A Christmas Carol. In Prose.
Medical tag
Public Health Sanitation
Sanitation, quarantine, urban disease, social medicine.
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.
A Modest Proposal is Swift's savage 1729 pamphlet on Irish poverty under British rule, written in the voice of a projector who treats hunger, tenancy, children, and mothers as items in a national account. The speaker begins with beggars and starving children in Dublin streets, then adopts the language of calculation: numbers of infants, costs of nursing, market value, culinary uses, and benefits to landlords.
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.
Franklin's Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack present the founding era through self-fashioning, practical wisdom, and the culture of improvement. The Autobiography narrates Franklin's movement from Boston apprentice to Philadelphia printer, civic organizer, scientist, and public man.
Centesimus Annus marks the hundredth anniversary of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum and reads the social question through the upheavals of the twentieth century. John Paul II returns first to 1891: industrial labor, socialist agitation, private property, wages, association, and the rights of workers.
Freud's late essay, in German Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ('the uneasiness in culture'), asks why civilized people, who have built so much for their own protection, are so often unhappy. It is written in eight short chapters in a conversational, self-questioning style.
This Paine anthology gathers the pamphlets that made revolutionary argument feel urgent, portable, and democratic. Common Sense, published in January 1776, attacks monarchy, hereditary succession, reconciliation with Britain, and political hesitation.
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.
De Regno is Aquinas's unfinished treatise on kingship, addressed to the king of Cyprus and concerned with why political rule exists, how it can serve the common good, and how it can decay into tyranny. Aquinas begins from the social nature of human beings.
Democracy in America is Tocqueville's great comparative study of democratic society. The first volume examines American political institutions: township government, federalism, courts, associations, parties, newspapers, religion, and the habits that sustain self-government.
Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council's declaration on religious freedom, argues that the human person has a right not to be coerced by individuals, groups, or the state in religious matters. The document grounds that right in dignity, conscience, and the nature of truth, while insisting that the right concerns immunity from coercion rather than indifference about religious truth.
Early Black Church Sermons and Addresses is an anthology concept rather than one single-author book: it gathers public religious speech from Black Christian leaders before 1950, using only public-domain sermons, convention addresses, ordination sermons, and printed appeals. Its center is the Black church as pulpit, school, refuge, protest platform, mutual-aid network, and political institution.
Washington's Farewell Address and selected letters present leadership as restraint, reputation, and institutional precedent. The Farewell Address, published in 1796 near the end of his presidency, warns against sectional division, party spirit, foreign entanglement, public debt, and attacks on constitutional authority.
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.
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.
I Am Prepared to Die is Nelson Mandela's statement from the dock during the Rivonia Trial in 1964. Facing charges that could lead to death, Mandela uses the courtroom not primarily to plead for mercy but to explain the political history and moral logic of resistance to apartheid.
Frederick wrote the treatise known in English as Instructions for His Generals in the winter of 1746–1747, after the first two Silesian Wars had won and held the rich Austrian province of Silesia. Its French title was Les Principes généraux de la guerre; a German version, Die General-Principia vom Kriege, was printed in 1748 in a small number of copies for Prussian generals, who were bound to keep it secret.
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.
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.
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.
Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance and Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention show him as both principled advocate and institutional anatomist. Memorial and Remonstrance, written in 1785 against a Virginia religious assessment bill, argues that religion must be free from state coercion because conscience is prior to civil society and cannot be surrendered to government.
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.
Jefferson's selected writings show the range and tensions of the revolutionary Enlightenment in America. Notes on the State of Virginia began as answers to questions from a French diplomat, but it became Jefferson's most sustained book: a survey of Virginia's geography, natural history, laws, economy, population, slavery, Indigenous peoples, education, religion, and politics.
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.
On the Origin of Species argues that species are not fixed, separately created kinds but populations changed over time by variation, inheritance, struggle, natural selection, and descent with modification. Darwin begins with variation under domestication, using pigeons, livestock, and cultivated plants to show how small differences can be preserved and accumulated.
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.
Politics examines the polis as the community ordered toward living well. Aristotle begins with the household, including relations of master and slave, husband and wife, parent and child, and then argues that the city exists by nature because human beings possess speech about justice and advantage.
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.
Latimer's Selected Sermons bring the English Reformation into a rough, vivid, public idiom. Unlike a systematic theologian, Latimer often sounds like a moral witness standing before court and commons at once.
Whitefield's Selected Sermons preserve the voice of the eighteenth century's most famous evangelical itinerant. His preaching emphasized new birth, heartfelt conversion, human sin, Christ's mercy, and the immediate demand that hearers respond.
's public theology and civil-rights argument at their most concentrated. The sermon tradition behind King includes the Black church, biblical prophecy, social gospel, liberal theology, and the cadences of African American sacred speech.
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.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence's account of his two years with the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, from his first visit to the Hejaz in October 1916 to the entry into Damascus in October 1918. It opens with an introductory chapter that admits the book's political bad conscience: Lawrence knew that Britain and France had already divided the Arab lands in the Sykes–Picot agreement while he encouraged the Arabs to fight for independence.
St. Dymphna and the Geel Colony is less a single book than a layered dossier: a thirteenth-century Latin Vita by Pierre of Cambrai, a medieval shrine in the Brabant town of Geel, and a centuries-long practice of boarding mentally ill people with local families.
Patrick's own writings are the narrow bridge between the global St. Patrick's Day figure and a real late Roman Christian voice.
St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles traces a murder into a medical archive.
Sts. Roch and Sebastian became plague saints through two different imaginative routes.
The Anti-Federalist Papers are not a single coordinated book but a body of pamphlets, essays, speeches, and newspaper pieces opposing or demanding amendments to the proposed Constitution. Their writers differed among themselves, but they shared alarm about the scale and power of the new federal government.
The Art of the Commonplace gathers Wendell Berry's agrarian essays on land, household, work, food, technology, economy, conservation, and the moral scale of community. The collection's title points to Berry's method: he resists abstraction by returning arguments to farms, watersheds, kitchens, tools, soil, neighbors, and inherited obligations.
The Art of War is a short treatise of thirteen chapters, around six thousand Chinese characters, written as a sequence of terse sayings introduced by the formula 'Sun Tzu said'. It begins by declaring war a matter of life and death for the state, to be studied through five constant factors: the moral law that binds people to their ruler, heaven (weather and seasons), earth (terrain and distance), the commander's qualities, and method and discipline.
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.
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.
The Communist Manifesto presents modern history as the history of class struggle and casts the bourgeoisie as both revolutionary and exploitative. Marx and Engels argue that capitalism has dissolved feudal relations, expanded world markets, concentrated production, remade family and nation, and subjected older loyalties to cash exchange.
The Federalist Papers are eighty-five essays written to persuade New York voters to ratify the proposed United States Constitution. Published under the shared pseudonym Publius, they defend a stronger federal union against fears that centralized power would destroy liberty.
The Founding Documents gathers the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights as one civic anthology. The Declaration, adopted by the Continental Congress in July 1776, announces separation from Britain by appealing to the laws of nature and of nature’s God, to the self-evident truths that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, and to government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed.
This entry gathers the Golden Legend chapters and adjacent medieval traditions behind saints whose images still move through calendars, holidays, icons, hospitals, medals, advertising, and folklore. Jacobus de Voragine did not write critical biography in the modern sense.
The History of the 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 Jewish War is Josephus' account of the revolt against Rome from its Hasmonean and Herodian prehistory to the destruction of Jerusalem and the last pockets of resistance. Written after Josephus had defected to the Romans, the work tries to explain a catastrophe to several audiences at once: Jews who had survived it, Romans who had conquered, and Greek-speaking readers who needed Judean politics translated into the language of civil war, faction and providence.
The Koran, or Quran ('recitation'), is the central scripture of Islam. It consists of 114 chapters called suras, of very unequal length, each made up of verses (ayat).
The Quiet American is narrated by Thomas Fowler, a weary British journalist in French-controlled Vietnam during the First Indochina War. The novel begins after the death of Alden Pyle, a young American official whose innocence, confidence and political theories have made him dangerous.
The 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.
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 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.
The Voyage of the Beagle is Darwin's account of his five-year journey around South America, the Pacific, Australia, and the Atlantic aboard HMS Beagle. It is a travel book before it is an evolutionary treatise: Darwin describes landscapes, fossils, earthquakes, volcanoes, coral reefs, animals, plants, Indigenous peoples, imperial violence, slavery, disease, and the practical hardships of field observation.
Two Lives of Charlemagne pairs Einhard's Life of Charlemagne with Notker the Stammerer's later anecdotes about the emperor. Einhard writes as a court insider shaped by classical biography, especially Suetonius.
Utilitarianism is a short defence of the ethical theory Mill inherited from Jeremy Bentham and his own father. It was first published in three instalments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and as a book in 1863.
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.
We Hold These Truths collects John Courtney Murray's essays on the American constitutional experiment, natural law, religious liberty, pluralism, and the conditions of civil conversation. Murray argues that the American order depends on moral truths that public argument must continue to articulate, not merely procedural agreement or private preference.
Passages
- A Christmas Carol, Stave III
The allegorical starving children Ignorance and Want under the spirit's robe.
- 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 Modest Proposal, The cannibal policy
A Modest Proposal gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes starvation, infant mortality, public health, reproductive exploitation, and the dehumanizing language of population management
- Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack, Civic institution passages
Franklin's public projects belong to the history of urban improvement and health infrastructure.
- Centesimus Annus, Looking back to Rerum Novarum
Centesimus Annus gives this tag concrete force through its medical lens is social: work, poverty, family wages, consumerism, and solidarity all shape health before clinical care begins
- Civilization and Its Discontents, Ch. III
Civilization's protections against disease and nature, including hygiene and cleanliness; technology as prosthetic organs; the footnoted speculation about the control of fire.
- Common Sense, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and The American Crisis, Rights of Man, social welfare proposals
Paine proposes public measures for poverty and old age, anticipating later welfare and public-health arguments.
- Daisy Miller, Part II (Colosseum scene)
Winterbourne warns Daisy of the danger of the Roman fever from the night air.
- De Regno, Why rule is needed
De Regno gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens is analogical: tyranny appears as a disorder of the body politic, and prudent rule resembles care ordered toward communal health
- Dignitatis Humanae, Civil order
Dignitatis Humanae gives this tag concrete force through its medical relevance is bioethical and institutional: conscience, coercion, dignity, and religious liberty matter in hospitals and public health policy
- Early Black Church Sermons and Addresses, Addresses on education, temperance, and mutual aid
Institutional care appears as a response to excluded and endangered bodies.
- Farewell Address and Selected Letters, Revolutionary War letters on army health
Camp disease, supply shortages, and inoculation decisions show public health as military necessity.
- Heart of Darkness, Part I (Outer Station)
The grove of death where sick, starving African labourers lie dying in the shade.
- Instructions for His Generals, Articles on camps
Choice of camp sites for water, wood and defensibility, and arrangements that also bear on sanitation and the health of an army at rest.
- Jewish Antiquities, Books 3-4, Mosaic legislation
Josephus summarizes laws about purity, childbirth, skin disease, bodily emissions and priestly inspection, translating ritual categories for Greek readers.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 7, famine traditions
Famine in biblical history is treated as social crisis and divine judgment, linking hunger, public order and survival.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 20, late provincial unrest
Crowding, executions, famine relief and social disorder in the later books reveal the bodily cost of unstable governance.
- Mansfield Park, Vol. III, Ch. 7–8 (Ch. 38–39)
The noise, dirt and close air of the Price household in Portsmouth affect Fanny's health and spirits.
- 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. XII (Memphis)
Letters on regimental and general hospitals, the use of freed people as hospital attendants and nurses, and requisition of buildings for patients.
- Memorial and Remonstrance and Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention, Convention Notes on federal powers
Debates over national and state authority shape later public-health law and emergency governance.
- Notes on the State of Virginia, Selected Letters, and The Jefferson Bible, Notes on climate and natural history
Environmental observation links health, geography, and early American science.
- On Liberty, Ch. IV, Of the Limits to the Authority of Society
The United Kingdom Alliance's case for prohibition and its doctrine of 'social rights' against the drink trade, which Mill rejects.
- On the Origin of Species, Natural selection
On the Origin of Species gives this tag concrete force through darwin matters to medicine through heredity, variation, adaptation, population thinking, and later debates over degeneration, eugenics, and disease ecology
- On War, Book V, Ch. 12, Marches (continued)
Sickness in crowded quarters versus on the road; soldiers drinking cold water after heat exhaustion; Napoleon's losses of 95,000 to sickness and straggling on the march to Smolensk in 1812.
- 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.
- Personal Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XXXII
The flooded winter before Vicksburg: malarial fevers, measles and smallpox among troops, hospital arrangements Grant credits with limiting deaths, and orders establishing general hospitals between Duckport and Milliken's Bend.
- Politics, Household and city
Politics gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens appears by analogy: aristotle often treats constitutions as healthy or diseased orders, requiring diagnosis, regimen, and proportion
- Ruth, Ch. 32–33
Typhus epidemic in Eccleston; Ruth volunteers as matron-nurse in the fever ward of the hospital.
- Selected Sermons, Court sermons on negligent officials
Social disorder is treated as a public disease requiring correction by rulers and clergy.
- Sermons on Several Occasions and Primitive Physick, Sermons on works of mercy
Visiting the sick and caring for bodies become duties within Methodist holiness.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book X (Damascus, October 1918)
Lawrence finds a Turkish military hospital full of dead and dying men and organises its cleaning and burials amid the chaos of the city's first days.
- St. Dymphna and the Geel Colony, Nineteenth-century psychiatric visits to Geel
Alienists and reformers used Geel as evidence in debates over asylum limits, moral treatment, and whether chronic mental illness required institutional segregation.
- St. Patrick's Writings, Confessio I
Patrick's capture at roughly sixteen provides a rare late antique first-person account of adolescent enslavement.
- St. Patrick's Writings, Letter to Coroticus
Patrick's denunciation of killing and trafficking baptized captives preserves a moral response to slave-raiding and communal trauma.
- St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles, Water of St. Thomas
Blood mixed with water becomes a portable contact relic used externally and internally in healing stories.
- 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 Anti-Federalist Papers, Brutus on judicial and national power
Concerns over expansive federal authority anticipate later disputes about courts, rights, and public-health power.
- The Art of the Commonplace, Agrarian membership
The Art of the Commonplace gives this tag concrete force through his medical relevance lies in public health broadly conceived: food systems, labor, ecological damage, loneliness, and the social conditions of flourishing
- The Art of War, Ch. IX.11–12
Armies prefer high, sunny ground; camping on hard ground near water and pasture keeps the army free from disease; commentators call low ground damp and unhealthy.
- 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 2 (superintendent of liquor)
Regulation of the production and sale of alcoholic drinks and the conduct of drinking houses.
- The Arthashastra, Book 4 (remedies against national calamities)
State measures against fire, flood, epidemic disease, famine and pests.
- The Bible, Leviticus 13–14
Laws for priestly diagnosis, isolation outside the camp and purification of 'leprosy' in people, garments and houses.
- The Civil War, Book I.81–84
The Pompeian army in Spain, cut off from water and forage, kills its baggage animals and surrenders.
- 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.47–49
Dyrrachium: Caesar's troops eat chara bread and bark; Pompey's army suffers from foul smells, carcasses, hard labour and lack of water after Caesar dams the streams.
- The Communist Manifesto, Bourgeois and proletarians
The Communist Manifesto gives this tag concrete force through its medical relevance lies in social medicine: labor conditions, poverty, urbanization, family disruption, and the political diagnosis of suffering
- The Federalist Papers, Federalist 51
Checks and balances are presented as structural safeguards against predictable human impulses.
- The Founding Documents, Constitution, federal and state powers
The division of authority becomes central to American public-health law and emergency power.
- The Golden Legend: Popular Saints, Life of St. George
The healing fountain attached to George's church shows how martyr cult could become a site for illness narratives.
- The History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 2.51–53
Caregivers die, laws lose force, burial customs collapse and despair spreads through the crowded city.
- The Jewish War, Book 5, Jerusalem under siege
Crowding, corpses, factional violence and the shrinking food supply turn Jerusalem into a public health crisis before the final assault.
- The Koran, Sura 2:183–185
Fasting in Ramadan, with exemptions for the sick and travellers.
- The River War, Chapters IV–V
Reforms of the Egyptian army include hospital care for the sick (Ch. IV); the Suakin garrison (Ch. V) suffers malaria, liver abscess, bursati sores in animals and invaliding of a quarter of British officers.
- 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 River War, Chapter XVI: The Fall of the City
Bombarded Omdurman: mangled civilians, houses crammed with wounded, decomposing bodies and animal carcasses.
- The Secret Garden, Ch. 1
The cholera outbreak kills Mary's parents and household, revealing imperial neglect and epidemic vulnerability.
- The Social Contract, Book III, Chapter IX
Rousseau names the increase of population, without colonies or naturalisation, as the decisive mark of good government and dismisses tranquillity that hides depopulation.
- The Theban Plays, Oedipus the King, opening
Thebes suffers plague, failed crops, infertility and public supplication before Oedipus.
- The Voyage of the Beagle, imperial encounters
Darwin's observations of slavery in Brazil, frontier warfare in Argentina, and disease among peoples the ship visited set his natural history within the voyage's human world.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter II (the removable evils)
Poverty and disease presented as largely conquerable by education, social institutions, 'proper control of noxious influences' and science; those who care for others keep their interest in life on the eve of death.
- We, Early records
D-503 praises rational happiness and describes regulated sex, time and transparent living as healthful social order.
- We Hold These Truths, Church and state
We Hold These Truths gives this tag concrete force through its medical relevance appears where conscience, institutional freedom, public reason, and contested moral goods affect health law and care
Quotes
“If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
“This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy”
“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”
“How many trifling illnesses by that means become serious, how many serious ones become mortal”
“About one-third of the people with me died, either at Cruces or on the way to Panama”
“Then for to avoide infirmitie, thei did flie from places Fennie, or subjecte to hurtfull windes: whiche thei knewe not so well, by the qualitie of the situacion, as by the face of the inhabitours: for when thei sawe theim evill coloured, or swollen, or full of other infeccion, thei would not lodge there”
“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”
“and camp on hard ground, the army will be free from disease of every kind”
“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”
“that they themselves were not in good health from their confinement within so narrow a compass, from the noisome smell, the number of carcasses, and the constant fatigue to them, being men unaccustomed to work, and labouring under a great want of water”
Frequently cited
“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles”
“But of the first thousand cases between Assuan and Suarda nearly eight hundred proved fatal”
“Even that most intractable of enemies, disease, may be indefinitely reduced in dimensions by good physical and moral education, and proper control of noxious influences”