The Humanym archive
Being ill
Sickness, pain and last illnesses, described by the people living through them.
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1775
Abigail Adams to John Adams, 1775
Abigail Adams · 8-10 September 1775 · Braintree
During a dysentery epidemic that has struck her own household, Abigail Adams reports days of illness and a neighborhood losing children and adults to the same disease.
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1776
Adam Smith to William Strahan, 1776
Adam Smith · 9 November 1776 · Kirkaldy, Fifeshire
Eleven weeks after David Hume's death, Adam Smith gives a detailed account of his friend's calm, even cheerful, conduct through his final illness, quoting Hume's own farewell letter and a doctor's letter reporting his death before closing with a eulogy.
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1796
Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Thomas Poole, 1796
Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 5 November 1796
Coleridge describes a night of agonizing facial pain and the laudanum he took to ease it.
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1849
Harriet Beecher Stowe to Calvin Stowe, 1849
Harriet Beecher Stowe · 29 June - 23 July 1849 · also Grief
Over several weeks of a cholera epidemic in Cincinnati, Harriet Beecher Stowe writes to her husband urging him to stay away, and the letter ends as their young son is dying.
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1883
Ivan Turgenev to Leo Tolstoy, 1883
Ivan Turgenev · June or July 1883
Dying of cancer, Turgenev sent a last plea urging the estranged Tolstoy to return to his fiction; it survives only as quoted by Henry James in a memorial essay.