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
Pharmacology Poisons
Drugs, remedies, poisons, toxicology, hemlock and potions.
Works
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dracula is told through journals, letters, phonograph diaries, telegrams and newspaper cuttings assembled by its characters. Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to Transylvania to arrange the purchase of a London property, Carfax, for Count Dracula.
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.
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.
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.
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver, presents itself as the sober memoir of a ship's surgeon. In Part I, shipwrecked, Gulliver wakes on the shore of Lilliput tied down by people six inches tall.
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.
Humboldt's Gift is narrated by Charlie Citrine, a successful middle-aged Chicago writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and made a fortune from a Broadway hit about the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron von Trenck, which was also made into a film. Now in his fifties, Charlie is distracted, spiritually restless and steadily losing his money.
Napoleon dictated or wrote tens of thousands of letters, often several dozen a day, to generals, ministers, prefects, bishops, kings, his family and the women he loved. Napoleon III's government published a thirty-two-volume Correspondance de Napoléon Ier between 1858 and 1870, pruning letters that embarrassed the dynasty; the Fondation Napoléon's complete edition, begun in 2004, runs to more than forty thousand items.
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.
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.
Medea and Other Plays centers on Euripides’ art of making the socially powerless terrifyingly articulate. Medea begins after Jason has abandoned his foreign wife and children to marry the Corinthian princess.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin poem in fifteen books of dactylic hexameter, about 12,000 lines, that strings together some 250 myths of transformation from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus. Its unifying thread is change of form: gods, humans and nymphs become animals, plants, stones, stars and springs, usually at moments of extreme passion, violence or divine punishment.
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 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.
Persian Letters is an epistolary novel made up of letters exchanged between two Persian noblemen travelling in Europe, Usbek and his younger companion Rica, and their friends, servants and wives back home in Isfahan. The letters run from 1711 to 1720, covering the last years of Louis XIV, the Regency and the collapse of John Law's financial system.
This volume pairs one of Plato's most literary dialogues with two letters attributed to him. The Phaedrus takes place outside the walls of Athens, where Socrates, who rarely leaves the city, walks with the young Phaedrus along the river Ilissus and sits under a plane tree on a hot summer day.
Wesley's Sermons on Several Occasions and Primitive Physick make an unusually strong pairing for a medical classics library. The sermons define Methodist teaching on salvation, new birth, sanctification, practical holiness, the means of grace, Christian perfection, money, self-denial, and social responsibility.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a comic and nostalgic novel of boyhood set in the 1840s in St. Petersburg, a small Missouri town on the Mississippi modelled on Twain's Hannibal.
The Age of Alexander is a collection of nine of Plutarch's Lives covering the Greek world in the fourth and early third centuries BCE, from the decline of Sparta and Thebes through the rise of Macedon and the conquests of Alexander to the struggles of his successors. Removed from their original Roman pairings, they read as a sequence of Greek history told through character.
This volume contains Tacitus' two earliest works, both written in 98 CE, soon after the assassination of the emperor Domitian. The Agricola is a biography and eulogy of the author's father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who died in 93.
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 Annals of Imperial Rome narrates the Julio-Claudian empire from the death of Augustus through Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, though parts are lost. Tacitus writes history as the psychology of autocracy.
The Arthashastra, the 'science of material gain' or of statecraft, is a vast Sanskrit treatise on how a king should acquire, protect and govern territory. Written mostly in prose with occasional verses, it is divided into fifteen books and some 150 chapters, and covers almost every aspect of administration with remarkable detail and an unsentimental realism that has led to comparisons with Machiavelli.
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is a selection of Lovecraft's tales, edited with notes by the Lovecraft scholar S. T.
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 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.
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.
Die Traumdeutung appeared in November 1899 with the date 1900 on its title page, and Freud regarded it as his most important book. Its central claim is that dreams are meaningful psychic acts that can be interpreted, and that every dream, properly analysed, proves to be the fulfilment of a wish.
The Lais of Marie de France are twelve short narrative poems in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, preserved together in one manuscript (British Library, Harley 978) with a general prologue in which Marie dedicates them to a 'noble king', probably Henry II. She says she has heard Breton lais, songs commemorating adventures, and has put them into verse so they will not be forgotten.
The Last Days of Socrates gathers four dialogues by Plato that together tell the story of Socrates' trial and death in Athens in 399 BCE: the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. In the Euthyphro, Socrates meets Euthyphro outside the court where Socrates must answer an indictment for impiety and corrupting the young.
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 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 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 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 Satires of Horace and Persius brings together two Roman satiric voices separated by style, temperament and political world. Horace's Sermones, written after the civil wars and during the rise of Augustus, are conversational poems about greed, ambition, social climbing, sexual folly, legacy-hunting, literary quarrels, dinner parties and the art of living within limits.
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.
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.
We is presented as the diary or record of D-503, mathematician and builder of the spaceship Integral in the OneState, a glass-walled totalitarian society ruled by the Benefactor. Citizens, called Numbers, live by tables of hours, regulated labor, monitored sex, prescribed walks and transparent architecture.
Passages
- 12 Years a Slave, Ch. 2-3
Northup is drugged, imprisoned and beaten when he asserts that he is free.
- A Burnt-Out Case, Middle chapters
Colin's routine at the leproserie: dispensing drugs, examining patients, and planning facilities with Querry.
- Alone in Berlin, Part IV
Interrogation and imprisonment of the Quangels; cyanide capsules offered as a means of choosing death.
- 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 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section VIII, Part I
Physicians are not surprised when medicines fail, because they assume hidden causes in the animal economy; Hume uses this to argue for regularity in human conduct.
- 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.
- De Materia Medica, Book 4, mandrake
Mandrake is presented as a narcotic and surgical/anodyne aid, later surrounded by magical lore.
- De Materia Medica, Book 4, hellebore
Black and white hellebore are purgative drugs associated in ancient medicine with melancholia and madness.
- De Materia Medica, Book 4, henbane and hemlock
Dangerous plants illustrate the thin margin between medicinal sedation and poisoning.
- De Materia Medica, Books 1–5, wine and oils
Medicated wines, oils and resins show drug delivery through everyday substances.
- De Materia Medica, Antidote and poison entries
Descriptions of toxic substances and countermeasures form an early practical toxicology.
- Don Quixote, Part I, Ch. 17
Don Quixote brews and drinks the balsam of Fierabras; he and Sancho are violently sick.
- Dracula, Ch. 8 (Seward's diary)
Sleepless and dejected, Seward considers taking chloral hydrate and resolves not to let it become a habit.
- Dracula, Ch. 10–12
Van Helsing performs successive blood transfusions on Lucy from Arthur, Seward, himself and Quincey, and treats her with garlic and opiates.
- East of Eden, Part Two
Kate poisons the brothel-keeper Faye gradually with medicines.
- East of Eden, Part Four
Kate, suffering from arthritis and fearing exposure, takes poison.
- Effi Briest, Kessin chapters
Friendship with the hunchbacked apothecary Gieshübler.
- 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.
- Galen: Selected Works, Therapeutic and pharmacological works
Compound remedies, theriac and poppy/opium preparations belong to Galen’s drug tradition.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part IV, Ch. 6
Gulliver explains European physicians, purges, clysters and the habit of foretelling death to save reputation.
- Hippocratic Writings, The Oath
The physician promises restraint with deadly drugs, confidentiality and disciplined conduct in the houses of patients.
- Humboldt's Gift, Middle sections
Humboldt's paranoid accusations, violence toward his wife, use of drink and pills, and commitment to Bellevue.
- Letters of Napoleon, Letters and orders from Egypt and Syria (1798–1799)
Plague in the Army of the Orient, quarantine measures, and the siege of Acre; context for the disputed Jaffa opium episode.
- Life of St. Martin, Life, Ch. 6: hellebore
The poisonous plant episode links ascetic foraging to ancient pharmacology and the dangers of diet.
- Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 1–2
The hallucinated dagger; the voice crying 'Sleep no more'; the drugged possets given to the grooms.
- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 3
Macbeth asks the Doctor to minister to a mind diseased; 'Throw physic to the dogs'.
- Medea and Other Plays, Medea, poisoned gifts
A robe and crown destroy Jason’s bride and Creon through concealed toxic power.
- Metamorphoses, Book VII
Medea drains Aeson's blood and refills his veins with a magic brew, restoring his youth; the daughters of Pelias are tricked into killing their father.
- 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 25, hellebore traditions
Hellebore appears in the ancient therapeutic world of purging and treatment of mental disturbance.
- Natural History: A Selection, Book 25, mandrake traditions
Mandrake lore connects narcotic, magical and surgical uses.
- 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
Sale of poisons: labelling, a register of buyers, Bentham's 'preappointed evidence', and rejection of a universal prescription requirement; the unsafe-bridge example and its exceptions for the delirious or overexcited.
- On Medicine, Books 5–6
Drug preparations include purges, plasters, narcotic applications and substances that can heal or poison.
- Persian Letters, Final letter (Letter 161 in the 1758 numbering)
Roxane writes to Usbek after taking poison, declaring her deception and her inner freedom.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 274c–275b
The myth of Theuth: writing as a pharmakon for memory that weakens memory.
- Sermons on Several Occasions and Primitive Physick, Primitive Physick, preface and remedy lists
Wesley promotes simple remedies and access for the poor, revealing eighteenth-century lay medicine and its hazards.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 12
Aunt Polly, infatuated with patent medicines, tries the water treatment and other remedies on a listless Tom, who gives the Pain-killer to the cat.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 19
Alexander falls ill after bathing in the cold Cydnus and drinks his physician Philip's draught while showing him an accusation of poisoning.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 75–77
Alexander's final fever at Babylon, day by day from the royal journals, with Plutarch's discussion of poisoning rumours.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Demosthenes 29–30
Demosthenes takes poison concealed in his pen to avoid capture by Macedonian agents.
- The Agricola and the Germania, Agricola 43
Agricola's last illness, the emperor's physicians and freedmen visiting, and rumours of poison.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 2, Sect. 4, Memb. 2, Subs. 1
Emetic simples, hellebore and antimony, and the double-edged praise and condemnation of tobacco.
- The Annals of Imperial Rome, Book 12, death of Claudius traditions
Tacitus reports the famous poisoning tradition surrounding Claudius and succession.
- The Arthashastra, Book 1 (protection of the king)
Signs by which poisoned food and drink can be detected, and the role of physicians and antidotes in guarding the king.
- The Arthashastra, Book 4 (examination of sudden death)
Procedures for inspecting a corpse to determine whether death resulted from hanging, drowning, poison or violence.
- The Arthashastra, Book 14
Recipes for poisons, injurious smokes and their counter-measures, used in secret warfare.
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'The Colour Out of Space'
The Gardner family sicken, grow grey and brittle, and lose their minds as the colour poisons the land.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Château d'If chapters ('The Abbé's Chamber' to 'The Cemetery of the Château d'If')
Faria's cataleptic attacks, treated with drops of a red liquid; the third attack kills him.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Paris section ('Toxicology')
Monte Cristo discusses poisons, tolerance and the medicinal and lethal effects of drugs with Madame de Villefort.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Paris section (Saint-Méran and Barrois deaths)
Successive poisonings in the Villefort household; Dr d'Avrigny diagnoses poison and confronts Villefort.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Late Paris section ('Locusta' and following)
Monte Cristo substitutes a narcotic that simulates death to save Valentine from poisoning.
- The Golden Ass, Book 3
Lucius applies the wrong magical ointment and becomes a donkey while retaining human mind.
- The Iliad, Book 4.190–219
Machaon is summoned to treat Menelaus' arrow wound: he draws the arrow, sucks out the blood and applies healing herbs.
- The Iliad, Book 11.828–848
Patroclus cuts the arrow from Eurypylus' thigh, washes the wound, and applies a bitter, pain-killing root.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter II, the dream of Irma's injection
A patient with hysterical symptoms, a throat examination revealing white patches, colleagues diagnosing infection and blaming an injection given with an unclean syringe; Freud's analysis of his own professional guilt.
- The Lais of Marie de France, 'Les Deus Amanz'
A strengthening potion from a relative at Salerno; the lover refuses it and dies of exhaustion at the summit.
- The Last Days of Socrates, Phaedo 116a–118a
The bath, the farewell, the friends' weeping, the drinking of the hemlock and the ascending numbness until death.
- The Master and Margarita, Part Two, Ch. 23
Satan's ball: Margarita receives a procession of poisoners and murderers from history.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Imaginary Invalid, Act 1, Scene 1
Argan audits his apothecary's bill for enemas, purges and draughts.
- The Odyssey, Book 4
Helen mixes a drug into wine that suppresses grief and anger, a striking ancient fantasy of pharmacological emotional control.
- The Odyssey, Book 10
Circe's potion transforms men into swine; Hermes provides moly as protective antidote before Odysseus confronts her.
- The Persian Expedition, Book IV, Chapter VIII
Mass poisoning by wild honey: dose-dependent intoxication, vomiting, diarrhoea, inability to stand, delirium and collapse, with recovery after a day and convalescence over three to four days.
- The Satires of Horace and Persius, Horace, Satire 1.8
Canidia and Sagana's magic rites invoke poisons, corpses and bodily grotesquerie in a comic anti-witchcraft scene.
- The Twelve Caesars, Several lives
Poisoning rumors, assassination wounds and deathbed omens recur as instruments of political interpretation.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, §5
The last man: health-conscious, conflict-averse, managing his days with small doses of poison for pleasant dreams and a larger dose for a pleasant death; dissenters go voluntarily into the madhouse.
- 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.
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”
“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”
“he found the same operation and effect that those do who have taken one indeed”
“The precepts for the physician to make his patient thoroughly healthy, and for a poisoner to ensure certain death, are of equal value in this respect, that each serves to effect its purpose perfectly”
“Here he subsisted for some time on the roots of plants; and, while doing so, he took for food hellebore, which is, as people say, a poisonous kind of grass”
“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?”
“Throw physic to the dogs, I’ll none of it”
“But opiates, and the like, banish the spirits by their malignant and hostile quality”
“If poisons were never bought or used for any purpose except the commission of murder, it would be right to prohibit their manufacture and sale”
“But to require in all cases the certificate of a medical practitioner, would make it sometimes impossible, always expensive, to obtain the article for legitimate uses”
“When we are well we wonder what we would do if we were ill, but when we are ill we take medicine cheerfully; the illness persuades us to do so”
“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”
“this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories”
“Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases”
“but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, 'tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul”
Frequently cited
“Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt”
“A small dose produced a condition not unlike violent drunkenness, a large one an attack very like a fit of madness, and some dropped down, apparently at death's door”
“on the third or fourth day got on their legs again like convalescents after a severe course of medical treatment”
“A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death”