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.
Medical tag
Nursing Caregiving
Nursing, sickbed care, home care of the ill.
Works
Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, subtitled 'The Autobiography of a Horse', is narrated by a handsome black horse with a white star and one white foot. He grows up in a pleasant meadow under a kind master, Farmer Grey, and his mother Duchess teaches him to be gentle and good and to work willingly.
Cannery Row is a loosely plotted, affectionate portrait of the sardine-cannery district of Monterey, California, during the Depression, built from short narrative chapters alternating with self-contained vignettes or 'inter-chapters'. Its centre is Doc, a gentle, learned marine biologist who runs the Western Biological Laboratory, collects specimens from the tide pools, listens to Gregorian chant and Bach, reads poetry, and is trusted by everyone on the Row.
David Copperfield is the first-person autobiography of a novelist looking back on his life. David is born at Blunderstone in Suffolk six months after his father's death, on a night when his formidable great-aunt Betsey Trotwood storms out on learning he is not a girl.
Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem covers the last twenty-four hours or so of Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old travelling salesman, interwoven with his memories and imaginings of the past. Willy returns early to his small Brooklyn house, now hemmed in by apartment buildings, because he can no longer keep the car on the road: his mind keeps drifting.
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.
Early Christian Lives gathers late antique biographies of saints, monks and holy figures, often including Athanasius’ Life of Antony and Jerome’s lives of Paul, Hilarion and Malchus. These works do not present biography as neutral chronology.
Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers gathers short texts from Christianity’s formative generations after the apostles. The collection usually includes 1 Clement, the letters of Ignatius, Polycarp’s letter, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, 2 Clement and fragments such as Papias or the Epistle to Diognetus, depending on edition.
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.
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'.
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.
Sulpitius Severus's Life of St. Martin made Martin of Tours one of the defining saints of the Latin West.
Little Women follows the four March sisters growing up in a New England town during and after the American Civil War, while their father serves as an army chaplain. Meg, the eldest, is pretty and longs for fine things; Jo, a tomboyish aspiring writer with a quick temper, is the heart of the book; Beth is shy, gentle and musical; and Amy, the youngest, is artistic and vain.
Mansfield Park follows Fanny Price, the timid daughter of a poor, overburdened family in Portsmouth, who at ten is taken in by her wealthy aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, at Mansfield Park in Northamptonshire. Her other aunt, the officious and mean Mrs Norris, never lets her forget her dependent status, and her cousins Tom, Maria and Julia treat her with indifference.
Napoleon's Maxims of War is not a book Napoleon wrote but a compilation made by a French officer, General Burnod, who in 1827 published Maximes de guerre de Napoléon, drawn from the emperor's memoirs dictated on St Helena and other sources. The British officer George Charles D'Aguilar translated it into English in 1831, adding explanatory notes with examples from the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne, Montecuccoli, Frederick the Great and Napoleon himself.
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.
On the Road is narrated by Sal Paradise, a young writer living with his aunt in New Jersey, and records a series of journeys back and forth across the United States and into Mexico between 1947 and 1950. The engine of the book is Dean Moriarty, a fast-talking, car-stealing, endlessly restless young man from Denver who seems to Sal the embodiment of a wild, joyous American energy.
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.
Ruth is Gaskell's novel about a 'fallen woman', written to challenge the Victorian assumption that an unmarried mother and her child were beyond redemption. Ruth Hilton is a beautiful, innocent orphan of fifteen, apprenticed to a dressmaker, Mrs Mason, in a country town, where she works long hours in a cold workroom.
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.
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.
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.
Sts. Roch and Sebastian became plague saints through two different imaginative routes.
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.
Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Civili, in three books, narrate the first two years of the war he fought against Pompey and the senatorial party, from January 49 BCE to the beginning of the Alexandrian war in late 48. The work is unfinished, breaking off in Alexandria, and it is the most openly political of his writings: its constant task is to show that Caesar was forced into war by a faction of personal enemies, that he repeatedly sought peace, and that he treated defeated fellow citizens with a mercy his opponents never showed.
The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman gathers the evolving work of a poet who made the self expansive enough to contain a democracy. The center is Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised across multiple editions until Whitman's death.
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 History of the Church tells the story of Christianity from the apostles to Eusebius’ own fourth-century world, where persecution gives way to imperial favor. Eusebius organizes the past through succession: bishops, teachers, heresies, writings, persecutions and martyrs.
The Iliad tells of a few weeks in the tenth year of the Greek siege of Troy, and its subject, announced in the first line, is the wrath of Achilles. A plague sent by Apollo ravages the Greek camp because Agamemnon, commander of the Achaeans, has refused to return the captive daughter of Apollo's priest Chryses.
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 Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's long return from Troy to Ithaca and of the household that must survive his absence. The poem opens not with Odysseus but with disorder: his son Telemachus is growing up under the pressure of suitors who consume the estate and demand that Penelope choose a new husband.
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 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 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 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 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.
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.
Wuthering Heights is a violent family romance told through layered narration. Mr.
Passages
- A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, Defense of Black caregivers
Allen and Jones describe dangerous care work performed by Black residents during the epidemic.
- Black Beauty, Part I (Birtwick chapters)
Joe Green gives the overheated Beauty cold water and no blanket; Beauty falls seriously ill and is treated by the horse doctor and nursed by John.
- Black Beauty, Part IV (London)
Jerry Barker falls ill with bronchitis from exposure and must give up cab work.
- Cannery Row, Interchapter on the epidemic
Influenza hits the Row; Dora's girls and Doc care for sick families.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 14
Betsey explains that she rescued Mr Dick from an asylum his brother intended for him, and defends his sanity.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 48–53
Dora's illness and death, and David's grief.
- Death of a Salesman, Act One, Linda's speech to her sons
Linda reveals Willy's deliberate car crashes and the rubber hose she found by the gas pipe.
- Description of the Retreat, Chs. 2-3
The institutional description makes architecture, air, garden access, and household order central to care.
- Early Christian Lives, Life of Antony, visitors and healings
Antony counsels, consoles and participates in healing while resisting fame.
- Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, 1 Clement
Conflict in Corinth is treated through humility, order and restoration of communal health.
- Frankenstein, Vol. I, Ch. I–II (1818) / Ch. 2–3 (1831)
Victor's youthful reading of Agrippa, Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus; his mother dies of scarlet fever caught while nursing Elizabeth.
- Kokoro, Part Two
The father's slow decline from kidney disease, the doctor's visits and the family's vigil.
- Letters and Papers from Prison, Letters to Bethge, late November 1943
Heavy air raids on Berlin; prisoners screaming in locked cells, Bonhoeffer assisting in the sick bay, and his reflections on fear.
- Life of St. Martin, Life, Ch. 3: cloak at Amiens
Martin responds to exposure and cold by sharing clothing, an act of basic bodily care before formal office.
- Life of St. Martin, Dialogue tradition: leper at Paris
Martin's kiss of a leper reverses stigma through touch, making the leper's isolation and bodily revulsion part of the healing scene.
- Little Women, Part One, Ch. 15
A telegram reports Mr March seriously ill in Washington; Marmee leaves to nurse him and Jo sells her hair.
- Little Women, Part One, Ch. 16–18
Beth nurses the poor Hummel family's sick baby, who dies of scarlet fever; Beth catches it; Amy is sent away; Dr Bangs attends.
- Little Women, Part One, Ch. 19–20
The crisis of Beth's fever passes; Marmee returns.
- Little Women, Part Two, Ch. 36 and 40
Beth's slow decline at the seaside and at home; her death nursed by Jo.
- Mansfield Park, Vol. III, Ch. 13–14 (Ch. 44–45)
News that Tom has fallen dangerously ill with fever after a drinking bout and a fall; his return home and nursing.
- Napoleon's Maxims of War, Maxim XXI
Convoys of sick and wounded require the shortest possible line to depots.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 1
George describes the incident at Weed and Lennie's compulsion to stroke soft things; he rehearses what Lennie must do if in trouble.
- On the Road, Part Four (Mexico City)
Sal falls ill with fever and dysentery and is left behind by Dean.
- Persuasion, Vol. I, Ch. 6–7
Mary's complaints of illness at Uppercross; her son's dislocated collarbone after a fall and the household's response.
- Persuasion, Vol. I, Ch. 12
Louisa's fall from the Cobb; Anne directs restoratives and calls for a surgeon while others panic.
- Persuasion, Vol. II, Ch. 5
Anne visits Mrs Smith, disabled by illness and attended by Nurse Rooke, a sick-nurse of the Bath lodging-house world.
- Ruth, Ch. 5–7
Bellingham's fever in Wales; his mother takes over the sickroom and excludes Ruth.
- Ruth, Ch. 32–33
Typhus epidemic in Eccleston; Ruth volunteers as matron-nurse in the fever ward of the hospital.
- Second Treatise of Government, Ch. VI, §§57–61
Freedom tied to the age of reason; guardians must 'understand for' those without understanding; lunatics, 'ideots' and madmen remain under others' government.
- Sense and Sensibility, Vol. III, Ch. 6–7
Marianne's fever at Cleveland after walks in the wet; Mr Harris the apothecary attends, fears of infection send the Palmers' baby away, and Elinor nurses her through the crisis.
- 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.
- Sts. Roch and Sebastian: Plague Saints, Roch at Aquapendente and Piacenza
Roch tends plague victims and then contracts plague himself, making the healer's exposure central to the legend.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Camberwell)
First experiences as a VAD at the First London General Hospital, learning to dress wounds and confronting the realities of injury.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Malta)
Nursing in Malta, including her own illness during service there.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Étaples)
Nursing German prisoners and, in spring 1918, gassed and badly wounded British soldiers in overwhelmed wards.
- The Civil War, Book III.75–78
After the defeat at Dyrrachium Caesar delays only to care for the sick and wounded and sends them to Apollonia before retreating.
- The Complete Poems, Drum-Taps
The Civil War poems move through camps, hospitals, wounds, deathbeds and nursing care.
- 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 Iliad, Book 11.828–848
Patroclus cuts the arrow from Eurypylus' thigh, washes the wound, and applies a bitter, pain-killing root.
- The Meek One, Part Two, Ch. 1
Her prolonged fever; the narrator arranges a doctor and nursing care; her silent withdrawal afterwards.
- The Odyssey, Book 5
Odysseus is shipwrecked, battered and washed ashore exhausted, showing exposure, pain and recovery at the edge of death.
- The Portrait of a Lady, Mr. Touchett's final illness
Inheritance is decided at a sickbed, linking money, care, mortality and Ralph's experiment in enabling Isabel.
- The Portrait of a Lady, Ralph's deathbed
Isabel's return to the dying Ralph concentrates grief, confession, forgiveness and the bodily end of one of the novel's moral witnesses.
- The River War, Chapters IV–V
Reforms of the Egyptian army include hospital care for the sick (Ch. IV); the Suakin garrison (Ch. V) suffers malaria, liver abscess, bursati sores in animals and invaliding of a quarter of British officers.
- 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, Chapter 64
The abbot is warned to adapt to many temperaments and not crush the bruised reed.
- The Secret Garden, Early Misselthwaite chapters
Mary's sourness, poor appetite and lack of affection are linked to neglect, environment and bodily habits.
- The Secret Garden, Garden recovery chapters
Fresh air, exercise, food, friendship and belief become a child-centered therapeutic regimen.
- The Warden, Opening chapters
Hiram's Hospital is described as a charitable home for elderly men, establishing dependency, routine and institutional paternalism.
- 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'.
- Wuthering Heights, Linton Heathcliff chapters
Linton's chronic frailty and manipulation by Heathcliff link invalidism to inheritance and coercion.
Quotes
“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”
“This was the commencement of a nervous fever which confined me for several months”
“Taking, therefore, his sword with which he was girt, he divided his cloak into two equal parts, and gave one part to the poor man, while he again clothed himself with the remainder”
“When an army carries with it a battering train, or large convoys of sick and wounded, it cannot march by too short a line upon its depôts”
“I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you”
“There was no wound, no blood, no visible bruise; but her eyes were closed, she breathed not, her face was like death”
“And so lunatics and ideots are never set free from the government of their parents”
“The insane are treated in a peculiar manner; it is only in the beginning that they are placed in an institution for observation; later they are given shelter in the homes of the inhabitants, take part in their agricultural labours, and are treated very kindly”
“When they fell sick, they were sent to hospital instead of being flogged”
“For singing is for the convalescent; the sound ones may talk”