Abraham Nussbaum

Physician, Teacher, Writer


Ulysses, James Joyce

Ulysses has scabrous obscenities, luxuriated profanities, extraneous details, staggering vocabulary, formal experimentation, and a performative use of  anatomical terms. The body is mapped by the church and the state, but also by medicine. It is the most famous novel ever written by a med school dropout and is, slyly, Joyce’s revenge on medicine. Joyce contrasts a British-ish medical student (Buck Mulligan) who is a cynical Hellenizer with the Irish Bloom who is a humanizing Latinist. “People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep.”



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