A Burnt-Out Case follows Querry, a celebrated European architect of churches who has lost all feeling: for his work, for women, for God and for himself. Travelling as far as the river boats will take him, he arrives at a leproserie deep in the Belgian Congo run by a community of missionary fathers and by Dr Colin, an atheist physician devoted to his patients.
Medical tag
Physicians Doctors
Physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, healers as characters or institutions.
Works
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.
Pinel presents insanity as a medical and moral problem rather than a condition to be met chiefly with chains, spectacle, or punishment. The treatise moves between nosology, institutional observation, and therapeutic counsel.
Hume first published this book in 1748 as Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, and gave it its present title in 1758. It is his deliberate second attempt at the material of Book I of the Treatise, written, he said, so that the argument would no longer fail through its manner.
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.
This collection pairs Melville's posthumous novella Billy Budd, Sailor with the best of the short fiction he published in magazines in the 1850s, usually including Bartleby, the Scrivener, Benito Cereno and The Encantadas (contents vary by edition). Bartleby (1853) is narrated by a comfortable Wall Street lawyer who hires a pale, quiet copyist.
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.
Maudsley's Body and Mind argues that mental life cannot be separated from bodily organization, nervous function, heredity, and disease. Based on the Gulstonian Lectures, the book brings Victorian psychiatry, physiology, and evolutionary thought into one frame.
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.
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.
Ceremony follows Tayo, a young man of mixed Laguna and white ancestry, who returns to the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico after the Second World War deeply ill in body and mind. In the Philippines he fought alongside his cousin Rocky, the family's favoured son, and endured the Bataan Death March; Rocky died of his wounds during the march, and Tayo could not save him.
Chess (Schachnovelle, also translated as The Royal Game or Chess Story) is narrated by a passenger on a liner sailing from New York to Buenos Aires shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. Aboard is the world chess champion Mirko Czentovic, a stolid, almost illiterate son of a poor Danube boatman who was raised by a village priest, revealed an uncanny talent for chess, and now plays mechanically and greedily for money, showing no curiosity about anything else.
Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel parodying the overwrought rural fiction of the early twentieth century, the 'loam and lovechild' school associated with writers such as Mary Webb and D. H.
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.
Daisy Miller: A Study is told in close third person through Frederick Winterbourne, a young American who has lived most of his life in Geneva and has grown, in his aunt's phrase, too used to European ways. At a hotel in Vevey on Lake Geneva he meets Annie 'Daisy' Miller, a pretty, rich and uninhibited girl from Schenectady, New York, travelling with her vague, dyspeptic mother and her brash little brother Randolph, accompanied by a courier, Eugenio, whom they treat almost as a member of the family.
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.
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.
Bleuler's Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias reworks Kraepelin's deteriorating psychosis into a broader and more psychologically complex group of disorders. Its most famous act is terminological: Bleuler introduces schizophrenia to name a splitting or disjunction in psychic functions, not a split personality in the popular sense.
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.
The Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences was published anonymously in Leiden in 1637 as a preface to three scientific essays, the Dioptrics, the Meteors and the Geometry. Descartes wrote it in French rather than Latin so that readers using their natural reason, including women, could judge it without scholastic training, and he presented it not as a treatise but as a history or fable of his own mind.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fathers and Sons is set in the Russian countryside in the spring and summer of 1859, two years before the emancipation of the serfs. Arkady Kirsanov, a newly graduated student, returns to his father's modest, poorly run estate, Maryino, bringing his friend and mentor Yevgeny Bazarov, a brusque, brilliant medical student of humble origins who calls himself a nihilist: he accepts no principle on authority and values only what is useful, especially natural science.
Heraclitus's book does not survive; what remains are roughly 130 short sayings preserved as quotations by later authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus and Diogenes Laertius. Modern editions number them according to Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (DK), and the reference edition presents them in a fresh translation with commentary.
Galen: Selected Works introduces a physician whose ambition was encyclopedic. The surviving Galenic corpus ranges from technical anatomy and pulse lore to philosophical defenses of method, from therapeutics and compound drugs to autobiography and polemic against rivals.
Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), translated by Abbott as Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, is a short book with a narrow and ambitious aim: to identify and establish the supreme principle of morality. It does not offer a full ethical system, which Kant postponed to the Metaphysics of Morals of 1797, but clears the ground by asking what must be true of moral obligation if it is to bind every rational being without exception.
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.
Heart of Darkness is told by an unnamed narrator aboard the yawl Nellie, anchored in the Thames estuary at dusk, who reports a story told by his companion, the seaman Charles Marlow. Marlow begins by observing that the Thames, too, was once one of the dark places of the earth when the Romans came.
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.
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.
Kokoro, a word meaning heart, mind or the core of things, is in three parts. In the first, 'Sensei and I', a young university student in Tokyo meets an older man at the seaside resort of Kamakura and is drawn to him, calling him Sensei, 'teacher'.
Kraepelin's Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry introduces readers to psychiatric diagnosis through bedside cases and disease course. Rather than beginning with abstract definitions, the lectures proceed from patients: mood disturbance, excitement, confusion, delusions, hallucinations, deterioration, alcoholism, epilepsy, paralysis, dementia praecox, manic-depressive insanity, and other clinical groupings.
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.
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.
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.
Lord Jim begins with an omniscient narrator describing Jim, a young English parson's son who went to sea after reading light holiday literature and dreams of heroic deeds. Injured by a falling spar, he recovers in an Eastern port and takes a berth as chief mate of the Patna, a decrepit steamer carrying eight hundred Muslim pilgrims across the Arabian Sea.
This volume collects three of Aristophanes' comedies (contents vary by edition; a long-standing selection is The Acharnians, The Clouds and Lysistrata). The Acharnians (425 BCE), the earliest surviving comedy, is set in the sixth year of the Peloponnesian War.
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.
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.
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.
Sherman's Memoirs, published in two volumes in 1875 and revised in 1886, present themselves less as history than as testimony; in the preface to the second edition he says he writes as a witness before the tribunal of history, supplying material for some future historian. The first volume, the text stored in this library, runs from his Ohio boyhood to the Meridian campaign of February 1864.
Esquirol expands Pinelian alienism into a more elaborate clinical and institutional system. Mental Maladies surveys insanity as a family of disorders marked by disturbances of perception, judgment, passion, volition, and bodily function.
Griesinger gives nineteenth-century psychiatry a somatic and medical program. Mental Pathology and Therapeutics treats insanity as a disorder of the brain, even while admitting how little pathological anatomy could yet prove.
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.
Northanger Abbey follows Catherine Morland, the unremarkable seventeen-year-old daughter of a country clergyman, whom the narrator teasingly insists no one would have supposed born to be a heroine. Catherine is a devoted reader of Gothic novels, especially Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.
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.
Our Town presents Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, through three acts named Daily Life, Love and Marriage, and Death and Eternity. The Stage Manager introduces streets, families, dates, statistics, church steeples, milk deliveries, schoolbooks, and weather with almost no scenery, making the ordinary visible by stripping theater to gesture, voice, and memory.
Passing is a short novel in three parts, told in close third person through the consciousness of Irene Redfield, a light-skinned Black woman married to a Harlem physician. It opens with a letter that stirs Irene's memory of an encounter two years earlier.
The Pensées ('Thoughts') are the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, found after Pascal's death in 1662 as nearly a thousand notes, many on slips of paper threaded together in bundles. Pascal had planned a work that would first unsettle the complacent unbeliever (the honnête homme of polite society) by showing the misery and contradiction of the human condition, then show that Christianity alone explains that condition and offers its remedy.
Persuasion is Austen's last completed novel, a story of second chances. Anne Elliot is the overlooked middle daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, a vain and extravagant baronet of Kellynch Hall in Somerset.
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.
Psychopathia Sexualis is a medico-forensic taxonomy of sexual behavior written for physicians and lawyers. Krafft-Ebing organizes case histories under categories such as hyperaesthesia, anaesthesia, paraesthesia, sadism, masochism, fetishism, and contrary sexual feeling, using the language of degeneration, neuropathic heredity, and criminal responsibility.
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.
Maupassant's stories, written mostly between 1880 and 1890, are compact, ironic and often brutal studies of French life: Norman peasants, Parisian clerks, prostitutes, bourgeois families, soldiers and the provincial gentry. This selection gathers many of the best known, which typically include the following.
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.
Donne's Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions bring the metaphysical imagination into pulpit and sickroom. The sermons, including Death's Duel, display a preacher fascinated by mortality, judgment, resurrection, the body, and the unstable boundary between private self and Christian community.
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.
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.
Studies on Hysteria is the classic collaborative text from which psychoanalysis narrates much of its beginning. , followed by theoretical and therapeutic reflections.
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.
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 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 Bible is the sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity, and the reference edition presents the King James Version of 1611, the most influential translation in English. It is a library rather than a single book.
The 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 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.
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 Histories is the first great work of prose history in the Western tradition, an inquiry (historia) into the causes and course of the wars between the Greeks and the Persian Empire. Herodotus states his purpose in the opening: to preserve the memory of great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and barbarians, and especially the reason why they fought one another.
The History of the Peloponnesian War is Thucydides’ unfinished account of the war between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 411 BCE. Unlike Herodotus’ broad storytelling, Thucydides narrows his gaze to power, fear, interest, decision and the deterioration of civic language under pressure.
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 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 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 Major Symptoms of Hysteria gathers Janet's Harvard lectures into a clear account of dissociation, narrowed consciousness, fixed ideas, amnesia, anesthesia, motor symptoms, crises, and suggestibility. Janet stands close to Charcot but less theatrical; he is interested in how psychological functions fall apart, become dissociated, or continue automatically outside ordinary awareness.
The Master and Margarita interweaves two stories: the visit of the Devil to Soviet Moscow in the 1930s and a novel about Pontius Pilate written by an unnamed author known as the Master. On a hot spring evening at Patriarch's Ponds, the literary bureaucrat Mikhail Berlioz and the young poet Ivan Bezdomny are discussing the non-existence of Jesus when a mysterious foreigner joins them.
The Meek One (Krotkaya), also translated as A Gentle Creature, is a long short story that Dostoyevsky published in his one-man journal A Writer's Diary in November 1876, prompted by newspaper reports of suicides, including that of a young seamstress who leapt from a window holding an icon. In a short preface Dostoyevsky calls it a 'fantastic' story, explaining that it is realistic in every respect except its form: it imagines the inner monologue of a man as though a stenographer could record his chaotic thoughts.
The Metaphysical Poets is Helen Gardner's anthology of English poets of the seventeenth century who wrote in the style that Samuel Johnson, borrowing a phrase from Dryden, called 'metaphysical'. Johnson complained that in their verse the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked by violence together; T.
The Misanthrope and Other Plays collects several of Molière's comedies; the edition translated by John Wood and David Coward includes The Misanthrope, The Sicilian, Tartuffe, A Doctor in Spite of Himself and The Imaginary Invalid. Together they show the range of Molière's art, from the verse comedy of character to farce, and his satire of hypocrisy, pretension and medicine.
Les Passions de l'âme, published in Amsterdam and Paris in November 1649, was Descartes's last book and his fullest account of how mind and body interact in emotional life. It grew out of his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, who in 1643 had asked him how an immaterial thinking soul could move a body, and who later pressed him on the regulation of grief and the good life.
The 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 Principles of Psychology is a two-volume, 1,400-page textbook that William James spent twelve years writing for Henry Holt's American Science Series. It sets out to treat psychology as a natural science of mental life, studying feelings, desires, cognitions and decisions together with their bodily conditions, while refusing to reduce the mind to physiology or to dissolve it into atoms of sensation.
Jung's Psychology of Dementia Praecox attempts to make psychotic speech and behavior psychologically intelligible. Working from the Burgholzli clinic, word-association studies, Bleuler's dementia praecox, and Freud's ideas about complexes, Jung argues that seemingly senseless symptoms may express emotionally charged complexes.
The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan is the young Winston Churchill's history of the Anglo-Egyptian campaigns of 1896–1899 that destroyed the Mahdist state in the Sudan. Churchill begins with geography and the Nile, which he presents as the thread on which the whole story hangs, and then with the rebellion of Muhammad Ahmad, a Dongolawi boat-builder's son and Sufi ascetic who proclaimed himself the Mahdi in 1881.
The Scarlet Letter is set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston but begins with a nineteenth-century frame, The Custom-House, in which a narrator claims to discover an embroidered letter A and the story of Hester Prynne. Hester appears on the scaffold with her infant Pearl, condemned to wear the scarlet letter for adultery while refusing to name the child's father.
The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening was published in Copenhagen on 30 July 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, with Kierkegaard named as editor. ' The introduction argues that for the Christian even death is not the sickness unto death, since there is hope beyond it; the true sickness unto death is despair, a condition in which one cannot die and cannot live, a perpetual dying without end.
Of the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right is a compact treatise in four books, the only finished part of a larger work on political institutions that Rousseau abandoned. It opens with its most famous sentence, that man is born free and everywhere in chains, and with a promise not to explain how this happened but to say what could make it legitimate.
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 Vampyre is a brief but enormously influential Gothic tale that turns the vampire from folkloric corpse into a fashionable aristocratic predator. Aubrey, a young gentleman of imagination and moral seriousness, enters London society and becomes fascinated by Lord Ruthven, a mysterious nobleman whose charm is inseparable from coldness.
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.
Utilitarianism is a short defence of the ethical theory Mill inherited from Jeremy Bentham and his own father. It was first published in three instalments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and as a book in 1863.
Washington Square is a compact novel about an heiress, a suitor and a father whose intelligence becomes a weapon. Catherine Sloper is the plain, shy and dutiful daughter of Dr.
Passages
- A Burnt-Out Case, Early chapters (Part 1)
Dr Colin explains to Querry the meaning of a burnt-out case and describes the mutilations left after the disease has run its course.
- A Burnt-Out Case, Middle chapters
Colin's routine at the leproserie: dispensing drugs, examining patients, and planning facilities with Querry.
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, A Doll's House, Act 1
Nora reveals that Torvald's life was saved by a year in Italy prescribed by doctors, paid for with the secret loan.
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, A Doll's House, Act 3
Rank leaves his visiting card marked with a black cross to announce his approaching death.
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, An Enemy of the People, Acts 1–4
Dr Stockmann's laboratory analysis of the spa water, suppression of his report, and the public meeting that brands him an enemy of the people.
- A Treatise on Insanity, Introduction and Ch. 1
Pinel frames mental alienation as a medical subject requiring observation, classification, and reform of custodial habits.
- 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 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part II and notes
Reported miraculous cures at the tomb of the Abbé Pâris, with physicians and witnesses for and against, including the case of Mademoiselle Thibaut.
- Billy Budd and Other Stories, Billy Budd, after Claggart's death
The surgeon examines Claggart and silently questions Vere's sanity as Vere moves toward a drumhead court.
- Billy Budd and Other Stories, Billy Budd, after the execution
The purser and the surgeon debate why Billy's body showed no spasm at hanging.
- Black Beauty, Part I (Birtwick chapters)
Beauty and John ride through the night to fetch Dr White for the gravely ill mistress.
- Body and Mind, Responsibility chapters
The legal and moral reflections ask how disease, habit, and brain function alter blame.
- Candide: Or Optimism, Ch. 22
In Paris Candide falls ill; doctors and others descend on him and his health worsens under their care.
- Cannery Row, Interchapter on the epidemic
Influenza hits the Row; Dora's girls and Doc care for sick families.
- Ceremony, Opening section
Tayo's sleeplessness, nausea and flood of memories; his recollection of the VA hospital ward where he felt himself invisible.
- Chess, Dr B.'s narrative (breakdown and release)
He attacks a guard and wakes in hospital; a doctor's diagnosis secures his release from Gestapo custody.
- Cold Comfort Farm, Later chapters
Flora arranges for Judith to see a psychoanalyst to cure her fixation on her son.
- Confessions, Book IV.3
The physician Vindicianus, who crowned Augustine in a poetry contest, warns him against astrology.
- Confessions, Book VI
The attack of pounding arteries and tinnitus with permanent partial deafness; insomnia; 'the vapors'; reading anatomy and imagining a polyp of the heart; the journey to the physicians of Montpellier and their waters and whey.
- 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.
- Daisy Miller, Part I
Mrs Miller's dyspepsia and her faith in her doctor at home in Schenectady.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 1
David's birth attended by the mild Mr Chillip; Aunt Betsey's interrogation of the doctor.
- Discourse on Method, Part V
Harvey credited with circulation; evidence from surgeons who tie the arm above the vein they open in bloodletting.
- Discourse on Method, Part VI
Health as the first good; the mind's dependence on bodily organs; hope that medicine could cure diseases of body and mind and the debility of age.
- Don Quixote, Part II, Ch. 47
As governor of Barataria, Sancho is denied his meals by the physician Pedro Recio de Agüero.
- Dracula, Ch. 8–9
Sister Agatha writes from Budapest that Jonathan has been suffering from a violent brain fever.
- 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.
- Dracula, Ch. 14
Van Helsing invokes Charcot and hypnotism to persuade Seward to open his mind to the inexplicable.
- Dracula, Ch. 21
Renfield is found with a broken back and depressed skull fracture; Van Helsing operates (trephining) to relieve pressure so that he can speak before he dies.
- Early Christian Lives, Life of Antony, visitors and healings
Antony counsels, consoles and participates in healing while resisting fame.
- East of Eden, Part Two
Samuel Hamilton and Lee deliver Cathy's twins; Cathy shoots Adam and leaves.
- Effi Briest, Kessin chapters
Friendship with the hunchbacked apothecary Gieshübler.
- Effi Briest, Berlin chapters (c. Ch. 23–24)
Effi feigns illness and Dr Rummschüttel, seeing through it, prescribes accordingly.
- Essays, Book I, Ch. XX, 'Of the Force of Imagination'
Sympathetic coughs and fevers, impotence induced and cured by belief, the merchant who responds to a mimed clyster, and other cases of suggestion acting on the body.
- 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, Essay XXVII, Of Friendship
Friendship as the remedy for 'stoppings and suffocations' of the heart; contemporary remedies for liver, spleen, lungs and brain; those without friends as cannibals of their own hearts; a physician unacquainted with the patient's body may cure the disease and kill the patient.
- Essays, Essay XXX, Of Regiment of Health
Self-observation as physic, gradual change, Celsus's alternation of fasting and full eating, waking and sleep; passions to avoid; choosing a physician of middle temper.
- Fathers and Sons, Ch. 20–21
Vassily Ivanovich's old-fashioned country practice and his pride in his son's modern medical training.
- Fathers and Sons, Ch. 24
After the duel, Bazarov examines and bandages Pavel's leg wound.
- Fragments, DK 58
Physicians who cut and burn the sick and demand a fee, given as an example of good and ill being one.
- Fragments, Diogenes Laertius, Lives IX.3–4 (ancient testimony)
Account of Heraclitus's dropsy, his riddle to the physicians and his attempt to cure himself with dung.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Second Section (imperatives of skill)
The physician's precepts for healing and the poisoner's for killing are equally valid as technical rules; morality must come from elsewhere.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part I, Ch. 1
Gulliver's training as a surgeon and apprenticeship under a London surgeon before going to sea.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part III, Ch. 5
A Lagado physician treats colic by inflating the patient with bellows.
- Gulliver's Travels, Part IV, Ch. 6
Gulliver explains European physicians, purges, clysters and the habit of foretelling death to save reputation.
- Heart of Darkness, Part I (the Company office)
The doctor measures Marlow's cranium, asks whether there is madness in his family and notes that he never sees those who go out return.
- Hippocratic Writings, Epidemics, Books 1 and 3
Case notes track fever, delirium, sleep, stools, urine, crisis days and death or recovery across seasons.
- Hippocratic Writings, The Oath
The physician promises restraint with deadly drugs, confidentiality and disciplined conduct in the houses of patients.
- 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.
- Kokoro, Part Two
The father's slow decline from kidney disease, the doctor's visits and the family's vigil.
- Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry, Clinical demonstrations
Kraepelin models diagnosis as observation of patient presentation joined to disease course and prognosis.
- Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, Neurological lectures
The lectures use clinical signs, lesion localization, and pathology to classify disorders of movement and sensation.
- 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.
- Letters of Napoleon, St Helena correspondence and will (1815–1821)
Complaints about climate and confinement, failing health, and the will's request that his body be examined after death.
- 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.
- Lord Jim, Ch. 2
Jim is disabled by a falling spar and recovers in a hospital in an Eastern port.
- Lord Jim, Ch. 5
Marlow visits the Patna's chief engineer in hospital, raving in delirium tremens about pink toads under the bed; the hospital doctor comments on the case.
- Lysistrata and Other Plays, The Acharnians, finale
Lamachus returns wounded and calls for the doctor Pittalus while Dicaeopolis revels.
- Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3
An English doctor describes King Edward curing 'the evil' (scrofula) by touch.
- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1
Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking and hand-washing observed by the Doctor and Gentlewoman.
- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 3
Macbeth asks the Doctor to minister to a mind diseased; 'Throw physic to the dogs'.
- 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.
- Meditations, Book 3.3; 4.48
Catalogues of the dead, including Hippocrates and physicians who frowned over the sick.
- Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation VI
Nerves compared to a cord whose pull at any point produces the same motion in the brain; the dropsical patient's thirst as a natural signal that harms the sick body.
- Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. X (Pittsburg Landing, March–April 1862)
Sick soldiers shipped to Savannah for want of any building for a hospital; Sherman's postscript rejects floating hospitals in favour of regimental surgeons; his Shiloh report praises surgeons who treated wounded of both armies.
- Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XIV (October 1863)
Willie's typhoid on the steamer Atlantic, the attending army surgeon's warning, death at the Gayoso Hotel, and Sherman's self-reproach and midnight letter.
- Mental Pathology and Therapeutics, Book I
Griesinger argues that mental diseases must be understood as diseases of the brain, while admitting the limits of pathology.
- Metamorphoses, Book XV
Aesculapius comes from Epidaurus to Rome as a serpent to end a pestilence.
- Northanger Abbey, Vol. II, Ch. 8–9
Catherine's suspicions about Mrs Tilney's death and Henry's account of her illness and the physicians who attended her.
- Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism LXVI
Bacon criticises the doctrines of elementary qualities and occult specific powers while commending physicians' attention to attraction, astringency, maturation and other secondary qualities of medicines.
- Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism LXXIII
Citing Celsus, Bacon observes that medical experiments came first and philosophical causes were assigned afterward, using medicine as evidence against speculative systems.
- 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, Book 1, Preface
The history of medical schools frames medicine as a debate between reason, experience and practical method.
- Our Town, Daily Life
Our Town gives this tag concrete force through the medical material is quiet but important: doc gibbs, childbirth, mortality statistics, grief, and the care rituals surrounding death
- Passing, Part Two
Disagreements between Irene and Brian over what to tell their sons about sex and lynching; Brian's dissatisfaction with medicine and his wish to go to Brazil.
- Pensees, Fragment 82, Section II
Imagination as the 'mistress of error', able to make men healthy or sick; the philosopher sweating on a plank above a precipice; cats, rats and a crushed coal that 'unhinge the reason'; physicians in cassocks and mules; diseases that spoil judgment.
- Persuasion, Vol. I, Ch. 12
Louisa's fall from the Cobb; Anne directs restoratives and calls for a surgeon while others panic.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 270c–d
Appeal to Hippocrates: understanding the body, like the soul, requires understanding the nature of the whole.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Seventh Letter, c. 330c–331a
The counsellor compared to a physician advising a patient whose way of life must change before treatment can help.
- Psychopathia Sexualis, Forensic conclusions
The work links diagnosis to responsibility, punishment, and expert testimony.
- Ruth, Ch. 35–36
Mr Davis the surgeon offers Leonard an apprenticeship, revealing his own illegitimate birth.
- Selected Short Stories, 'The Horla', middle entries
A doctor's demonstration of hypnotic suggestion on the narrator's cousin in Paris.
- 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.
- Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Devotions, bells and physicians
The sickroom is linked to doctors, neighbors, death bells, and the social meaning of mortality.
- 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.
- Sts. Cosmas and Damian: Physician Saints, Anargyroi title
The saints are remembered as healers who do not take payment, making fees and charity central to the moral image of medicine.
- Sts. Cosmas and Damian: Physician Saints, Byzantine shrine incubation
Patients sleep at or near shrines, receive dream instructions, and report cures, blending ritual, expectation, and therapeutic authority.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 9
Dr. Robinson, Muff Potter and Injun Joe dig up a fresh grave to obtain a body; Injun Joe murders the doctor.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 8
Aristotle's teaching gives Alexander a taste for medicine; he treats his friends when they are ill.
- 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 72
Hephaestion dies of fever after eating against his doctor's orders; Alexander has the physician executed and mourns extravagantly.
- The Agricola and the Germania, Agricola 43
Agricola's last illness, the emperor's physicians and freedmen visiting, and rumours of poison.
- The Art of War, Book VI
How Roman generals avoided disease: fleeing fens and injurious winds, reading local inhabitants' complexions, shelter, shade, water, timing of marches, physicians, and daily exercise.
- 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 (protection against artisans and professionals)
Penalties for physicians whose treatment causes death or injury without notification to authorities.
- The Bible, 2 Kings 20:1–7 / Isaiah 38
Hezekiah's mortal illness and the lump of figs laid on his boil.
- The Bible, Mark 5:25–34
The woman with an issue of blood for twelve years who had spent all she had on physicians and grew worse.
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'Herbert West—Reanimator', Parts I–II
Medical students steal fresh corpses for reanimation trials; a typhoid epidemic in Arkham supplies bodies and kills the medical dean.
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'Cool Air'
Dr Muñoz keeps his dead body functioning through artificial refrigeration until the machinery fails.
- 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 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. 4–5
Competing diagnoses (floating kidney, appendix); Ivan Ilyich reads medical books and becomes absorbed in his symptoms.
- 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 Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Observation methods
Photographs, questionnaires, children, and animals show nineteenth-century methods for studying emotion.
- The Histories, Book 1.197
The Babylonians, having no physicians, carry the sick into the market so passers-by can advise them.
- The Histories, Book 3.129–137
Democedes of Croton heals Darius' dislocated ankle and Atossa's breast growth, then escapes to Greece.
- The History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 2.47–54
The plague enters Athens and produces fever, inflamed eyes, throat distress, ulcers, thirst, diarrhea and high mortality.
- 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 11.504–520
Machaon is wounded and carried from the field; the healer is said to be worth many men.
- 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 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 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, Crito 47a–48a
Analogy of the trainer and physician: one should heed the expert, not the many, about health of body and soul.
- The Master and Margarita, Part One, Ch. 2
Pilate suffers an excruciating hemicrania during the interrogation; Yeshua perceives it and it lifts.
- The Master and Margarita, Part One, Ch. 6–8
Ivan's arrival at the clinic in his underwear, his sedation, and his interview with Professor Stravinsky.
- The Meek One, Part Two, Ch. 1
Her prolonged fever; the narrator arranges a doctor and nursing care; her silent withdrawal afterwards.
- The Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, 'Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness'
Donne, on what he believes is his deathbed, imagines his physicians as cosmographers reading his body as a flat map.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, A Doctor in Spite of Himself, Act 2
Sganarelle, disguised as a physician, diagnoses Lucinde's feigned dumbness with Latin nonsense and reversed anatomy.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Imaginary Invalid, Act 2
The Diafoiruses visit; young Thomas Diafoirus boasts of rejecting the circulation of the blood; the doctors examine Argan.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Imaginary Invalid, final interlude
Burlesque Latin ceremony admitting Argan to the medical profession.
- The Persian Expedition, Book I, Chapter VIII
At Cunaxa Cyrus wounds Artaxerxes through his corselet; Ctesias the physician states he healed the wound. Cyrus is struck under the eye by a javelin and killed.
- 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 III
The extended analogy between foreseeing political trouble and the physicians' maxim about hectic fever: easy to cure but hard to detect early, easy to detect but hard to cure late.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter II: The Functions of the Brain
Motor and sensory aphasia, cerebral localisation, lesion studies and the cases in which patients recognise and suffer from their speech errors.
- The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, Association experiment chapters
Jung uses reaction times and verbal responses to infer affective complexes.
- The River War, Chapter XV: The Battle of Omdurman
Field hospitals in the zeriba, the hospital-barge blunder, the wounded of the Lancers' charge trickling in, and the field of Dervish dead and wounded.
- The Scarlet Letter, Ch. 9-10
Chillingworth becomes Dimmesdale's physician and investigates his secret through bodily symptoms and psychological pressure.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Preface and Introduction
The physician's bedside manner as a model for Christian exposition; the Lazarus story and the claim that despair, not death, is the mortal sickness.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Part One, B
The analogy of the physician who knows that apparent health may hide illness, applied to the universality of unrecognised despair.
- The Social Contract, Book II, Chapter VIII
Peoples, like men, are docile only in youth; aged peoples resist reform like cowardly patients who rave at the sight of the doctor. Revolutions are compared to illnesses that make individuals forget the past, after which a state may be reborn.
- The Underdogs, Luis Cervantes joins the band
A former medical student enters the revolutionary group, linking educated medicine to political opportunism.
- Treasure Island, Dr. Livesey's early scenes
Livesey combines physician, magistrate and gentlemanly courage, representing medicine as practical authority.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter V (justice and expediency)
A duty to steal medicine or compel the only qualified doctor to save a life; rights as protection of security; the injustice of sacrificing an individual without consent for others' benefit, raised in the discussion of punishment.
- Washington Square, Early Sloper household chapters
Dr. Sloper's grief over his wife and disappointment in Catherine establish a physician-father whose intelligence is emotionally punitive.
- Washington Square, Morris courtship chapters
Sloper evaluates Morris like a case, using social evidence and diagnostic confidence to predict mercenary motives.
Quotes
Frequently cited
“I was not a little surprized to find many maniacs who at no period gave evidence of any lesion of the understanding, but who were under the dominion of instinctive and ab- stract fury”
Frequently cited
“it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge”
“These gentlemen understood nothing of my illness, therefore concluded I could not be ill”
“I followed this indication, and determined to cure myself or die without the aid of physicians and medicine”
“At length, notwithstanding all I could say and do, the physician triumphed, and the child died of hunger”
“I need only mention in reply what has been written by a physician of England, who has the honor of having broken the ice on this subject”
“for the mind is so intimately dependent upon the condition and relation of the organs of the body, that if any means can ever be found to render men wiser and more ingenious than hitherto, I believe that it is in medicine they must be sought for”
“a man's own observation, what he finds good of, and what he finds hurt of, is the best physic to preserve health”
“Physicians are, some of them, so pleasing and conformable to the humor of the patient, as they press not the true cure of the disease; and some other are so regular, in proceeding according to art for the disease, as they respect not sufficiently the condition of the patient”
“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”
“the changes take place inside, you know”
Frequently cited
“This infirmity is the incurable outcome of a very common history of disease, to which we will provisionally give the name of Dementia Prcecox”
“Which Venime I will not doubt to compare to the biting of a mad Dogge, which is a disease the Physicians call Hydrophobia, or Fear Of Water”
“Unnatural deeds Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets. More needs she the divine than the physician”
“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”
“Hippocrates after curing many diseases himself fell sick and died.”
“Think continually how many physicians are dead after often contracting their eyebrows over the sick”
“They worked day and night, and did not rest till all the wounded of our own troops as well as of the enemy were in safe and comfortable shelter”
Frequently cited
“Insanity, or mental alienation, is a cerebral affection, ordinarily chronic, and without fever ; characterized by disorders of sensibility, understanding, in- telligence, and will”
“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”
“If magistrates had true justice, and if physicians had the true art of healing, they would have no occasion for square caps”
“Physicians will not heal thee, for thou wilt die at last. But it is I who heal thee, and make the body immortal”
“There was no wound, no blood, no visible bruise; but her eyes were closed, she breathed not, her face was like death”
“Cosmas and Damian are regarded as the patrons of physicians and surgeons and are sometimes represented with medical emblems”
“Having been cured of a dangerous illness by the intercession of Cosmas and Damian, Justinian, in gratitude for their aid, rebuilt and adorned their church at Constantinople, and it became a celebrated place of pilgrimage”
“The physician saints were called anargyroi, unmercenaries, because their legends remember them as healers who did not take payment for medicine”
“those that fall sicke by chaunce, make them to bee cured of Phisicions: bicause a capitain hath no reamedie, when he hath to faight with sicknesse, and with an enemie: but nothing is so profitable, to maintaine the armie in health, as is the exercise”
“They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick”
“Physician, heal thyself”
“I say to her: “If you still have pains, it is really only your own fault”
“I think that after all I must be overlooking some organic affection”
“This, according to the statement of Ctesias the surgeon, who further states that he himself healed the wound.”
“appointed eight surgeons to attend to the many wounded”
“as the physicians say it happens in hectic fever, that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult to cure”
“by a stupid and grievous mistake the three regular hospital barges, duly prepared for the reception of the wounded, had been towed across to the right bank”
“Physician, heal thyself: then wilt thou also heal thy patient”
“Thus, to save a life, it may not only be allowable, but a duty, to steal, or take by force, the necessary food or medicine, or to kidnap, and compel to officiate, the only qualified medical practitioner”