The title play, A Doll's House (1879), takes place over three days of Christmas in the comfortable Norwegian home of Torvald Helmer, a newly appointed bank manager, and his wife Nora, whom he treats as a charming pet, calling her his songbird and squirrel. Years earlier, when Torvald was gravely ill and doctors advised a year in Italy, Nora secretly borrowed the money from the lawyer Krogstad, forging her dying father's signature as guarantor.
Medical tag
Opium Laudanum
Opium, laudanum, morphine and other opiates, medical or recreational.
Works
Hume first published this book in 1748 as Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, and gave it its present title in 1758. It is his deliberate second attempt at the material of Book I of the Treatise, written, he said, so that the argument would no longer fail through its manner.
Locke says in the Epistle to the Reader that the Essay began when five or six friends meeting in his rooms found themselves at a standstill over questions of morality and revealed religion, and he proposed that they first examine what objects human understanding is fitted to deal with. Nearly twenty years later the result was a long, patient survey of where ideas come from, how they combine, how words signify them and how far knowledge and probable belief can reach.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The Personal Memoirs of U. S.
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 Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is a selection of Lovecraft's tales, edited with notes by the Lovecraft scholar S. T.
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 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.
Passages
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, Ghosts, Act 2
Osvald recounts the Paris doctor's verdict that he was born with a worm-eaten constitution, and reveals he carries morphine powders.
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section VI
Irregular causes such as rhubarb as a purge and opium as a soporific, used to explain how probability arises from mixed experience.
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. XXIII
Opium's colour, taste and soporific or anodyne virtues as powers grounded in hidden primary qualities.
- De Materia Medica, Book 4, poppy/opium entries
Poppy juice and opium preparations are described as powerful pain-relieving and sleep-inducing substances with lethal risk.
- Frankenstein, Vol. III, Ch. IV (1818) / Ch. 21 (1831)
Imprisoned in Ireland after Clerval's death, Victor suffers prolonged fever and delirium; on the voyage home he relies on laudanum to sleep.
- Galen: Selected Works, Therapeutic and pharmacological works
Compound remedies, theriac and poppy/opium preparations belong to Galen’s drug tradition.
- Natural History: A Selection, Book 20, poppy traditions
Poppy preparations appear among sleep- and pain-related remedies, with danger implicit in potency.
- Novum Organum, Book II, Aphorism L
Medicines that condense the flesh or the spirits: mild soporifics (violet, dried roses, lettuce), rose-water for fainting fits, and opiates that expel the spirits from the brain's ventricles yet in moderation may aid cure and longevity.
- On Liberty, Ch. V, Applications
Drunkenness as self-regarding unless tied to violence; taxation of stimulants; the opium import ban in China and the Maine Law listed as interferences with buyers.
- On the Road, Part Two
Visit to Old Bull Lee's household near New Orleans, where drug use (including Benzedrine and opiates) is part of daily life.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 2, Sect. 5, Memb. 1, Subs. 2 and 6
Bloodletting for melancholy; correctors of insomnia and fearful dreams using poppy, mandrake, henbane, nightshade, hemp-seed and opiates.
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'Dagon'
Narrator's morphine dependence, terror and suicidal resolve after his vision of the sea creature.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 8
Opium and morphine for pain and sleeplessness; the doctor's routine visit; the family goes to the theatre.
- The Quiet American, Saigon domestic chapters
Fowler's opium use accompanies insomnia, detachment and emotional avoidance in a imperial urban setting.
Quotes
“nor has rhubarb always proved a purge, or opium a soporific to every one, who has taken these medicines”
“For the colour and taste of opium are, as well as its soporific or anodyne virtues, mere powers, depending on its primary qualities”
“But opiates, and the like, banish the spirits by their malignant and hostile quality”
“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”
“I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more.”