Post mortem: Essays, historical and medical

Whether the “great man” has had any real influence on the world, or whether history is merely a matter of ideas and tendencies among mankind, are still questions open to solutio...

The chief authority for the reign of Henry VIII is contained in the _Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII_, edited by Brewer and Gairdner. This gigantic work, containin...

However, Jeanne was put on her trial for witchcraft, and after a long and apparently hesitating process--for there had been grave doubts raised as to the legality of the whole t...

So far we have nothing to go by but the statements of one man; the greatest historian of his time, to be sure--if we can be certain that he wrote the book. Von Ranke, himself a...

In Theodora’s time Asklepios and the other Olympian divinities had long been gathered to their fathers before the advancing tides of Christianity and Earth-Mother worship; but t...

Charles was mistaken in supposing that he could find rest at Yuste; the world would not let him rest. He had been a figure too overwhelming. He spent his days in reading dispatc...

Two years later he got the real chance of his life. The Turks, having recovered from the shock inflicted on them by Charles V, captured Cyprus and seemed about to conquer all th...

The death of Don Quixote is probably the most generally famous in literature, vying with that of Colonel Newcome, though more impressive because it is less sentimental. Cervante...

Husband and wife went everywhere together, and seem really to have loved each other; the impression that I gather from Pepys’s exceedingly candid description of her is that she...

But the great problem remains: Why did Pepys write down all these intimate details of his private life? Why did he confess to things which most men do not confess even to themse...

It seems to be certain that he organized, if he did not originate, the frightful September massacres. There were many hundreds of Royalists in the prisons, who were becoming a n...

It has been surmised by some enthusiasts that the frequency of micturition, followed by dysuria, to which he was liable, may have really been due to hyper-pituitarism. Whenever...

Nor is it possible to obtain help from the great men of the past, because not one of them knew any more about death than you do yourself. Socrates, in Plato’s _Phædo_, Sir Thoma...

The illness which causes the most misery is an illness complicated with neurasthenia, and probably the neurasthenic tastes the bitterest misery of which mankind is capable, unle...