title: Doctors, disease and James Joyce.
abstract: The Irish author James Joyce is regarded as the greatest modernist writer of his time. His works, notably The Dead, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake--are intensely autobiographic including meticulous descriptions of illness and states of health--no surprise in view of Joyce's medical history and hypochondria. The Dead revolves around the tragic love of a doomed tubercular youth. Ulysses has a graphic description of Mary Joyce-s death, a funeral and a birth; Stephen Dedalus, the character based on Joyce, attends a drinking session with medical students at the lying-in hospital just as Joyce had done as a student; references to syphilis, alcoholism and other illnesses abound.
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Medicine, University of Wollongong, New South Wales. rob.liaison@gmail.com
authors.forename: Robert M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Kaplan
mesh_terms: D000739:Anecdotes as Topic; D005194:Family Practice / Q000266:history*; D005197:Famous Persons; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D006998:Hypochondriasis / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000266:history* / Q000628:therapy; D007494:Ireland; D008297:Male; D008513:Medicine in Literature