Elisabeth Tova Bailey

Who is Elisabeth Tova Bailey?

Elisabeth Tova Bailey is the author of The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating which won the 2010 John Burroughs Medal, the Natural History Literature category of the 2010 National Outdoor Book Award, and the non-fiction category of the 2012 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. In the book she describes her observations of an individual land snail in the species Neohelix albolabris which lived in a terrarium next to her while she was confined to bed through illness.

In her essay A Green World Deep in Winter: The Bedside Terrarium, published in the Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, Bailey describes how Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, inventor of the Wardian case, had published during the mid 19th century a report on the "Use of Closed Cases in Illness", explaining the benefit of a terrarium to bed-ridden patients in order to "beguile many a weary hour".