Modernists versus Medicine in Literature: Mann, Céline, Beckett, and the Challenge of Medicalization (Routledge Studies in Literature and Health Humanities)

This academic work explores the pivotal shift in Western thought when disease replaced sin as the fundamental framework for understanding human existence.This volume examines how this transformation shaped literary modernism through three exemplary writers who confronted the growing medicalization of human life. The book traces medicine's evolving relationship with literature across European history-from medieval skepticism through Renaissance ambivalence to Enlightenment enthusiasm.It argues that modernity emerged when humanity ceased viewing disease as divine punishment and began understanding it as natural physiochemical processes. Central to the analysis is how medicine assumed powers once held by the Church, overseeing birth, life, and death while explaining human suffering.This medicalization granted authority to medical practitioners, creating both benefits and potential abuses-particularly evident in early 20th-century eugenics movements. The author demonstrates how modernist w