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
Pain
Physical pain, its expression, endurance and relief.
Works
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories gathers Flannery O'Connor's early fiction around Southern households where manners, piety, resentment, and violence collide. In the title story, a grandmother's nostalgia and manipulations help divert a family trip toward the Misfit, whose murders expose both her shallow goodness and her final reach toward kinship.
Alone in Berlin (Jeder stirbt für sich allein, 'Everyone dies for himself alone') opens in Berlin in 1940, as the postwoman Eva Kluge delivers to Otto and Anna Quangel the news that their only son has been killed in the invasion of France. The Quangels live in a tenement at 55 Jablonski Strasse with neighbours who represent the range of life under Nazism: the Persickes, a family of brutal Party loyalists; old Frau Rosenthal, a Jewish widow whose flat is looted and who is hounded until she jumps to her death; and retired judge Fromm, who quietly helps where he can.
Subtitled 'Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future', Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche's attempt to restate in plain argumentative prose, divided into 296 numbered sections and a closing poem, the ideas that Thus Spoke Zarathustra had put in prophetic form. The preface opens by supposing that truth is a woman and that dogmatic philosophers, with their clumsy seriousness, have never known how to win her.
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.
Candide, ou l'Optimisme follows a guileless young man raised in the castle of the Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh in Westphalia, where the tutor Pangloss teaches that this is the best of all possible worlds and that everything is for the best. Candide is kicked out of the castle for kissing the Baron's daughter Cunégonde behind a screen, and the rest of the tale tests Pangloss's doctrine against an avalanche of catastrophe.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Montaigne called his pieces essais, 'trials' or 'attempts', and the word names both a method and a new literary genre. The book gathers 107 chapters in three books, ranging from one-page notes on thumbs, smells and names to the sprawling 'Apology for Raymond Sebond', which fills a sixth of the whole.
Essays and Aphorisms is the title of the selection translated by R. J.
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.
Washington's Farewell Address and selected letters present leadership as restraint, reputation, and institutional precedent. The Farewell Address, published in 1796 near the end of his presidency, warns against sectional division, party spirit, foreign entanglement, public debt, and attacks on constitutional authority.
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.
Jewish Antiquities is Josephus' twenty-book retelling of Jewish history from creation to the outbreak of revolt against Rome in 66 CE. It is not simply a paraphrase of the Bible, though its first half follows Genesis through the monarchy, exile and restoration.
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.
Letters from a Stoic selects from Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, a sequence of philosophical letters that turn daily life into training for freedom. Seneca writes as an older adviser to a younger friend, but the letters are also exercises for himself.
Sulpitius Severus's Life of St. Martin made Martin of Tours one of the defining saints of the Latin West.
Long Walk to Freedom is Mandela's memoir of childhood, political awakening, resistance, imprisonment, negotiation, and democratic transition. It begins in rural Transkei, with family, Thembu traditions, mission schooling, and the gradual widening of Mandela's world through education and urban life.
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.
Meditationes de prima philosophia, published in Paris in 1641, compresses Descartes's metaphysics into six meditations, each imagined as a day's reflection by a solitary thinker seated by the fire in a dressing gown. The book was issued with six sets of Objections from learned readers (Caterus, Mersenne's circle, Hobbes, Arnauld, Gassendi and others) and Descartes's Replies, which are longer than the Meditations themselves; a second edition (Amsterdam, 1642) added the Jesuit Bourdin's Seventh Objections.
This Douglass entry pairs the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with the 1852 speech commonly known as What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? The Narrative tells Douglass's movement from enslaved childhood in Maryland through violence, literacy, skilled labor, resistance, escape, and public abolitionist identity.
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.
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 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.
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.
The Personal Memoirs of U. S.
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.
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.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight opens at Arthur's Christmas court, where a green stranger interrupts the feast with a beheading game. Gawain accepts the challenge, cuts off the Green Knight's head, and must seek the Green Chapel a year later to receive the return blow.
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.
Sts. Roch and Sebastian became plague saints through two different imaginative routes.
Dell'arte della guerra, printed in Florence in 1521, is the only one of Machiavelli's political works published in his lifetime. It is a dialogue in seven books, set in 1516 in the Orti Oricellari, the shaded garden of Cosimo Rucellai, where the humanist circle that Machiavelli frequented met to discuss Livy and republican government.
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 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 Fall of the Roman Republic is a selection of six of Plutarch's Roman Lives, arranged to tell the story of the Republic's collapse in the century before Augustus: Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar and Cicero. Read in sequence, they show how military glory, personal ambition and civil war destroyed Rome's traditional government.
The Golden Ass is a comic, erotic, violent and religious novel about curiosity transformed into degradation and salvation. Lucius, a young man fascinated by magic, travels in Thessaly, a region famous for witches.
This entry gathers the Golden Legend chapters and adjacent medieval traditions behind saints whose images still move through calendars, holidays, icons, hospitals, medals, advertising, and folklore. Jacobus de Voragine did not write critical biography in the modern sense.
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 Jewish War is Josephus' account of the revolt against Rome from its Hasmonean and Herodian prehistory to the destruction of Jerusalem and the last pockets of resistance. Written after Josephus had defected to the Romans, the work tries to explain a catastrophe to several audiences at once: Jews who had survived it, Romans who had conquered, and Greek-speaking readers who needed Judean politics translated into the language of civil war, faction and providence.
The Koran, or Quran ('recitation'), is the central scripture of Islam. It consists of 114 chapters called suras, of very unequal length, each made up of verses (ayat).
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 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 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket begins as a sea adventure told by a young Nantucketer whose craving for forbidden experience repeatedly overrides judgment. Pym and his friend Augustus Barnard first make a disastrous drunken voyage in the Ariel, a small boat nearly destroyed before rescue.
The Nibelungenlied is a medieval German epic of courtship, deception, insult and catastrophic revenge. Its first half centers on Siegfried, prince of Xanten, who comes to Worms hoping to win Kriemhild, sister of the Burgundian kings Gunther, Gernot and Giselher.
The Old Man and the Sea follows Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without taking a fish, as he sails far into the Gulf Stream and hooks a marlin larger than his skiff. Hemingway narrows the plot until skill, endurance, hunger, memory, prayer, and pain are concentrated in one body at sea.
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 Prince is a short treatise in twenty-six chapters that Machiavelli wrote in 1513, shortly after losing his post in the Florentine chancery, and dedicated, in its final form, to Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino. In the dedication he offers the Medici what he calls his knowledge of the actions of great men, gained from long experience of modern affairs and continual reading of ancient ones.
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 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 Twelve Caesars offers biographies of Julius Caesar and the first eleven Roman emperors from Augustus through Domitian. Suetonius does not write history as Tacitus does, with sustained analysis of institutions and causation.
The 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 Voyage of the Beagle is Darwin's account of his five-year journey around South America, the Pacific, Australia, and the Atlantic aboard HMS Beagle. It is a travel book before it is an evolutionary treatise: Darwin describes landscapes, fossils, earthquakes, volcanoes, coral reefs, animals, plants, Indigenous peoples, imperial violence, slavery, disease, and the practical hardships of field observation.
Treasure Island is narrated mainly by Jim Hawkins, the son of an innkeeper whose ordinary life is transformed when the old pirate Billy Bones comes to the Admiral Benbow inn. Bones brings a sea chest, a map and danger in the form of former shipmates, including Black Dog and the blind beggar Pew.
Two Lives of Charlemagne pairs Einhard's Life of Charlemagne with Notker the Stammerer's later anecdotes about the emperor. Einhard writes as a court insider shaped by classical biography, especially Suetonius.
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.
Passages
- 12 Years a Slave, Ch. 2-3
Northup is drugged, imprisoned and beaten when he asserts that he is free.
- 12 Years a Slave, Tibeats episode
Northup is nearly hanged and left in prolonged bodily torment after resisting Tibeats.
- 12 Years a Slave, Epps plantation chapters
Cotton labor, quotas, whippings, hunger and surveillance show slavery as chronic bodily extraction.
- A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Grace without softness
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes disability, chronic illness, trauma, violence, family care, and the charged symbolism of bodily affliction
- Alone in Berlin, Part IV
Interrogation and imprisonment of the Quangels; cyanide capsules offered as a means of choosing death.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Seven, §225; Part Nine, §270
Defence of great suffering as a discipline; the knowledge and pride of those who have suffered deeply.
- Black Beauty, Part II (Earlshall)
The bearing rein's effect on Beauty and Ginger: pain in mouth, neck and windpipe.
- Black Beauty, Part II
Reuben Smith rides drunk, Beauty falls and breaks his knees, Smith is killed; Beauty is left scarred and devalued.
- Candide: Or Optimism, Ch. 5–6
The Lisbon earthquake, the injured Candide, and the auto-da-fé held to prevent further quakes.
- Candide: Or Optimism, Ch. 3
Battle between Bulgars and Abares; heaps of dead and dying, mutilated villagers.
- Candide: Or Optimism, Ch. 19
The enslaved man in Surinam missing a hand and a leg as punishment.
- Confessions, Book IX.2, 4
Chest pain and difficulty breathing support his resignation from teaching; a severe toothache relieved after prayer.
- Confessions, Book VIII
The Vincennes illumination 'approaching a delirium'; congenital bladder defect, nephritic colic, treatment by Morand and Daran, Morand's prognosis of six months to live, and the decision to abandon physicians.
- 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.
- De Materia Medica, Book 4, mandrake
Mandrake is presented as a narcotic and surgical/anodyne aid, later surrounded by magical lore.
- 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.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 11
Four circumstances behind natural evil: pain as motive, general laws, frugal endowment of animals, inaccurate workmanship of nature (including excess or deficiency of humours and disease).
- Early Christian Lives, Life of Antony, tomb and fortress episodes
Demonic assaults, terrifying visions and endurance under attack structure ascetic combat.
- Early Franciscan Sources, Life of St. Francis, Ch. XIX
Doctors use cautery for Francis's eye disease, providing a vivid premodern treatment scene.
- East of Eden, Part Four
Kate, suffering from arthritis and fearing exposure, takes poison.
- Ecce Homo, Wise and clever chapters
Nietzsche links diet, climate, illness, recovery, and intellectual style.
- Essays, Book II, Ch. III, 'A Custom of the Isle of Cea'
Survey of classical and biblical cases of voluntary death and the arguments for and against it, including unbearable pain as a justification.
- Essays, Book II, Ch. XXXVII, 'Of the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers'
First-person account of kidney stone attacks, speculation on hereditary transmission from his father, and a long critique of physicians' contradictions and fees.
- Essays, Book III, Ch. XIII, 'Of Experience'
Detailed personal regimen (sleep, diet, habits) and colic attacks, with the argument that long experience of one's own body outranks medical rules.
- 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, 'Human Nature' (stored text)
Egoism, malice and the pleasure of anger and hatred; cruelty as the embittered will's attempt to relieve its own torment; Schadenfreude and envy as opposites of pity.
- Evangelium Vitae, Medicine and law
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
- Farewell Address and Selected Letters, Final illness correspondence and accounts
Washington's death after severe throat illness and bloodletting reflects eighteenth-century medical practice.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, First Section (happiness as indirect duty)
The gouty patient who prefers present pleasure to doubtful future health, showing how indefinite the concept of happiness is.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 17, Herod's final illness
Herod's last disease includes severe pain, feverish decline, abdominal and genital symptoms, physicians and desperate therapies before death.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 19, Agrippa I's death
The sudden illness and death of Agrippa I are framed as divine judgment, showing how acute disease becomes political theology.
- Letters from a Stoic, Letter 54
Seneca describes severe breathing attacks and his mental response to bodily crisis.
- 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.
- Long Walk to Freedom, Robben Island chapters
Hard labor, surveillance, diet, study, discipline, and solidarity shape the health and identity of prisoners.
- Meditations, Book 7.33, 7.64
On pain: if intolerable it ends life, if lasting it is bearable; in every pain remember there is no dishonour.
- Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation VI
Argument for the real distinction of mind and body, followed by the claim that the mind is not in the body as a pilot in a ship, as hunger, thirst and pain show.
- Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation VI
Phantom pain felt by those whose arm or leg has been amputated, used to show that the senses can mislead about the location of pain.
- Narrative of the Life and What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?, Narrative, childhood and plantation violence
Family separation, whipping, hunger, and terror show slavery as chronic bodily and psychological injury.
- Natural History: A Selection, Books 20–27
Medicinal plants are cataloged with uses for pain, sleep, wounds, digestion and mental disturbance.
- Natural History: A Selection, Book 20, poppy traditions
Poppy preparations appear among sleep- and pain-related remedies, with danger implicit in potency.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 3
Lennie crushes Curley's hand; the injury is covered up as a machine accident and Curley is taken to the doctor.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 4
Crooks rubs liniment into his crooked back in his solitary room.
- On Medicine, Book 3
Inflammation is described through redness, swelling, heat and pain, a durable clinical formula.
- On Medicine, Books 5–6
Drug preparations include purges, plasters, narcotic applications and substances that can heal or poison.
- On Medicine, Book 7
Operations for cataract, fistula, bladder stone and damaged body parts show technical Roman surgery.
- On the Genealogy of Morality, Essay II
Guilt and bad conscience are traced through pain, debt, punishment, and internalized instinct.
- Pensees, Fragment 552, Section VII
The Mystery of Jesus: Christ's self-inflicted agony in Gethsemane, the sleeping disciples, and the voice that says physicians will not heal.
- Personal Memoirs, Preface
Grant notes he was 'reduced almost to the point of death' while writing and that his son F. D. Grant helped with the work.
- Personal Memoirs, Vol. II, Ch. LXVII
Sick headache treated with hot mustard footbaths and plasters, cured on reading Lee's note; Grant's 'sad and depressed' feelings at the surrender.
- Selected Sermons, Autobiographical allusions to illness and pain
His own suffering informs pastoral speech about endurance and weakness.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book IV (the march to Aqaba)
The crossing of waterless country in summer; heat, thirst and the search for a lost man in the desert; the near-fatal effects of exhaustion on men and camels.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book VI (Deraa, November 1917)
Lawrence's account of his capture, flogging and sexual assault and of the lasting damage to his sense of self. Handle with care: the account is contested as fact and should be cited as his testimony.
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Green Chapel
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight gives this tag concrete force through medical interest gathers around bodily vulnerability: decapitation, fear, dream, the nick on the neck, confession, and shame felt as an embodied wound
- Sts. Roch and Sebastian: Plague Saints, Sebastian's arrows
Arrow wounds become a plague symbol, translating invisible epidemic danger into an image a viewer can recognize and pray before.
- The Art of War, Book II
Roman soldiers made the weight of armour bearable by habituating their bodies to hardship; accustomed pains cease to be felt.
- The Complete Poems, Drum-Taps
The Civil War poems move through camps, hospitals, wounds, deathbeds and nursing care.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 1
The widow tells Peter Ivanovich of her husband's three days of incessant screaming before death.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 3–4
The fall against a window frame, the pain in the side, the strange taste in the mouth, and the first consultation with a celebrated doctor.
- 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 Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 12
Three days of screaming, the sensation of being pushed into a black sack, then light and the end of fear.
- The Divine Comedy, Paradiso
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 Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Life of Marius 6
Marius has the varicose veins of one leg cut out without restraint, then refuses surgery on the other.
- The Golden Ass, Books 4–10
Lucius as ass suffers beating, hunger, overwork and repeated threat from human owners.
- The Golden Legend: Popular Saints, Life of St. Lucy
Lucy's later eye patronage and martyrdom narratives make her important for the history of blindness devotion and ocular symbolism.
- The History of the Church, Books 5–6, martyr narratives
Accounts of imprisoned and tortured Christians make bodily suffering central to communal memory.
- The History of the Church, Books 8–9, Great Persecution
Executions, mutilations, mines and prisons under Diocletian dominate the late narrative.
- The Jewish War, Book 1, late Herod narrative
Herod the Great's final illness is described through bodily pain, feverish symptoms, ulceration and futile attempts at relief before his death.
- The Jewish War, Book 3, siege of Jotapata
Roman siege engines, wounds, exhaustion, fear and Josephus' survival after a collective death pact make the campaign a study in injury and combat psychology.
- The Jewish War, Book 6, burning of the Temple
The final fighting around the Temple brings fire, crush injuries, slaughter and mass death in a sacred precinct.
- The Koran, Sura 19:23–26
Mary's labour pains beneath a palm tree; she is told to eat dates and drink from a stream.
- The Koran, Sura 38:41–44
Job, afflicted by Satan with distress and suffering, is told to strike the ground and finds cool water to wash and drink.
- The Master and Margarita, Part One, Ch. 2
Pilate suffers an excruciating hemicrania during the interrogation; Yeshua perceives it and it lifts.
- The Metaphysical Poets, George Herbert, 'Affliction (I)'
Herbert recounts how sickness and setbacks wasted his youth, and his complaint against God.
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Ch. 2-3
The Ariel voyage exposes Pym and Augustus to intoxication, storm, near drowning and rescue after impaired judgment at sea.
- The Nibelungenlied, Aventiure 3
Siegfried's dragon-blood invulnerability leaves one concealed vulnerable spot, making the hero's body both magical and anatomically fragile.
- The Nibelungenlied, Aventiure 33-39
The fighting in Etzel's hall emphasizes wounds, exhaustion, burning, thirst and the mass death of warriors trapped by honor.
- The Old Man and the Sea, The marlin
The Old Man and the Sea gives this tag concrete force through its medical lens is practical and bodily: age, cramps, hand wounds, exhaustion, starvation, pain tolerance, and the dignity of care between santiago and manolin
- The Persian Expedition, Book IV, Chapter V
The Armenian snows: deep drifts, a north wind, men dying overnight without fire or food, hunger-faintness, snow-blindness and frostbitten toes, with practical remedies.
- The Power and the Glory, Opening section with Mr. Tench
The dentist's decayed professional life and the priest's search for brandy establish bodily and spiritual malaise together.
- The Prince, Chapter XXVI
Italy pictured as beaten, despoiled and lacerated, waiting for someone to heal her wounds and cleanse her long-festering sores.
- The Quiet American, Watchtower episode
Fowler and Pyle trapped in danger reveal fear, pain and dependence beneath political disagreement.
- The Underdogs, Opening mountain fighting
Demetrio's band fights from rough terrain, foregrounding gunshot wounds, flight and bodily endurance.
- The Voyage of the Beagle, South America chapters
Darwin records illness, exposure, fatigue, and the bodily demands of collecting and travel.
- Treasure Island, Stockade fighting
The loyal party deals with gunshot wounds, field treatment, fever risk and pain during the island conflict.
- Two Lives of Charlemagne, Campaign narratives
Wars and punishments imply wounds, pain and coercive bodily discipline at the edge of exemplary kingship.
- 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.
Quotes
“use the consolations of reason in this case, and you were as good preach ease to one on the rack, and hope to allay, by rational discourses, the pain of his joints tearing asunder”
“The discipline of suffering, of GREAT suffering--know ye not that it is only THIS discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto”
“Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks.”
“A defect in the bladder caused me, during my early years, to suffer an almost continual retention of urine”
“But what racking pains, on the other hand, arise from gouts, gravels, megrims, toothaches, rheumatisms, where the injury to the animal machinery is either small or incurable”
“The doctors, having exhausted the therapeutic arsenal of the time, decided to resort to cauterization; it was decided to draw a rod of white-hot iron across his forehead”
“Brother fire," he said, "you are beautiful above all creatures; be favorable to me in this hour; you know how much I have always loved you; be then courteous to-day”
“It is as natural to die, as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful, as the other”
“the very sight of another’s pain materially pains me, and I often usurp the sensations of another person”
“I am in conflict with the worst, the most sudden, the most painful, the most mortal, and the most irremediable of all diseases”
“man is the only animal which causes pain to others without any further purpose than just to cause it”
“it is the will to live, which, more and more embittered by the constant sufferings of existence, seeks to alleviate its own torment by causing torment in others”
“a gouty patient, for instance, can choose to enjoy what he likes, and to suffer what he may”
“the Blood in a Pleurisie, getting into the Membrane of the breast, breedeth there an Inflammation, accompanied with a Fever, and painfull stitches”
Frequently cited
“Sooner would I stand Three times to face their battles, shield in hand, Than bear one child”
Frequently cited
“If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgement about it.”
“Jesus will be in agony even to the end of the world. We must not sleep during that time”
“Later I was reduced almost to the point of death, and it became impossible for me to attend to anything for weeks”
“The sight was more unendurable than encountering the enemy's fire, and I returned to my tree in the rain”
“I spent the night in bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and the back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning”
“When the officer reached me I was still suffering with the sick headache, but the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured”
“Diocletian, cruel emperor of Rome, commanded that Sebastian should be led into the middle of a field and there bound to a stake, and that his archers should shoot at him till he was as full of arrows as an urchin is full of pricks”
“the whiche thinges thei overcame, with accustomyng the body to diseases, and with hardenyng it, to bee able to indure labour. And you knowe, how that in thinges accustomed, men suffer no grief”
“Then they drew out their swords and smote her through the throat, but nevertheless she died not anon, but preached to the people”
“disabled soldiers, struck down with snow-blindness or with toes mortified by frostbite”
“sitting down and keeping quiet helped the blood to freeze and the toes to mortify”
“What means are there of determining which is the acutest of two pains, or the intensest of two pleasurable sensations, except the general suffrage of those who are familiar with both”