Book excerpt: James Joyce's interest in medicine has been well established--he attempted to embark on medical studies no fewer than three times--but a comprehensive assessment of the influence his interest in medicine had on his work has been lacking until now. Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity fills that gap as the first sustained study of Joyce's artistic uses of turn-of-the-century medical discourses. In this wide-ranging study, author Vike Plock balances close readings of Joyce's major texts with thorough archival research that retrieves principal late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical debates. The result is a fascinating book that details the ways in which Joyce reconciled, integrated, and blurred the paradigmatic boundaries between scientific and humanist learning.