Elisabeth Tova Bailey

Elisabeth Tova Bailey is the author of The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (2010, Algonquin Books, ISBN 978-1565126060) which won the 2010 John Burroughs Medal,[1] the Natural History Literature category of the 2010 National Outdoor Book Award (joint award),[2] and the non-fiction category of the 2012 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.[3] 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 Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.[4]

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".[5]