Chapter 13 - Joyce and the (Critical) Medical Humanities

Summary

Vike Martina Plock’s chapter examines the interplay between medical science and humanist learning in Joyce’s writing. It is well known that Joyce had a life-long interest in medicine. His works resonate with descriptions of bodies in various stages of (ill-)health, and in recent years critics such as John Gordon, Vike Martina Plock, and Martin Bock have shown his responsiveness to a number of medical theories and interventions crucial to his time. As these studies illustrate, Joyce is often extremely critical of modern medicine’s merits, seeing it as yet another regulatory system that has the potential to organize and coerce. This chapter proposes to use debates and theories that have emerged in recent years in the Medical Humanities to investigate how Joyce’s texts reject the proposal to narrativize patients’ case histories. Critics such as Angela Woods have particularly challenged the role of realism in contemporary accounts of health and illness. Joyce, as this chapter argues, deliberately uses experimental narrative techniques to defy medicine’s urge to classify individuals according to pre-existing pathological labels. The representation of bodies in Joyce’s texts offer new ways of understanding cultures of medicine, disability studies, communities in crisis, bioethics, and public health.