12 Years a Slave narrates Solomon Northup's kidnapping from freedom into slavery and his eventual restoration to his family. Northup is a literate, skilled violinist and laborer living as a free Black man in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Medical tag
Medical Ethics
Consent, responsibility of creator/healer, experimentation, duty of care.
Works
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.
A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity is a short paper with a long afterlife. McCulloch and Pitts propose an idealized model of neurons that fire or do not fire according to logical relations among their inputs.
This entry joins Claude Shannon's 1938 master's thesis on relay and switching circuits with his 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. The thesis made a decisive engineering move: it showed that Boolean algebra could describe and simplify relay circuits.
A Modest Proposal is Swift's savage 1729 pamphlet on Irish poverty under British rule, written in the voice of a projector who treats hunger, tenancy, children, and mothers as items in a national account. The speaker begins with beggars and starving children in Dublin streets, then adopts the language of calculation: numbers of infants, costs of nursing, market value, culinary uses, and benefits to landlords.
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.
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.
As We May Think is a speculative essay about the problem of intellectual abundance. Written at the end of World War II, it asks what scientists should do when their wartime energies turn toward peace and when the record of human knowledge has grown too large for traditional methods of indexing, filing, and retrieval.
Franklin's Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack present the founding era through self-fashioning, practical wisdom, and the culture of improvement. The Autobiography narrates Franklin's movement from Boston apprentice to Philadelphia printer, civic organizer, scientist, and public man.
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.
Centesimus Annus marks the hundredth anniversary of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum and reads the social question through the upheavals of the twentieth century. John Paul II returns first to 1891: industrial labor, socialist agitation, private property, wages, association, and the rights of workers.
Cybernetics presents one of the twentieth century's boldest attempts to unite machines, organisms, and societies under a single vocabulary of control, communication, feedback, and information. Wiener begins from wartime problems of prediction, especially the effort to anticipate the path of aircraft quickly enough for anti-aircraft fire.
De Materia Medica is an ancient pharmacopoeia: a systematic guide to plants, animals, minerals, wines, oils and manufactured preparations used as medicines. Dioscorides does not write a narrative.
De Regno is Aquinas's unfinished treatise on kingship, addressed to the king of Cyprus and concerned with why political rule exists, how it can serve the common good, and how it can decay into tyranny. Aquinas begins from the social nature of human beings.
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.
Destruction and Creation and the OODA Loop Briefings gather John Boyd's strategic thought from thermodynamics and epistemology to conflict, command, and adaptation. Destruction and Creation argues that organisms and organizations must break apart old mental concepts and rebuild new ones in order to cope with a changing reality.
Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council's declaration on religious freedom, argues that the human person has a right not to be coerced by individuals, groups, or the state in religious matters. The document grounds that right in dignity, conscience, and the nature of truth, while insisting that the right concerns immunity from coercion rather than indifference about religious truth.
The Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences was published anonymously in Leiden in 1637 as a preface to three scientific essays, the Dioptrics, the Meteors and the Geometry. Descartes wrote it in French rather than Latin so that readers using their natural reason, including women, could judge it without scholastic training, and he presented it not as a treatise but as a history or fable of his own mind.
Early Black Church Sermons and Addresses is an anthology concept rather than one single-author book: it gathers public religious speech from Black Christian leaders before 1950, using only public-domain sermons, convention addresses, ordination sermons, and printed appeals. Its center is the Black church as pulpit, school, refuge, protest platform, mutual-aid network, and political institution.
Francis of Assisi reaches modern popular culture through birds, wolves, poverty, brown robes, garden statues, animal blessings, Christmas cribs, and an almost ecological tenderness. The early sources are more demanding.
Bacon's Essays, or Counsels, Civil and Moral, grew over almost thirty years from a slim volume of ten pieces in 1597 to fifty-eight in the final edition of 1625, the text used here. Bacon borrowed the name essay from Montaigne, but where Montaigne explored himself at leisure, Bacon compressed observation into dense, balanced sentences meant for men of business and government.
Evangelium Vitae is John Paul II's 1995 encyclical on the dignity and inviolability of human life. It opens with biblical meditation, especially the story of Cain and Abel, and then develops a moral analysis of what the pope calls threats to life in modern law, medicine, family life, and political culture.
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.
Fides et Ratio is John Paul II's 1998 encyclical on the relation between faith and reason. Its governing image is that the human spirit rises toward contemplation of truth by two wings, and the whole argument defends the compatibility and mutual need of revelation and philosophical inquiry.
First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC is not a polished monograph but a technical memorandum whose influence exceeds its form. Written in 1945 for the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer project, it describes a general-purpose electronic digital computer in which numerical data and operating instructions occupy the same high-speed memory.
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.
Galen: Selected Works introduces a physician whose ambition was encyclopedic. The surviving Galenic corpus ranges from technical anatomy and pulse lore to philosophical defenses of method, from therapeutics and compound drugs to autobiography and polemic against rivals.
Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), translated by Abbott as Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, is a short book with a narrow and ambitious aim: to identify and establish the supreme principle of morality. It does not offer a full ethical system, which Kant postponed to the Metaphysics of Morals of 1797, but clears the ground by asking what must be true of moral obligation if it is to bind every rational being without exception.
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.
I Am Prepared to Die is Nelson Mandela's statement from the dock during the Rivonia Trial in 1964. Facing charges that could lead to death, Mandela uses the courtroom not primarily to plead for mercy but to explain the political history and moral logic of resistance to apartheid.
Lectures on Revivals of Religion is Finney's manual of revival as method. Where Edwards treats awakening as a surprising work to be interpreted cautiously, Finney argues that revivals are not miracles in the sense of being beyond means.
Charcot's lectures show clinical neurology becoming a public method: observe signs, localize lesions, correlate symptoms with anatomy, and teach by cases. The English volumes gather Salpetriere lectures on spinal cord disease, paralysis, tremor, sclerosis, locomotor ataxia, hysteria, epilepsy, and related nervous disorders.
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.
Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance and Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention show him as both principled advocate and institutional anatomist. Memorial and Remonstrance, written in 1785 against a Virginia religious assessment bill, argues that religion must be free from state coercion because conscience is prior to civil society and cannot be surrendered to government.
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.
Ada Lovelace's Notes on Menabrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine begin as an act of translation and become a theory of computation. Luigi Menabrea had published a French account of Charles Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine after hearing Babbage lecture in Turin.
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.
The Novum Organum ('new instrument') is the second and only substantially completed part of Bacon's projected Instauratio Magna, a six-part plan to rebuild human knowledge from its foundations. Its title throws down a challenge to the Organon, the collection of Aristotle's logical works that had governed university teaching for centuries.
Of Mice and Men takes place over a few days on a ranch near Soledad in California's Salinas Valley during the Depression. George Milton, small and sharp, and Lennie Small, a huge, immensely strong man with an intellectual disability and the mind of a child, are itinerant ranch hands who travel together, unusual among solitary migrant workers.
This paired entry brings together Alan Turing's 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem and his 1950 essay Computing Machinery and Intelligence. The first paper attacks a precise mathematical problem: what does it mean for a number or function to be computable?
On Formally Undecidable Propositions is one of the decisive works in the history of logic. Godel addresses the dream that mathematics might be placed on a complete and consistent formal foundation, a dream associated with Hilbert's program.
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.
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.
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 Regensburg Lecture, delivered by Benedict XVI in 2006 at the University of Regensburg, argues that Christian faith is intrinsically bound to reason and that the modern narrowing of reason endangers both theology and culture. Benedict begins with a contested quotation from a dialogue between the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and a Persian interlocutor, then uses the controversy over faith and violence to introduce his larger claim: acting against reason is contrary to the nature of God.
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.
's public theology and civil-rights argument at their most concentrated. The sermon tradition behind King includes the Black church, biblical prophecy, social gospel, liberal theology, and the cadences of African American sacred speech.
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.
Sts. Cosmas and Damian are the physician saints par excellence: twin or paired martyrs, healers without payment, patrons of doctors and surgeons, and subjects of one of medieval art's strangest surgical miracles.
Studies on Hysteria is the classic collaborative text from which psychoanalysis narrates much of its beginning. , followed by theoretical and therapeutic reflections.
The Annals of Imperial Rome narrates the Julio-Claudian empire from the death of Augustus through Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, though parts are lost. Tacitus writes history as the psychology of autocracy.
The Anti-Federalist Papers are not a single coordinated book but a body of pamphlets, essays, speeches, and newspaper pieces opposing or demanding amendments to the proposed Constitution. Their writers differed among themselves, but they shared alarm about the scale and power of the new federal government.
The Art of the Commonplace gathers Wendell Berry's agrarian essays on land, household, work, food, technology, economy, conservation, and the moral scale of community. The collection's title points to Berry's method: he resists abstraction by returning arguments to farms, watersheds, kitchens, tools, soil, neighbors, and inherited obligations.
The Arthashastra, the 'science of material gain' or of statecraft, is a vast Sanskrit treatise on how a king should acquire, protect and govern territory. Written mostly in prose with occasional verses, it is divided into fifteen books and some 150 chapters, and covers almost every aspect of administration with remarkable detail and an unsentimental realism that has led to comparisons with Machiavelli.
The Communist Manifesto presents modern history as the history of class struggle and casts the bourgeoisie as both revolutionary and exploitative. Marx and Engels argue that capitalism has dissolved feudal relations, expanded world markets, concentrated production, remade family and nation, and subjected older loyalties to cash exchange.
The Conquest of Gaul is a common English title for Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, seven books narrating his campaigns of 58 to 52 BCE, completed by an eighth book written after his death by his officer Aulus Hirtius. Each book covers one campaigning year, and Caesar speaks of himself throughout in the third person, a device that makes political self-advertisement read like a dispatch.
Published in Munich in 1937 under the one-word title Nachfolge (following, or discipleship), The Cost of Discipleship is Bonhoeffer's attempt to recover the plain command of Jesus to follow him from a Lutheran church that had, he believed, turned grace into a doctrine requiring nothing. Its first chapter sets the terms for the whole book with the contrast between cheap and costly grace.
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 Death of Ivan Ilyich begins at the end. In the law courts, colleagues of Ivan Ilyich Golovin read in the newspaper of his death, and each thinks first of the promotions and transfers it will bring.
The Early Christian Creeds gathers short doctrinal texts that became durable summaries of Christian identity: baptismal symbols, conciliar formulas and later Western confessions. The Old Roman Symbol and the Apostles' Creed preserve the shape of early baptismal confession: belief in God the Father, Jesus Christ his Son, the Spirit, the church, forgiveness, resurrection and life.
The Founding Documents gathers the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights as one civic anthology. The Declaration, adopted by the Continental Congress in July 1776, announces separation from Britain by appealing to the laws of nature and of nature’s God, to the self-evident truths that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, and to government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed.
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 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 Persian Expedition, known in Greek as the Anabasis or 'march up-country', is Xenophon's account of the campaign of 401–399 BCE in which about ten thousand Greek mercenaries followed Cyrus the Younger into Mesopotamia and then fought their way home. Cyrus, younger son of Darius II, gathers an army in Sardis on the pretext of a war against Pisidian raiders, while his real aim is to unseat his brother, King Artaxerxes II.
The 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 Quiet American is narrated by Thomas Fowler, a weary British journalist in French-controlled Vietnam during the First Indochina War. The novel begins after the death of Alden Pyle, a young American official whose innocence, confidence and political theories have made him dangerous.
The Republic begins with a question that never stays small: what is justice, and is the just life happier than the unjust? Socrates meets Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Piraeus.
The Rule of St Benedict is a concise manual for forming a stable monastic community. It opens by calling the monastery a school for the Lord’s service and asks what kind of person desires life.
The Scarlet Letter is set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston but begins with a nineteenth-century frame, The Custom-House, in which a narrator claims to discover an embroidered letter A and the story of Hester Prynne. Hester appears on the scaffold with her infant Pearl, condemned to wear the scarlet letter for adultery while refusing to name the child's father.
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 Underdogs follows Demetrio Macias, a peasant from Juchipila who joins the Mexican Revolution after conflict with federal soldiers makes ordinary life impossible. At first Demetrio's rebellion is local and personal: he flees with a band of men into the hills, fights effectively and becomes a leader because of courage, terrain knowledge and charisma.
The Warden is a quiet institutional novel about conscience, reform and the human cost of public righteousness. Septimus Harding is the gentle precentor of Barchester Cathedral and warden of Hiram's Hospital, a charitable almshouse for twelve elderly men.
Twelve Angry Men takes place almost entirely in a jury room after a murder trial. Twelve male jurors must decide whether a young defendant is guilty of killing his father; a guilty verdict will mean death.
Utilitarianism is a short defence of the ethical theory Mill inherited from Jeremy Bentham and his own father. It was first published in three instalments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and as a book in 1863.
Washington Square is a compact novel about an heiress, a suitor and a father whose intelligence becomes a weapon. Catherine Sloper is the plain, shy and dutiful daughter of Dr.
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.
We Hold These Truths collects John Courtney Murray's essays on the American constitutional experiment, natural law, religious liberty, pluralism, and the conditions of civil conversation. Murray argues that the American order depends on moral truths that public argument must continue to articulate, not merely procedural agreement or private preference.
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 Doll's House and Other Plays, An Enemy of the People, Acts 1–4
Dr Stockmann's laboratory analysis of the spa water, suppression of his report, and the public meeting that brands him an enemy of the people.
- A Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1948 paper, treatment of noise and redundancy
The formal handling of uncertainty and error has clear implications for diagnostic systems and medical decision support.
- A Modest Proposal, Rejected remedies
A Modest Proposal gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes starvation, infant mortality, public health, reproductive exploitation, and the dehumanizing language of population management
- A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, Response to accusations and immunity assumptions
The pamphlet exposes how false medical claims about race shaped risk and blame.
- A Treatise on Insanity, Treatment chapters
The discussion of regimen, baths, restraint, and moral management captures the therapeutic hopes and limits of asylum reform.
- As We May Think, Opening postwar frame
The redirection of wartime research toward peaceful knowledge raises questions about scientific responsibility.
- Body and Mind, Responsibility chapters
The legal and moral reflections ask how disease, habit, and brain function alter blame.
- Centesimus Annus, Market, culture, person
Centesimus Annus gives this tag concrete force through its medical lens is social: work, poverty, family wages, consumerism, and solidarity all shape health before clinical care begins
- Cybernetics, Wartime prediction background
The anti-aircraft context ties theories of cognition and control to the injuries and decisions of modern war.
- De Materia Medica, Antidote and poison entries
Descriptions of toxic substances and countermeasures form an early practical toxicology.
- De Regno, Kingship and tyranny
De Regno gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens is analogical: tyranny appears as a disorder of the body politic, and prudent rule resembles care ordered toward communal health
- Description of the Retreat, Treatment chapters
Moral treatment is presented as calm authority, respect, occupation, and minimized restraint.
- Dignitatis Humanae, Human dignity
Dignitatis Humanae gives this tag concrete force through its medical relevance is bioethical and institutional: conscience, coercion, dignity, and religious liberty matter in hospitals and public health policy
- Discourse on Method, Part V
Animal spirits, nerves, muscles and the brain explained mechanically; animals as automata; speech and reason as signs of a rational soul, with remarks on deaf people's sign language.
- Early Black Church Sermons and Addresses, Addresses on education, temperance, and mutual aid
Institutional care appears as a response to excluded and endangered bodies.
- Early Franciscan Sources, Death narratives
Francis's final weakness, song, and ritual gestures make dying a communal and liturgical event.
- Essays, Essay XXX, Of Regiment of Health
Self-observation as physic, gradual change, Celsus's alternation of fasting and full eating, waking and sleep; passions to avoid; choosing a physician of middle temper.
- Evangelium Vitae, Threats to life
Evangelium Vitae gives this tag concrete force through this is one of the batch's most explicit medical-ethics texts, addressing abortion, euthanasia, suffering, conscience, and care for the vulnerable
- 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.
- Fides et Ratio, The two wings
Fides et Ratio gives this tag concrete force through the medical relevance is in bioethics and anthropology: a reduced account of reason weakens the defense of dignity, conscience, and persons
- First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, Memory and control sections
The treatment of memory and orders anticipates later clinical and cognitive uses of computational language.
- Galen: Selected Works, On the Passions and Errors of the Soul
Galen treats anger, error, self-knowledge and moral training as matters with therapeutic significance.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Second Section (imperatives of skill)
The physician's precepts for healing and the poisoner's for killing are equally valid as technical rules; morality must come from elsewhere.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Second Section (first example under the universal law of nature)
A man wearied of life asks whether suicide from self-love could be a universal law and concludes it could not.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Second Section (formula of humanity, duties to oneself)
One may not mutilate, damage or kill oneself; Kant defers the question of amputating limbs to preserve life to a future ethics.
- Hippocratic Writings, The Oath
The physician promises restraint with deadly drugs, confidentiality and disciplined conduct in the houses of patients.
- Lectures on Revivals of Religion, Lectures on means and measures
Finney's claim that revival follows proper means frames conversion as something structured environments can promote.
- Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind, Treatment sections
Recommended bleeding, purging, restraint, and moral management raise major ethical issues.
- Memorial and Remonstrance and Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention, Memorial and Remonstrance
The priority of conscience becomes relevant to later medical conflicts over professional duty and state compulsion.
- Mental Maladies, Asylum chapters
The institutional material treats space, classification, attendants, and medical authority as therapeutic instruments.
- Mental Pathology and Therapeutics, Therapeutics
The treatment chapters combine physical care, moral treatment, prognosis, and asylum organization.
- Notes on Menabrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine, Concluding reflections on the Engine
The statement that the machine cannot originate anything frames the ethical boundary around claims made for artificial minds.
- 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.
- Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism LXXXVII
Impostors who promise prolongation of life, retarding of old age, relief of pain and the exaltation of the intellect discredit honest natural philosophy.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 3
Carlson shoots Candy's old dog; Candy later wishes he had done it himself.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 6
George kills Lennie to spare him the lynch mob.
- On Computable Numbers and Computing Machinery, 1950 essay, imitation game
The replacement of the thinking question by a behavioral test matters for psychiatric interviews and modern AI evaluation.
- On Formally Undecidable Propositions, Consistency theorem
The inability of a system to certify itself invites ethical caution about self-validating technical institutions.
- On Liberty, Ch. I, Introductory
The harm principle, sovereignty over one's own body and mind, and the explicit exclusion of children and those needing care from the doctrine.
- 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.
- On Liberty, Ch. V, Applications
Sale of poisons: labelling, a register of buyers, Bentham's 'preappointed evidence', and rejection of a universal prescription requirement; the unsafe-bridge example and its exceptions for the delirious or overexcited.
- On Medicine, Book 7
Operations for cataract, fistula, bladder stone and damaged body parts show technical Roman surgery.
- Psychopathia Sexualis, Medico-forensic introduction
Krafft-Ebing presents sexuality as an object of psychiatric and legal expertise.
- Psychopathia Sexualis, Forensic conclusions
The work links diagnosis to responsibility, punishment, and expert testimony.
- Regensburg Lecture, A contested citation
Regensburg Lecture gives this tag concrete force through the medical relevance is indirect: the lecture resists narrowed technical reason and thereby speaks to bioethics, human dignity, and clinical judgment
- Second Treatise of Government, Ch. II, §6
The law of nature forbids harming anyone in life, health, liberty or possessions; no one has liberty to destroy himself.
- Second Treatise of Government, Ch. IV, §23
No one can consent to absolute power over his own life, so self-enslavement is void.
- Sermons and Letter from Birmingham Jail, Sermons on love and beloved community
Love is framed as a social discipline capable of healing public hatred without denying danger.
- St. Dymphna and the Geel Colony, Geel shrine and colony
Mentally afflicted pilgrims and boarders are lodged first near the shrine and later in family homes, creating a premodern alternative to confinement.
- 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.
- Sts. Cosmas and Damian: Physician Saints, Anargyroi title
The saints are remembered as healers who do not take payment, making fees and charity central to the moral image of medicine.
- Sts. Cosmas and Damian: Physician Saints, Miracle of the black leg
The saints perform a miraculous limb replacement, making medieval viewers imagine diseased tissue, surgical instruments, donor bodies, and postoperative identity.
- The Annals of Imperial Rome, Book 15, Seneca’s death
Seneca’s forced suicide is narrated as philosophical performance and political coercion.
- The Anti-Federalist Papers, Federal Farmer on amendments
The insistence on explicit rights informs later arguments over bodily liberty and legal protection.
- The Art of the Commonplace, Economy and care
The Art of the Commonplace gives this tag concrete force through his medical relevance lies in public health broadly conceived: food systems, labor, ecological damage, loneliness, and the social conditions of flourishing
- The Arthashastra, Book 4 (protection against artisans and professionals)
Penalties for physicians whose treatment causes death or injury without notification to authorities.
- The Communist Manifesto, Rivals and conclusion
The Communist Manifesto gives this tag concrete force through its medical relevance lies in social medicine: labor conditions, poverty, urbanization, family disruption, and the political diagnosis of suffering
- The Conquest of Gaul, Book VII.77–78
Critognatus's speech proposing cannibalism, and the Mandubii, including old and sick people unfit for war, expelled from Alesia and refused food at the Roman lines.
- The Cost of Discipleship, Part Two, Matthew 5 (the enemy)
Love of enemies and refusal of retaliation are read as concrete commands, written amid persecution of Jews and dissenters.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Paris section (Saint-Méran and Barrois deaths)
Successive poisonings in the Villefort household; Dr d'Avrigny diagnoses poison and confronts Villefort.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 7
The lie that he is only ill torments him; Gerasim holds his legs on his shoulders for hours and speaks honestly of death.
- The Early Christian Creeds, Chalcedonian Definition (451), two natures
Chalcedon's insistence that Christ is fully human protects the reality of embodied suffering from being treated as merely apparent.
- The Founding Documents, Bill of Rights, due process and bodily protections
Rights language later shapes legal questions about bodily integrity, confinement, treatment, and punishment.
- 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 Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Imaginary Invalid, Act 3
Monsieur Purgon curses Argan with a cascade of diseases; Toinette, disguised as a doctor, prescribes absurd remedies; Argan feigns death to test his family.
- The Persian Expedition, Book V, Chapter VIII
Xenophon's defence at the army's audit: he struck men who left the disabled behind or tried to bury a living comrade, and forced stragglers to keep moving to prevent freezing.
- The Power and the Glory, Final return to the dying American
The call to attend a dying man forces the priest back into danger and frames sacramental care as a duty to the body at death.
- The Quiet American, Place Garnier bombing
Civilian casualties after the bombing make Pyle's theory visible as wounds, blood and preventable death.
- The Republic, Book 5
Guardian reproduction and family arrangements treat politics as managed breeding and education.
- The Rule of St Benedict, Chapter 36
Care of the sick is placed before and above other duties, with service rendered as to Christ.
- The Rule of St Benedict, Chapters 23–30
Correction and excommunication regulate disruptive behavior within a closed institution.
- The Scarlet Letter, Ch. 2-3
Hester's postpartum public punishment makes sexuality, maternity and communal discipline visible on the scaffold.
- The Scarlet Letter, Ch. 9-10
Chillingworth becomes Dimmesdale's physician and investigates his secret through bodily symptoms and psychological pressure.
- The Trial of Joan of Arc, Condemnation trial, repeated interrogations
The court repeatedly pressures Joan to define the voices, creating a hostile setting unlike any modern diagnostic encounter.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, school expulsion and surveillance
Miles's unclear misconduct and the governess's scrutiny raise questions about child psychology, projection and moral panic.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, final scene
The confrontation with Miles joins possible exorcism, panic, coercion and child death.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Aspern Papers, Juliana Bordereau scenes
Juliana's extreme age, guarded privacy and bodily frailty become objects of the narrator's archival opportunism.
- The Underdogs, Luis Cervantes joins the band
A former medical student enters the revolutionary group, linking educated medicine to political opportunism.
- The Warden, Bold's reform campaign
The bedesmen become subjects of legal and journalistic advocacy, raising consent and representation issues.
- Twelve Angry Men, Juror Ten's speech
The group confronts explicit prejudice as a contaminant of judgment.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter II (higher and lower pleasures)
The competent-judge test; the claim that pains, like pleasures, can only be ranked by the experienced; the 'tender plant' of the nobler feelings that dies for want of sustenance.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter V (justice and expediency)
A duty to steal medicine or compel the only qualified doctor to save a life; rights as protection of security; the injustice of sacrificing an individual without consent for others' benefit, raised in the discussion of punishment.
- Washington Square, Morris courtship chapters
Sloper evaluates Morris like a case, using social evidence and diagnostic confidence to predict mercenary motives.
- Washington Square, Europe journey
Sloper attempts to cure Catherine's attachment through distance and pressure, treating emotion as a correctable error.
- We, O-90 pregnancy plot
O-90's illegal pregnancy exposes reproductive control and the state's claim over bodies.
- We, Great Operation records
The surgical removal of imagination turns medicine into political pacification.
- We Hold These Truths, Public consensus
We Hold These Truths gives this tag concrete force through its medical relevance appears where conscience, institutional freedom, public reason, and contested moral goods affect health law and care
Quotes
Frequently cited
“I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection”
“I followed this indication, and determined to cure myself or die without the aid of physicians and medicine”
“At length, notwithstanding all I could say and do, the physician triumphed, and the child died of hunger”
“Physicians are, some of them, so pleasing and conformable to the humor of the patient, as they press not the true cure of the disease; and some other are so regular, in proceeding according to art for the disease, as they respect not sufficiently the condition of the patient”
“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man? Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?”
“The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials”
“I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created”
“The precepts for the physician to make his patient thoroughly healthy, and for a poisoner to ensure certain death, are of equal value in this respect, that each serves to effect its purpose perfectly”
“A man reduced to despair by a series of misfortunes feels wearied of life, but is still so far in possession of his reason that he can ask himself whether it would not be contrary to his duty to himself to take his own life”
Frequently cited
“So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only”
“In the kingdom of ends everything has either value or dignity”
Frequently cited
“That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection”
“His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant”
Frequently cited
“Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign”
“The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free. It is not freedom, to be allowed to alienate his freedom”
“reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions”
“a man, not having the power of his own life, cannot, by compact, or his own consent, enslave himself to any one”
Frequently cited
“yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself”
“The physician saints were called anargyroi, unmercenaries, because their legends remember them as healers who did not take payment for medicine”
“When these came to the Roman fortifications, weeping, they begged of the soldiers by every entreaty to receive them as slaves and relieve them with food. But Caesar, placing guards on the rampart, forbade them to be admitted”
Frequently cited
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”
“I say to her: “If you still have pains, it is really only your own fault”
“by the same token we shall all one day be dead, but that is no reason why meantime we should all be buried alive”
Frequently cited
“By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots”
“Thus, to save a life, it may not only be allowable, but a duty, to steal, or take by force, the necessary food or medicine, or to kidnap, and compel to officiate, the only qualified medical practitioner”