought; collective insanity; the thought of suicide as consolation through bad nights.
- Billy Budd and Other Stories, Billy Budd, after Claggart's death
The surgeon examines Claggart and silently questions Vere's sanity as Vere moves toward a drumhead court.
- Chess, Dr B.'s narrative (chess against himself)
He splits into a white self and a black self and is consumed by compulsive play, losing sleep and appetite.
- Chess, Dr B.'s narrative (breakdown and release)
He attacks a guard and wakes in hospital; a doctor's diagnosis secures his release from Gestapo custody.
- Confessions, Books IX–XII
The growing conviction of a plot by Diderot, Grimm, d'Épinay and others, culminating in the narrative of flight and persecution.
- Crime and Punishment, The theory and the murder
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
- Critique of Pure Reason, Refutation of Idealism (B 274–279)
Inner experience requires outer objects; representations in dreams and madness are acknowledged but said to derive from earlier real perceptions.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 14
Betsey explains that she rescued Mr Dick from an asylum his brother intended for him, and defends his sanity.
- Death of a Salesman, Act One, memory scenes
Willy talks aloud to people from the past, including his dead brother Ben, while others watch.
- Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, Opening conceptual chapters
Bleuler revises dementia praecox and introduces schizophrenia as a group concept.
- Description of the Retreat, Case statements
The case material records mania, melancholy, relapse, recovery, and chronic illness in early asylum language.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10
Demea quotes Milton's lazar-house (stone, ulcer, colic, frenzy, melancholy, madness, atrophy, marasmus, pestilence) and catalogues disorders of the mind; a hospital full of diseases as a specimen of the world's ills.
- Don Quixote, Part I, Ch. 1
Little sleep and much reading dry Alonso Quixano's brain until he loses his wits.
- Don Quixote, Part I, Ch. 8
The windmills taken for giants, the most famous image of delusion in literature.
- Don Quixote, Part II, Ch. 22–23
Descent into the Cave of Montesinos and Quixote's report of dream-like visions.
- Dracula, Ch. 5–6, 8–9 (Seward's diary)
Seward's observations of Renfield: flies, spiders, sparrows, and his classification as a zoophagous maniac; Renfield's escape attempts toward Carfax.
- Early Christian Lives, Life of Antony, tomb and fortress episodes
Demonic assaults, terrifying visions and endurance under attack structure ascetic combat.
- Ethics, Part III, Prop. XXVI, Note
Pride described as a species of madness in which a man dreams with his eyes open, imagining he can accomplish all things.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part III, Ch. 6
Political projectors propose physicians to diagnose senators and a surgical swap of half-brains between party leaders.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part IV, Ch. 11–12
Gulliver's return home, his revulsion at his family and his daily conversations with his horses.
- 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.
- Heart of Darkness, Part III
Kurtz's emaciation and illness, his midnight crawl toward the forest, and his death.
- Hippocratic Writings, On the Sacred Disease 14–17
The brain is presented as the organ through which people think, perceive, rejoice, grieve, become mad and suffer terrors.
- Hippocratic Writings, Aphorisms, Book 6
Aphoristic remarks classify melancholic and phrenitic states within bodily illness and prognosis.
- Humboldt's Gift, Middle sections
Humboldt's paranoid accusations, violence toward his wife, use of drink and pills, and commitment to Bellevue.
- King Lear, The love test
King Lear gives this tag concrete force through lear is central for psychiatry and aging: cognitive vulnerability, rage, delirium, homelessness, trauma, blindness, caregiving, and unbearable grief
- Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry, Clinical demonstrations
Kraepelin models diagnosis as observation of patient presentation joined to disease course and prognosis.
- Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry, Dementia praecox lectures
Psychotic symptoms are interpreted through deterioration, age of onset, and expected outcome.
- 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 IV, Ch. XLV, 'Of Daemonology'
Critique of belief in demons and possession, reinterpreting biblical demoniacs as madmen and lunatics.
- Life of St. Martin, Life and Dialogues: demons and possession
Demonic encounters frame mental and behavioral disturbance through spiritual agency and episcopal authority rather than modern psychiatric categories.
- Lord Jim, Ch. 5
Marlow visits the Patna's chief engineer in hospital, raving in delirium tremens about pink toads under the bed; the hospital doctor comments on the case.
- Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 1–2
The hallucinated dagger; the voice crying 'Sleep no more'; the drugged possets given to the grooms.
- Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4
Banquo's ghost at the banquet, seen only by Macbeth.
- Medea and Other Plays, Heracles, madness episode
In a related Euripidean tragedy, Heracles kills his family under divinely imposed madness and awakens to horror.
- Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind, Opening chapters on causes and seats of mental disease
Rush links mental disorder to bodily and brain processes, marking a medicalizing account of mind.
- Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation I
The meditator considers madmen whose brains are disturbed by black bile, who believe they are kings, or that their heads are earthenware or their bodies glass.
- Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. IX (Kentucky, autumn 1861)
Cameron's memorandum, newspaper reports that Sherman was insane, his relief from command and his sense that his position was unbearable.
- Mental Maladies, Hallucinations and illusions
Esquirol distinguishes false perception from false judgment and makes hallucination a key psychiatric sign.
- Metamorphoses, Book VIII
Erysichthon, cursed with Hunger by Ceres, eats everything and finally devours his own body.
- On Liberty, Ch. III, Of Individuality (with footnote 13)
Eccentric people risk a commission de lunatico; the footnote condemns trials in which ordinary peculiarities are paraded before juries as proof of insanity and imagines atheists placed in madhouses as a 'humane' persecution.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 244a–245c
The four kinds of divine madness, contrasted with madness arising from human disease.
- 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.
- Selected Short Stories, 'The Horla', later entries
Water and milk vanish from the carafe; the narrator's reflection fails to appear in the mirror; he reads of an epidemic of madness in São Paulo.
- Selected Short Stories, 'The Horla', final entries
He sets fire to his house to destroy the Horla and resolves that he must kill himself.
- Sixty Stories, 'Game'
Two officers confined in a missile bunker, each watching the other, deteriorate psychologically under rigid protocol.
- St. Dymphna and the Geel Colony, Vita tradition: flight from the father
The legendary incestuous threat and flight invite trauma-informed reading, while remaining a folktale-shaped hagiographic motif rather than secure biography.
- 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.
- 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.
- Summa Theologica, I, Q. 111, Arts. 3–4
How angels or demons can move the imagination and senses, set against natural causes of dream-visions and hallucinations in disturbed humours.
- Testament of Youth, Part III
Postwar Oxford: estrangement, numbness, nightmares and a period of distressing perceptions about her own face, followed by gradual recovery.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 1, Sect. 1, Memb. 1, Subs. 4–5; Memb. 3, Subs. 1
Distinctions between madness, frenzy, melancholy as disposition and melancholy as habit, and the definition of melancholy as dotage without fever, with fear and sadness.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 1, Sect. 2, Memb. 3, Subs. 15
Overmuch study as a cause of madness, with the digression on the misery of scholars and why the Muses are melancholy.
- 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 Bacchae and Other Plays, The Bacchae, first messenger speech
The bacchants nurse animals, strike the ground for water and wine, and tear cattle apart.
- The Bacchae and Other Plays, The Bacchae, sparagmos
Agave and the bacchants dismember Pentheus while misrecognizing him as an animal.
- The Bible, 1 Samuel 16:14–23; 18:10–11
Saul's evil spirit, David's harp, and Saul's later violent episodes.
- The Bible, Daniel 4
Nebuchadnezzar is driven from men and eats grass like oxen until his reason returns.
- The Bible, Mark 5:1–20
The Gadarene demoniac, bound with chains among the tombs, healed by Jesus.
- The Brothers Karamazov, Murder and trial
The Brothers Karamazov gives this tag concrete force through its medical material includes epilepsy, hysteria, alcoholism, trauma, patricidal obsession, suicidal despair, and the contagious psychology of families
- 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 Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'The Call of Cthulhu', Section I
Wilcox's fevered dreams and delirium; reports of worldwide nightmares, panic and asylum admissions among sensitives.
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'The Colour Out of Space'
The Gardner family sicken, grow grey and brittle, and lose their minds as the colour poisons the land.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Final chapters
Madame de Villefort poisons herself and her son; Villefort loses his reason.
- The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Life of Marius 45
Marius, aged and drinking heavily, falls ill with pleurisy and in delirium imagines himself fighting Mithridates.
- The Histories, Book 3.29–38
Cambyses' madness, his killing of the Apis bull, and Herodotus' suggestion that he had the 'sacred disease'.
- The Histories, Book 6.75, 84
Cleomenes goes mad and mutilates himself with a knife; the Spartans blame his habit of drinking unmixed wine.
- The Lais of Marie de France, 'Bisclavret'
The baron's periodic transformation into a werewolf and his confession to his wife.
- The Master and Margarita, Part One, Ch. 6–8
Ivan's arrival at the clinic in his underwear, his sedation, and his interview with Professor Stravinsky.
- The New York Trilogy, City of Glass, Peter Stillman's history
Peter Stillman's childhood confinement by his father links language deprivation, abuse and religious theory.
- The Oresteia, Agamemnon, Cassandra scene
Cassandra foresees murder, ancestral crimes and her own death while the chorus struggles to understand her.
- The Oresteia, Libation Bearers, ending
Orestes sees the Furies immediately after killing Clytemnestra and flees in terror.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter X: The Consciousness of Self
Mutations of the self: insane delusions, alternating personalities, Janet's patient Lucie, the boy Louis V., the fugue of the Rev. Ansel Bourne, and mediumship.
- The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, Clinical interpretation chapters
Delusions, stereotypies, and neologisms are read as meaningful products of disturbed complexes.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Part One, C (forms of the synthesis)
Despair of infinitude lost in fantasy and despair of possibility, set against fatalistic and philistine despair of necessity; descriptions often compared to grandiosity and to depressive hopelessness.
- The Trial of Joan of Arc, Condemnation trial, first voice testimony
Joan describes onset, fear, time of day, location, light, and auditory experience, giving material often cited in medical speculation.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, early Bly chapters
The governess's isolation, attraction to the absent employer and first apparition establish an anxious perceptual field.
- The Twelve Caesars, Caligula
The biography uses illness, sleeplessness and behavioral excess to frame tyranny as madness or monstrous disorder.
- The Vampyre, Aubrey's return to England
Aubrey suffers fever, terror and apparent mental disorder after Ruthven returns and the oath prevents disclosure.
- The World as Will and Representation, Third Book, §36
Genius and madness compared; theory of insanity as a broken thread of memory filled with fictions, giving rise to monomania, melancholy or folly; the difficulty of obtaining histories from asylum patients; madness as a refuge from unbearable grief.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Discourse VI: The Pale Criminal
A murderer whose reason misinterprets his own impulses; 'madness before the deed' and 'madness after the deed'; a plea to judges to say 'invalid' rather than 'wretch'.
- Timaeus, Embodiment and disorder
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
- Twelfth Night, Illyrian love plots
Twelfth Night gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes melancholy, love-sickness, feigned madness, confinement, and the social power to declare someone disordered
- We, Great Operation records
The surgical removal of imagination turns medicine into political pacification.
Quotes
Frequently cited
“Mother, give me the sun”
“When the imagination, from any extraordinary ferment of the blood and spirits, acquires such a vivacity as disorders all its powers and faculties, there is no means of distinguishing betwixt truth and falshood”
Frequently cited
“I was not a little surprized to find many maniacs who at no period gave evidence of any lesion of the understanding, but who were under the dominion of instinctive and ab- stract fury”
“The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation”
“For they do not appear to me to have lost the faculty of reasoning, but having joined together some ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for truths; and they err as men do that argue right from wrong principles”
“a man who is very sober, and of a right understanding in all other things, may in one particular be as frantic as any in Bedlam”
“A friend of mine knew one perfectly cured of madness by a very harsh and offensive operation”
Frequently cited
“Insanity in individuals is something rare--but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule”
“their representations may very well be the mere products of the imagination (in dreams as well as in madness”
Frequently cited
“In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits”
Frequently cited
“Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves”
“My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar kind. I shall have to invent a new classification for him, and call him a zoöphagous (life-eating) maniac”
Frequently cited
“The blood is the life! The blood is the life”
“But, in reality, Avarice, Ambition, Lust, &c., are species of madness, though they may not be reckoned among diseases”
“the changes take place inside, you know”
Frequently cited
“This infirmity is the incurable outcome of a very common history of disease, to which we will provisionally give the name of Dementia Prcecox”
“Dejection, subjects a man to causelesse fears; which is a Madnesse commonly called MELANCHOLY, apparent also in divers manners; as in haunting of solitudes, and graves; in superstitious behaviour; and in fearing some one, some another particular thing”
“If some man in Bedlam should entertaine you with sober discourse; and you desire in taking leave, to know what he were, that you might another time requite his civility; and he should tell you, he were God the Father; I think you need expect no extravagant action for argument of his Madnesse”
“For the effect of the wine, does but remove Dissimulation; and take from them the sight of the deformity of their Passions”
“Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand”
Frequently cited
“Out, damned spot! out, I say”
“the report that I was "crazy, insane, and mad," that "I had demanded two hundred thousand men for the defense of Kentucky”
Frequently cited
“Insanity, or mental alienation, is a cerebral affection, ordinarily chronic, and without fever ; characterized by disorders of sensibility, understanding, in- telligence, and will”
“the specious meditations, speculations, and theories of mankind are but a kind of insanity, only there is no one to stand by and observe it”
“they are in peril of a commission _de lunatico_, and of having their property taken from them and given to their relations”
“And so lunatics and ideots are never set free from the government of their parents”
“For when the act of the imagination is hindered by a lesion of the corporeal organ, for instance in a case of frenzy; or when the act of the memory is hindered, as in the case of lethargy, we see that a man is hindered from actually understanding things of which he had a previous knowledge”
“Indeed, the commotion of the spirits and humors may be so great that such appearances may even occur to those who are awake, as is seen in mad people, and the like”
“puts study, contemplation, and continual meditation, as an especial cause of madness”
“one supposeth himself to be a dog, cock, bear, horse, glass, butter, &c”
“And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him”
“My name is Legion: for we are many”
Frequently cited
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents”
“A small dose produced a condition not unlike violent drunkenness, a large one an attack very like a fit of madness, and some dropped down, apparently at death's door”
“Pass that by. I was thirteen when I had a Voice from God for my help and guidance. The first time that I heard this Voice, I was very much frightened; it was mid-day, in the summer, in my father's garden”
“delirium falsifies perception, madness the thoughts”
“the thread of memory is broken, the continuity of its connection destroyed, and no uniformly connected recollection of the past is possible”
“The streak of chalk bewitcheth the hen; the stroke he struck bewitched his weak reason. Madness AFTER the deed, I call this”
Frequently cited
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em”
Frequently cited
“Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad”