A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia is one of the most important public-health and Black-authored documents of the early United States. Written by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones after the devastating yellow fever epidemic of 1793, it answers Mathew Carey's published accusations that Black Philadelphians profited from disaster or behaved badly during the crisis.
Medical tag
Plague Epidemic
Plague, pestilence, cholera, epidemics and contagion as social events.
Works
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.
City of God is Augustine’s monumental argument that Rome’s disaster does not discredit Christianity and that human history must be understood through two loves. The immediate occasion is the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, after which critics blamed Christians for weakening the old gods.
Modelled on Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, Hume's Dialogues are narrated by Pamphilus, a young man, to his friend Hermippus, and report a conversation at the house of Pamphilus's tutor, Cleanthes. Three speakers debate not whether God exists, which all profess to accept, but what can be known of God's nature by reason.
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.
Homilies on the Statues records Chrysostom preaching to Antioch during a civic emergency in 387. After unpopular imperial taxes provoked unrest, a crowd in Antioch insulted and damaged statues of Emperor Theodosius and his family.
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.
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.
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.
On the Nature of the Universe, better known as De Rerum Natura, is a philosophical poem that tries to cure fear by explaining the world. Lucretius addresses Memmius and invokes Venus, then argues that religion has driven human beings to cruelty, as in the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
On War (Vom Kriege) is an unfinished philosophical inquiry into the nature of war, written by a Prussian staff officer who had lived through the Napoleonic transformation of warfare. It is organised in eight books, but Clausewitz left a note in 1827 saying that only the first chapter of Book I satisfied him, and he was revising the whole when he died.
The Personal Memoirs of U. S.
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.
Selected Sermons and Reformation Treatises gathers the Luther who speaks from pulpit, classroom, controversy, and pastoral desk. The center is not one genre but a reformatory voice: the Ninety-Five Theses against indulgence abuse, The Freedom of a Christian, sermons on faith and good works, catechetical teaching, and occasional writings shaped by conflict.
St. Vitus and the Dancing Mania joins two histories that later language often confuses: the hagiographic cult of a youthful martyr and the medical naming of involuntary or epidemic movement.
Sts. Roch and Sebastian became plague saints through two different imaginative routes.
The Aeneid tells how Aeneas, a Trojan survivor, travels from ruined Troy to Italy to found the lineage that will become Rome. The poem opens with storm and displacement: Juno hates the Trojans, Aeolus releases winds, and Aeneas reaches Carthage.
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 Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872 when Nietzsche was a twenty-seven-year-old professor at Basel, argues that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two opposed artistic drives, which he names after the gods Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian is the drive toward clear form, measure and individuation, whose physiological analogue is the dream, in which every person is a perfect artist of images.
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is a selection of Lovecraft's tales, edited with notes by the Lovecraft scholar S. T.
Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Civili, in three books, narrate the first two years of the war he fought against Pompey and the senatorial party, from January 49 BCE to the beginning of the Alexandrian war in late 48. The work is unfinished, breaking off in Alexandria, and it is the most openly political of his writings: its constant task is to show that Caesar was forced into war by a faction of personal enemies, that he repeatedly sought peace, and that he treated defeated fellow citizens with a mercy his opponents never showed.
This entry gathers the Golden Legend chapters and adjacent medieval traditions behind saints whose images still move through calendars, holidays, icons, hospitals, medals, advertising, and folklore. Jacobus de Voragine did not write critical biography in the modern sense.
The 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 Church tells the story of Christianity from the apostles to Eusebius’ own fourth-century world, where persecution gives way to imperial favor. Eusebius organizes the past through succession: bishops, teachers, heresies, writings, persecutions and martyrs.
The 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.
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 Secret Garden begins in imperial India, where Mary Lennox is a sickly, spoiled and emotionally neglected child. A cholera outbreak kills her parents and household, and Mary is sent to Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire to live with her reclusive uncle Archibald Craven.
The Theban Plays collects Sophocles’ tragedies about Oedipus and his children: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. They were not written as a trilogy, but together they form the most influential family disaster in Western drama.
Passages
- A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, Response to accusations and immunity assumptions
The pamphlet exposes how false medical claims about race shaped risk and blame.
- Cannery Row, Interchapter on the epidemic
Influenza hits the Row; Dora's girls and Doc care for sick families.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10
Demea quotes Milton's lazar-house (stone, ulcer, colic, frenzy, melancholy, madness, atrophy, marasmus, pestilence) and catalogues disorders of the mind; a hospital full of diseases as a specimen of the world's ills.
- Essays, Book III, Ch. XII, 'Of Physiognomy'
Montaigne and his household flee plague and civil war; he admires how ordinary people meet death without philosophy.
- 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.
- Meditations, Book 9.2
Corruption of the mind is a worse pestilence than any plague of the air.
- Metamorphoses, Book VII
Aeacus describes the plague at Aegina: fever, thirst, corpses and the failure of medicine.
- Metamorphoses, Book XV
Aesculapius comes from Epidaurus to Rome as a serpent to end a pestilence.
- On the Nature of the Universe, Book 6, plague of Athens
The poem ends with fever, thirst, sores, despair, contagion-like care and burial breakdown.
- On War, Introductory memoir (Graham/Maude edition)
Clausewitz's death from cholera at Breslau in November 1831, apparently contracted with the army of observation on the Polish frontier.
- Personal Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XIV
Cholera at Cruces and Panama in 1852; hospital hulk and tents; roughly a third of Grant's party dead and a seventh of the regiment lost overall.
- Ruth, Ch. 32–33
Typhus epidemic in Eccleston; Ruth volunteers as matron-nurse in the fever ward of the hospital.
- Selected Sermons and Reformation Treatises, Plague counsel
His advice about remaining, fleeing, and caring for neighbors during epidemic disease combines prudence with vocation.
- Sts. Roch and Sebastian: Plague Saints, Roch at Aquapendente and Piacenza
Roch tends plague victims and then contracts plague himself, making the healer's exposure central to the legend.
- Sts. Roch and Sebastian: Plague Saints, Sebastian's arrows
Arrow wounds become a plague symbol, translating invisible epidemic danger into an image a viewer can recognize and pray before.
- Sts. Roch and Sebastian: Plague Saints, Council of Constance plague procession
The Roch tradition links public prayers and processions to epidemic cessation, showing ritual as civic plague response.
- The Arthashastra, Book 4 (remedies against national calamities)
State measures against fire, flood, epidemic disease, famine and pests.
- The Bible, 2 Samuel 24
A pestilence kills seventy thousand after David's census.
- 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 Civil War, Book II.22
Massilia's surrender after famine and a fatal pestilence attributed to confinement and old millet and barley.
- The Civil War, Book III.87
Labienus describes Caesar's veterans as wasted by autumn pestilence in Italy, with invalid cohorts at Brundisium.
- The Golden Legend: Popular Saints, Lives of plague and danger saints in the Golden Legend tradition
Roch, Sebastian, Barbara, and Christopher show how sudden communal or occupational risks were organized through saints before modern public health.
- The Histories, Book 8.115
Plague and dysentery afflict Xerxes' army on its retreat through Thrace.
- The History of the Church, Book 9, crisis and relief
Social catastrophe, famine and disease imagery accompany persecution and political upheaval.
- 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 1.43–52
Apollo shoots his arrows into the Greek camp, killing first mules and dogs and then men, for nine days.
- The River War, Chapter VII: The Recovery of the Dongola Province
Cholera creeps up the Nile from Cairo; case-fatality near 80 per cent among the first thousand cases; detailed casualty figures; profound depression across the army.
- The Secret Garden, Ch. 1
The cholera outbreak kills Mary's parents and household, revealing imperial neglect and epidemic vulnerability.
- The Theban Plays, Oedipus the King, opening
Thebes suffers plague, failed crops, infertility and public supplication before Oedipus.
Quotes
“they are nothing in comparison of those which arise within ourselves, from the distempered condition of our mind and body”
“About one-third of the people with me died, either at Cruces or on the way to Panama”
“At Piacenza, he himself was stricken with the plague”
“Everywhere the terrible scourge disappeared before his miraculous power”
“Diocletian, cruel emperor of Rome, commanded that Sebastian should be led into the middle of a field and there bound to a stake, and that his archers should shoot at him till he was as full of arrows as an urchin is full of pricks”
“There are some, who, from lack of experience or obtuseness, will turn away from such phenomena as "folk-diseases" with a smile of contempt or pity prompted by the consciousness of their own health”
“struggling moreover with a fatal pestilence, from their long confinement and change of victuals (for they all subsisted on old millet and damaged barley, which they had formerly provided and laid up in the public stores against an emergency of this kind”
“many fell victims to the autumnal pestilence in Italy, many returned home, and many were left behind on the continent. Have you not heard that the cohorts at Brundisium are composed of invalids”
“But of the first thousand cases between Assuan and Suarda nearly eight hundred proved fatal”
“The violence of the battle may be cheaply braved, but the insidious attacks of disease appal the boldest”