A Burnt-Out Case follows Querry, a celebrated European architect of churches who has lost all feeling: for his work, for women, for God and for himself. Travelling as far as the river boats will take him, he arrives at a leproserie deep in the Belgian Congo run by a community of missionary fathers and by Dr Colin, an atheist physician devoted to his patients.
Medical tag
Melancholia Depression
Melancholy, despondency, depressive states, acedia, 'low spirits'.
Works
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.
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.
Freud's late essay, in German Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ('the uneasiness in culture'), asks why civilized people, who have built so much for their own protection, are so often unhappy. It is written in eight short chapters in a conversational, self-questioning style.
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.
The Confessions is a prayer in thirteen books addressed to God, in which Augustine recounts his life up to his mother's death and then turns to philosophical reflection on memory, time and the creation narrative of Genesis. Books I to IX are autobiographical.
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.
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.
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.
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.
East of Eden is a multigenerational saga set mainly in the Salinas Valley of California from the Civil War to the First World War, which retells the story of Cain and Abel through two families: the Trasks and the Hamiltons, the latter being the narrator's own maternal ancestors. Samuel Hamilton, a poor, inventive, generous Irish immigrant farmer and blacksmith, raises a large family on barren land.
Ecce Homo is Nietzsche's late self-interpretation, part autobiography, part literary self-defense, part philosophical performance. Its chapter headings are famously outrageous: why he is so wise, clever, and a destiny; why he writes such good books.
Effi Briest opens at Hohen-Cremmen, the Brandenburg estate of the Briest family, where seventeen-year-old Effi, playful and still half a child, is suddenly engaged to Baron Geert von Innstetten, a thirty-eight-year-old district administrator who long ago courted her mother. Effi accepts, partly from ambition and partly from a wish for excitement, and the couple marry and move to Kessin, a small Baltic resort town in Pomerania.
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.
Essays and Aphorisms is the title of the selection translated by R. J.
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.
Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric appeared in Copenhagen on 16 October 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio, 'John of silence', the same day as Repetition. Its subject is Genesis 22, in which God commands Abraham to take his son Isaac to Mount Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering.
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.
Kokoro, a word meaning heart, mind or the core of things, is in three parts. In the first, 'Sensei and I', a young university student in Tokyo meets an older man at the seaside resort of Kamakura and is drawn to him, calling him Sensei, 'teacher'.
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.
Letters and Papers from Prison was assembled after the war by Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer's closest friend, former student and nephew by marriage, and published in 1951 as Widerstand und Ergebung ('Resistance and Submission'). It gathers what Bonhoeffer wrote during two years of imprisonment by the Nazi state, together with the essay 'After Ten Years', composed at Christmas 1942 as a stocktaking for fellow conspirators.
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.
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.
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 Meditations, which Marcus Aurelius may have titled simply 'To Himself', is a private notebook of philosophical reflections written in Greek, probably during his military campaigns on the Danube in the 170s CE. It was not intended for publication and consists of twelve books of entries ranging from single sentences to short essays, often repeated and varied as exercises to fix principles in the mind.
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.
My Ántonia is presented as a memoir written by Jim Burden, a successful New York railroad lawyer, about a Bohemian girl he knew in his Nebraska childhood; a brief introduction by an unnamed friend frames his manuscript. Orphaned at ten, Jim travels from Virginia to live with his grandparents on the prairie near the town of Black Hawk.
Natural History: A Selection introduces one of antiquity’s great encyclopedic minds. Pliny wants to collect nature and human use together: stars, lands, peoples, animals, plants, metals, pigments, stones, medicines, marvels and technologies all belong to one vast inventory.
On the Genealogy of Morality is Nietzsche's most sustained inquiry into the historical and psychological origins of moral values. In three treatises he asks where good and evil came from, how guilt and bad conscience developed, and what ascetic ideals do for priests, philosophers, artists, scientists, and sufferers.
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.
Gerard Manley Hopkins's Poems, published after his death in 1918, bring together a Jesuit priest's experiments in sound, perception, praise, and spiritual desolation. Hopkins's key ideas of inscape and instress name the particular form of a created thing and the energy by which that form is apprehended.
Spurgeon's Selected Sermons show Victorian evangelical preaching at industrial scale. Week by week, his sermons moved from pulpit to print, reaching readers far beyond the Metropolitan Tabernacle.
Selected Sermons and Reformation Treatises gathers the Luther who speaks from pulpit, classroom, controversy, and pastoral desk. The center is not one genre but a reformatory voice: the Ninety-Five Theses against indulgence abuse, The Freedom of a Christian, sermons on faith and good works, catechetical teaching, and occasional writings shaped by conflict.
Sense and Sensibility follows two sisters whose temperaments represent the opposed values of its title. When Henry Dashwood dies, Norland Park in Sussex passes to John, his son by a first marriage, who promises to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters but is talked out of any real generosity by his grasping wife Fanny.
Bernard's Sermons on the Song of Songs are among the central monuments of medieval monastic spirituality. They do not offer a continuous modern commentary on every verse.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence's account of his two years with the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, from his first visit to the Hejaz in October 1916 to the entry into Damascus in October 1918. It opens with an introductory chapter that admits the book's political bad conscience: Lawrence knew that Britain and France had already divided the Arab lands in the Sykes–Picot agreement while he encouraged the Arabs to fight for independence.
Siddhartha is a short, lyrical novel set in India in the time of the Buddha, following the spiritual journey of a young man who seeks enlightenment through experience rather than doctrine. Siddhartha is the handsome, gifted son of a Brahmin, admired by all and loved by his friend Govinda.
This paired entry sets Jonathan Edwards's most famous terror sermon beside his narrative of revival in Northampton and neighboring towns. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is often remembered for its imagery of danger, wrath, and suspended judgment, but its structure is theological before it is theatrical.
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.
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 Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, forming part of the sixth book of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic of the war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra at the moment before battle begins.
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 Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872 when Nietzsche was a twenty-seven-year-old professor at Basel, argues that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two opposed artistic drives, which he names after the gods Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian is the drive toward clear form, measure and individuation, whose physiological analogue is the dream, in which every person is a perfect artist of images.
The Consolation of Philosophy is a prison dialogue between the condemned Boethius and Lady Philosophy, who appears at his bedside when he is sick with grief and self-pity. The work alternates prose and metre.
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 Divine Comedy begins with Dante lost in a dark wood midway through life, unable to climb the sunlit hill because beasts block his way. Virgil comes as guide and leads him through Inferno, where punishments reveal the inner logic of disordered love, violence, fraud, and treachery.
Darwin's Expression of the Emotions is one of the founding works of comparative psychology. It asks how humans and animals express fear, anger, joy, grief, shame, disgust, attention, and other states through face, posture, voice, tears, hair, muscles, and involuntary action.
The Gay Science, also translated as The Joyful Wisdom, is Nietzsche's book of convalescence, experiment, and dangerous cheerfulness. Its aphorisms and songs range across knowledge, art, women, morality, religion, science, friendship, self-creation, health, and style.
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 Meek One (Krotkaya), also translated as A Gentle Creature, is a long short story that Dostoyevsky published in his one-man journal A Writer's Diary in November 1876, prompted by newspaper reports of suicides, including that of a young seamstress who leapt from a window holding an icon. In a short preface Dostoyevsky calls it a 'fantastic' story, explaining that it is realistic in every respect except its form: it imagines the inner monologue of a man as though a stenographer could record his chaotic thoughts.
The Metaphysical Poets is Helen Gardner's anthology of English poets of the seventeenth century who wrote in the style that Samuel Johnson, borrowing a phrase from Dryden, called 'metaphysical'. Johnson complained that in their verse the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked by violence together; T.
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 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.
Les Passions de l'âme, published in Amsterdam and Paris in November 1649, was Descartes's last book and his fullest account of how mind and body interact in emotional life. It grew out of his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, who in 1643 had asked him how an immaterial thinking soul could move a body, and who later pressed him on the regulation of grief and the good life.
The Portable Dorothy Parker collects poems, stories, sketches, reviews and occasional pieces that display Parker's distinctive mixture of speed, polish, cruelty and pain. The volume is not a single narrative but a portable career: the brittle lyrics of disappointed love, the dramatic monologues of women waiting for calls or managing humiliation, the social comedies of parties and hotel rooms, the criticism that makes taste sound conversational, and the political pieces that reveal moral seriousness beneath the pose of urban detachment.
The Portable Faulkner is not a single work in the usual sense but an edited map of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction. Malcolm Cowley arranged stories, novel excerpts, genealogical material and commentary so that readers could see Faulkner's invented county as one continuous historical field.
The Portrait of a Lady follows Isabel Archer, a young American woman brought to Europe by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, and admired for her intelligence, independence and hunger for experience.
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.
The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan is the young Winston Churchill's history of the Anglo-Egyptian campaigns of 1896–1899 that destroyed the Mahdist state in the Sudan. Churchill begins with geography and the Nile, which he presents as the thread on which the whole story hangs, and then with the rebellion of Muhammad Ahmad, a Dongolawi boat-builder's son and Sufi ascetic who proclaimed himself the Mahdi in 1881.
The 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 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.
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 Vampyre is a brief but enormously influential Gothic tale that turns the vampire from folkloric corpse into a fashionable aristocratic predator. Aubrey, a young gentleman of imagination and moral seriousness, enters London society and becomes fascinated by Lord Ruthven, a mysterious nobleman whose charm is inseparable from coldness.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. Instead of studying churches, creeds or theology, James studies personal religious experience as a psychologist, drawing on a large collection of first-person documents: diaries, autobiographies, letters and replies to questionnaires.
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.
The Waves follows six speaking consciousnesses from childhood to old age: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis. A seventh figure, Percival, never speaks directly but becomes the focus of admiration, desire and grief.
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.
Troilus and Criseyde retells a story from the Trojan War tradition, but its real subject is erotic psychology under the pressure of fortune, language and time. Troilus, a Trojan prince and son of Priam, initially mocks lovers until he sees Criseyde in the temple and is struck by desire.
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.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a lyric sequence of erotic longing, memory, landscape and loss. The poems do not tell a plot, but they trace an emotional arc from sensual address to abandonment and despair.
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.
White Nights is narrated by an unnamed young dreamer in St. Petersburg, a lonely man who lives more intensely in imagination than in social life.
Wuthering Heights is a violent family romance told through layered narration. Mr.
Passages
- A Burnt-Out Case, Throughout
Querry describes his loss of desire, pleasure and belief, a condition he likens to the leper's loss of sensation.
- A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, Sect. 7
Hume's despair, dread of error, sense of monstrous isolation and 'heated' brain, followed by recovery through dining, backgammon and conversation; he names his mood a splenetic humour.
- 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 I
Nature warns that excessive abstract study will be punished by pensive melancholy, uncertainty and cold reception, and recommends a mixed life of thought, action and society.
- Billy Budd and Other Stories, Bartleby, middle and end
Bartleby's escalating refusals, his living in the office, removal to the Tombs, refusal to eat and death against the prison wall.
- Billy Budd and Other Stories, Benito Cereno, closing pages
Don Benito withdraws to a monastery and dies within months, unable to recover from his ordeal.
- Civilization and Its Discontents, Ch. VII–VIII
The super-ego, unconscious guilt, and the 'need for punishment'; melancholia as the clinical picture of a harsh super-ego; the possibility of diagnosing 'communal neuroses'.
- Complete Poems, 'Résumé' (Enough Rope)
A catalogue of methods of suicide and their disadvantages, ending in reluctant survival.
- 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 IV.4–9
Grief at the death of a friend: weeping, hatred of familiar places, weariness of life and fear of death.
- Crime and Punishment, Confession and exile
Crime and Punishment gives this tag concrete force through this is a major psychiatric novel: fever, delirium, obsession, dissociation, alcoholism, suicide, trauma, and moral injury drive the action
- De Materia Medica, Book 4, hellebore
Black and white hellebore are purgative drugs associated in ancient medicine with melancholia and madness.
- Death of a Salesman, Act One, opening
Willy returns home unable to drive, describing how his mind drifted and he nearly went off the road.
- 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 1
Cleanthes says the sceptic's 'philosophical melancholy' dissipates on contact with external objects and passions.
- 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.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10
Gratuitous pains of gout, gravel, migraine, toothache and rheumatism, and spleen, melancholy and superstition as pains of the mind.
- Don Quixote, Part II, Ch. 74
Don Quixote falls into a fever, sleeps, wakes sane, renounces chivalry and dies.
- East of Eden, Parts Two–Three
Adam's prolonged numbness and neglect of his sons until Samuel confronts him.
- Effi Briest, Final chapters (c. Ch. 33–36)
Effi's decline after Annie's visit, Rummschüttel's letter to her parents, and her death at Hohen-Cremmen.
- Essays, Essay I, Of Truth
Illusions and flattering hopes as supports of morale; without them minds would be 'full of melancholy and indisposition'.
- Essays, Essay XXVII, Of Friendship
Friendship as the remedy for 'stoppings and suffocations' of the heart; contemporary remedies for liver, spleen, lungs and brain; those without friends as cannibals of their own hearts; a physician unacquainted with the patient's body may cure the disease and kill the patient.
- Essays, Essay XXXI, Of Suspicion
Suspicions as defects 'not in the heart, but in the brain' that dispose wise men to irresolution and melancholy, remedied by learning more.
- Essays and Aphorisms, Parerga II, 'On the Suffering of the World' and 'On the Vanity of Existence' (in the Hollingdale selection)
Pain as positive and pleasure as negative; boredom; life as a debt repaid at death.
- Essays and Aphorisms, On Human Nature, 'Ethical Reflections' (stored text)
Two moods toward misery: suffering felt in oneself, which intensifies the will until resignation, and suffering seen in others, which produces sympathy.
- Ethics, Part IV, Props. XLI–XLIV and Notes
Pleasure and pain evaluated by their bodily effects; mirth always good, melancholy always bad, localized stimulation and love capable of excess; fixed ideas as madness.
- Fear and Trembling, Preamble from the Heart
The lad who renounces the princess and transforms lost love into eternal remembrance, a model of resignation set beside grief.
- Frankenstein, Vol. II, Ch. I (1818) / Ch. 9 (1831)
After Justine's execution, Victor's despondency, sleeplessness and thoughts of drowning himself in the lake.
- Galen: Selected Works, Commentaries on Hippocratic aphorisms
Galen’s discussions of melancholia, mania and phrenitis transmit Hippocratic categories through humoral explanation.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, First Section (examples of acting from duty)
The person who preserves life without loving it after hopeless sorrow, and the philanthropist whose own grief has extinguished sympathy.
- 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.
- Kokoro, Part One
Sensei's monthly visits to K's grave and his gloomy reflections on human nature.
- Kokoro, Part Three (end)
Sensei's account of his long guilt and his resolve to die.
- Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry, Manic-depressive lectures
Recurring excitement and depression are grouped by course rather than isolated symptoms.
- Letters and Papers from Prison, Letters on time, waiting and longing (winter 1943–1944)
Reflections on the experience of time in prison, homesickness, and the danger of letting longing become despair.
- 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.
- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 3
Macbeth asks the Doctor to minister to a mind diseased; 'Throw physic to the dogs'.
- Meditations, Book 5.1
Argument with himself about getting out of bed in the morning.
- 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.
- Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XI
Sherman describes Shiloh as having given him new life after being cast down by the 'crazy' label, and counsels a demoralised Grant.
- Mental Maladies, Lypemania and monomania
The diagnostic chapters track partial delusions, fixed ideas, fear, sorrow, and suicidal danger under now-historical labels.
- Mental Pathology and Therapeutics, Clinical books
The syndrome descriptions of melancholia, exaltation, monomania, and dementia show German psychiatry before Kraepelin.
- My Ántonia, Book I (first winter)
The Shimerdas' hunger and hardship in the dugout; Mr Shimerda's homesickness and withdrawal.
- Natural History: A Selection, Book 25, hellebore traditions
Hellebore appears in the ancient therapeutic world of purging and treatment of mental disturbance.
- On the Genealogy of Morality, Essay III
The ascetic ideal is interpreted as a technique for giving suffering a meaning.
- Pensees, Fragment 131, Section II
Weariness: at rest without occupation, man feels his nothingness and from his heart rise gloom, sadness, fretfulness and despair.
- Persuasion, Vol. I, Ch. 11
Captain Benwick's mourning for his dead fiancée; Anne advises him to read more prose and less poetry.
- Poems, Inscape and praise
Poems gives this tag concrete force through hopkins is important for melancholia, scruple, exhaustion, vocation stress, and the language of inward suffering before modern diagnostic categories
- Selected Sermons, Sermons addressed to the downcast
Spurgeon repeatedly offers consolation to hearers experiencing despair, guilt, grief, and spiritual darkness.
- Selected Sermons and Reformation Treatises, Sermons and treatises on temptation and conscience
Luther addresses terrified conscience as a condition requiring gospel consolation rather than moral bookkeeping.
- Sense and Sensibility, Vol. II, Ch. 7–9
Marianne's grief after Willoughby's letter: refusal of food, sleeplessness and hysterical weeping, while Elinor attends her.
- Sermons on the Song of Songs, Sermons on wounds and languishing
Bernard's love-sickness imagery shows medieval overlaps between emotion, body, and religious cure.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Books VII–VIII (winter 1917–18)
Daud's death from cold; Farraj wounded and killed by Lawrence to spare him capture and torture; Lawrence's growing exhaustion and despair before asking to be relieved.
- Siddhartha: An Indian Tale, Part Two, 'Samsara'
Siddhartha's gradual decline into gambling, wine and satiety, ending in self-disgust.
- Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and A Faithful Narrative, Faithful Narrative, descriptions of awakenings
Reports of distress, tears, joy, and communal spread show revival emotion as an interpretive challenge.
- Summa Theologica, I-II, Q. 38 (not in stored text)
Remedies of sorrow: pleasure, weeping, the sympathy of friends, contemplation of truth, and sleep and baths, which restore the body's natural movement.
- 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, Democritus Junior to the Reader
Burton's confession of melancholy, his account of writing as occupation against it, and the satirical argument that the whole world is mad.
- 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. 2, Subs. 5–7
Bad air, immoderate exercise, solitariness and idleness, and disordered sleeping and waking as causes of melancholy.
- 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. 3, Sect. 2
Heroical or love-melancholy treated as a disease, with symptoms (wasting, sleeplessness, sighing) and cures from diet and labour to marriage.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 3, Sect. 4, Memb. 2, Subs. 2–6
Religious despair: definitions, causes in the devil, melancholy and terrifying preaching, symptoms of fear and anxiety, prognosis toward violent death, and cure by physic and good counsel.
- The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 1.28–1.47
Arjuna's physical and emotional collapse: trembling, dry mouth, burning skin, a reeling mind and refusal to fight.
- The Bible, 1 Samuel 16:14–23; 18:10–11
Saul's evil spirit, David's harp, and Saul's later violent episodes.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §3
The wisdom of Silenus, that it is best not to be born and next best to die soon, as the pessimistic ground of Greek art.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §7
The lethargic gulf of oblivion after Dionysian ecstasy; return to everyday reality brings nausea and an ascetic, will-paralysing mood; art as a healing enchantress.
- The Consolation of Philosophy, Book 1, opening
Boethius lies grieving in prison until Philosophy appears and diagnoses his condition.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Château d'If chapters (before 'Number 34 and Number 27')
Dantès, despairing in solitary confinement, resolves to die by refusing food.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 6
The Caius syllogism: he cannot accept that the logic of mortality applies to himself.
- The Divine Comedy, Inferno
The Divine Comedy gives this tag concrete force through dante is rich for the history of mind: despair, fear, grief, bodily torment, purgative healing, visionary states, and spiritual therapy structure the journey
- The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Suffering and anxiety chapters
Descriptions of grief, fear, anxiety, and bodily signs are useful for histories of affect and psychiatry.
- The Gay Science, Eternal recurrence aphorism
The thought experiment tests whether suffering and joy can be affirmed together.
- The Master and Margarita, Part One, Ch. 13
The Master tells Ivan of his novel's persecution, his fear, the burning of the manuscript and his flight to the clinic.
- The Meek One, Part Two, Ch. 1
Her prolonged fever; the narrator arranges a doctor and nursing care; her silent withdrawal afterwards.
- The Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, 'A Nocturnal upon St Lucy's Day'
A meditation on the longest night in which the speaker describes himself as the quintessence of nothingness after a loved one's death.
- The Metaphysical Poets, George Herbert, 'Affliction (I)'
Herbert recounts how sickness and setbacks wasted his youth, and his complaint against God.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Misanthrope, subtitle and Act 1, Scene 1
Alceste's black humour and contempt for society, framed by the subtitle 'The Atrabilious Lover' (atrabile = black bile).
- The New York Trilogy, City of Glass, opening chapters
Quinn's bereavement, pseudonymous writing life and willingness to answer a call meant for another person set up identity as a fragile compensatory structure.
- The Passions of the Soul, Part Two (c. Art. 96–111)
Movements of blood and spirits, and changes of pulse, heat and digestion, in love, hatred, desire, joy and sadness; why love is good for health and sadness weakens the appetite.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, Big Blonde
Hazel Morse's party persona, drinking, depressive decline and suicide attempt make the story central for alcoholism and gendered despair.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, Selected poems on suicide and heartbreak
Several short lyrics use comic form to stage suicidal thought, romantic despair and the social performance of toughness.
- The Portable Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury selections
Benjy's sensory narrative, Caddy's absence and Quentin's breakdown foreground disability, grief, time disturbance and suicidal despair.
- The Portrait of a Lady, Rome marriage chapters
Isabel's life with Osmond is marked by constriction, watchfulness and psychological coercion rather than overt physical violence.
- 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 River War, Chapter VII: The Recovery of the Dongola Province
Cholera creeps up the Nile from Cairo; case-fatality near 80 per cent among the first thousand cases; detailed casualty figures; profound depression across the army.
- The Scarlet Letter, Ch. 11-12
Dimmesdale's vigils, self-punishment and wasting health show guilt translated into bodily and mental suffering.
- The Secret Garden, Archibald Craven's return
The father's grief and withdrawal are treated through dream, memory and reunion with the recovered child.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Part One, A
Despair as a sickness one cannot die of: the torment of wishing to die and being unable to, of the self wanting to be rid of itself.
- 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 Sickness Unto Death, Part One, C (despair of weakness and of defiance)
Despair over the earthly and over oneself, inclosing reserve that hides despair from others, the risk of suicide in the inclosed person, and demonic defiance.
- The Vampyre, Final marriage plot
Aubrey's failed warning and death frame secrecy and social disbelief as fatal for his sister.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures VI and VII: The Sick Soul
Anhedonia, Tolstoy's crisis of meaning, Bunyan's obsessions and verbal automatisms, and the anonymous French sufferer's panic and lasting dread.
- The Warden, Harding under attack
Harding's conscience and public shame disturb his peace, appetite and sense of vocation.
- The Waves, Rhoda's soliloquies
Rhoda repeatedly experiences terror, unreality and separation from ordinary social identity.
- The World as Will and Representation, Fourth Book, §§56–59
Life as constant striving, pain and boredom; the negativity of happiness; the sum of suffering in human life.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Discourses III–IV: Backworldsmen; The Despisers of the Body
Otherworldly belief traced to the weariness of the sick body; the ego as the instrument of a bodily Self; the body as 'a plurality with one sense'.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part III, Discourse LVII: The Convalescent
Zarathustra falls 'as one dead', lies seven days without eating, is fed and watched by his animals, and recovers to describe his 'great disgust at man'.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Introduction by Mrs Förster-Nietzsche (stored text, before the Prologue)
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche describes the Rapallo winter of influenza and her brother's effort in spring 1883 to stop taking chloral hydrate.
- Troilus and Criseyde, Book I
Troilus is struck by love and displays classic lovesickness: pallor, secrecy, sighing, sleeplessness and obsessive thought.
- Troilus and Criseyde, Book IV
Separation intensifies Troilus's despair, appetite loss and fixation on Criseyde's return.
- Twelfth Night, Shipwreck and disguise
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
- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Nocturnal poems
Night settings intensify solitude, sleepless reflection and the speaker's need to address an absent beloved.
- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, A Song of Despair
The closing poem gathers erotic loss into lament, grief and depressive imagery.
- 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 II (whether happiness is attainable)
Tranquillity and excitement as the two constituents of a satisfied life; the 'need of excitement' as a disease; selfishness and lack of mental cultivation as the main causes of an unsatisfying life; a passing reference to Novalis's recommendation of suicide.
- Washington Square, Europe journey
Sloper attempts to cure Catherine's attachment through distance and pressure, treating emotion as a correctable error.
- Washington Square, Final refusal
Catherine's refusal of Morris shows a life after romantic injury that is neither cure nor collapse.
- White Nights, First night
The dreamer's solitary walks and attachment to buildings show urban loneliness converted into imaginative companionship.
- White Nights, Fourth night and morning
The dreamer's sudden hope and loss form a compact study of attachment, disappointment and depressive return.
Quotes
“I am first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am placed in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster”
“Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium”
“I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends”
“Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man”
“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night”
Frequently cited
“I would prefer not to”
“You might as well live.”
“At this grief my heart was utterly darkened; and whatever I beheld was death”
“It is certain my disorder was in a great measure hypochondriacal”
Frequently cited
“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart”
“Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.”
“External objects press in upon him; passions solicit him; his philosophical melancholy dissipates”
“Remorse, shame, anguish, rage, disappointment, anxiety, fear, dejection, despair; who has ever passed through life without cruel inroads from these tormentors”
“We are terrified, not bribed to the continuance of our existence”
“Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men's minds, vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds, of a number of men, poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves”
“you may take sarza to open the liver, steel to open the spleen, flowers of sulphur for the lungs, castoreum for the brain; but no receipt openeth the heart, but a true friend”
“As for the passions, and studies of the mind; avoid envy, anxious fears; anger fretting inwards; subtle and knotty inquisitions; joys and exhilarations in excess; sadness not communicated”
“It is in their person that we become aware of human misery; we are filled with sympathy; and the result of this mood is general benevolence, philanthropy”
“PROP. XLII. Mirth cannot be excessive, but is always good; contrariwise, Melancholy is always bad”
“PROP. LIV. Repentance is not a virtue, or does not arise from reason; but he who repents of an action is doubly wretched or infirm”
Frequently cited
“I am malicious because I am miserable”
“if adversity and hopeless sorrow have completely taken away the relish for life; if the unfortunate one, strong in mind, indignant at his fate rather than desponding or dejected, wishes for death, and yet preserves his life without loving it- not from inclination or fear, but from duty- then his maxim has a moral worth”
“Put the case that the mind of that philanthropist were clouded by sorrow of his own, extinguishing all sympathy with the lot of others”
“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”
“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”
“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, / Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, / Raze out the written troubles of the brain, / And with some sweet oblivious antidote / Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart?”
Frequently cited
“Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing”
“In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present—I am rising to the work of a human being.”
“the report that I was "crazy, insane, and mad," that "I had demanded two hundred thousand men for the defense of Kentucky”
“Before the battle of Shiloh, I had been cast down by a mere newspaper assertion of "crazy;" but that single battle had given me new life, and now I was in high feather”
“The first qualification in a general-in-chief is a cool head--that is, a head which receives just impressions, and estimates things and objects at their real value. He must not allow himself to be elated by good news, or depressed by bad”
“By this comes to light for the inexperienced eye one of those things which put fetters in the dark, as it were, on the action of the mind, and wear out in secret the powers of the soul”
“Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study”
“I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought”
“All my joys to this are folly, Naught so sweet as melancholy”
“I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy. There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, no better cure than business”
“Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality”
“The common sort define it to be a kind of dotage without a fever, having for his ordinary companions, fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion”
“puts study, contemplation, and continual meditation, as an especial cause of madness”
“Musica est mentis medicina moestae, a roaring-meg against melancholy, to rear and revive the languishing soul”
“Waking, by reason of their continual cares, fears, sorrows, dry brains, is a symptom that much crucifies melancholy men, and must therefore be speedily helped, and sleep by all means procured”
“observe this short precept, give not way to solitariness and idleness. Be not solitary, be not idle”
“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”
“Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived”
“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones”
“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts”
Frequently cited
“What is best of all is for ever beyond your reach: not to be born, not to _be_, to be _nothing._ The second best for you, however, is soon to die”
“Knowledge kills action, action requires the veil of illusion--it is this lesson which Hamlet teaches”
“Here, in this extremest danger of the will, _art_ approaches, as a saving and healing enchantress”
Frequently cited
“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost”
Frequently cited
“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him”
“The violence of the battle may be cheaply braved, but the insidious attacks of disease appal the boldest”
Frequently cited
“Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation”
“Life had been enchanting, it was now flat sober, more than sober, dead”
“He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament, sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears, and insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory”
“suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence”
Frequently cited
“Thus its life swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards between pain and ennui”
“All satisfaction, or what is commonly called happiness, is always really and essentially only _negative_, and never positive”
Frequently cited
“The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen”
“Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance”
“Next to selfishness, the principal cause which makes life unsatisfactory, is want of mental cultivation”