Category: Literary Vignettes
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The man of one book
George DuneaChicago, Illinois, United States As the publishing industry is going through a technological revolution and enhanced digital books come loaded with videos, songs, animated shorts, pop-up graphics, and interactive features, two issues long resonating with scholars and educators seem irrelevant but actually are not. Should one read widely or concentrate on a few authors?…
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Jane Austen and the hypochondriacs
George DuneaChicago, Illinois, United States Jane Austen began working on Sanditon in January of 1817, completing only 2,600 words before she died six months later—probably from adrenal failure (Addison’s disease) caused by tuberculosis. The fragment was published in part in 1870, then in its entirety in 1925. Several authors since then have completed the story,…
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Doctor and dictionary
For almost two decades beginning in 1882, Dr. William Chester Minor, retired army surgeon and captain of the Union Army during the American Civil War, labored unceasingly, day after day, reading and researching sixteenth and seventeenth century books, making notes on more than 12,000 slips of paper, and mailing them to the Scriptorium of Dr.…
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Edward Gibbon
“Every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first from his teachers; the second, more personal and important, from himself.” “The warm desires, the long expectations of youth, are founded on the ignorance of themselves and of the world. They are gradually damped by disappointment and possessions; and after the…
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Francis Peabody: caring for the patient
“The good physician knows his patient through and through, and his knowledge is bought dearly. Time, sympathy, and understanding must be lavishly dispensed, but the reward is to be found in that personal bond which forms the greatest satisfaction of the practice of medicine. One of the essential qualities of the clinician is his interest…
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From Merdle to Madoff (Charles Dickens)
They found him sprawled out in his bath, ‘lying in it as in a grave or sarcophagus . . . the white marble at the bottom of the bath veined with a dreadful red . . . on his side an empty laudanum-bottle and a tortoise-shell handled penknife–soiled, but not with ink.’ ‘Separation of jugular…
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“How the Poor Die” by George Orwell, 1946
The next moment . . . the doctor and the students came across to my bed, hoisted me upright and without a word began applying the same set of glasses, which had not been sterilized in any way. A few feeble protests that I uttered got no more response than if I had been an…
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The last illness of Père Goriot
“It is all up with him, or I am much mistaken! Something very extraordinary must have taken place; he looks to me as if he were in imminent danger of serous apoplexy. The lower part of his face is composed enough, but the upper part is drawn and distorted. Then there is that peculiar look…
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Lead poisoning in Northern Yorkshire
In Journey Home, John Hillaby describes how during a walk through North Yorkshire he “saw the gaunt shoulders of moors slashed open and poisoned by mining operations, leaving only mounds of spoil and the ruins of abandoned building. The scene is one of desolation, the outcome of the lust for lead, most of it in…
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Doctor Rabelais Part I: The education of Gargantua
François Rabelais is one of the world’s greatest writers, one whose place is in the company of Aristophanes, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Dante. Regarded as the creator of modern French literature, he was a man of the Renaissance, yet emerging out of the Middle Ages and standing between the old world and the new. Born somewhere…