Tag Archives: Oliver Twist

The birth of Oliver Twist

May 12, 2023

From the book by Charles Dickens, chapter one: “Although I am not disposed to maintain that being born in a workhouse, is in itself the most fortunate and enviable circumstance that can possibly befall a human being, I do mean to say that in this particular instance, it was the best thing for Oliver Twist […]

Pushing back at perceptions of epilepsy: the interplay between medicine and literature in three 19th-century British novels

March 4, 2017

Laura Fitzpatrick New York, United States   If I wished to show a student the difficulties of getting at truth from medical experience, I would give him the history of epilepsy to read. —Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1891.1 As the nineteenth century dawned, the average Briton still understood epilepsy much in the way his ancient Greek […]