Clare Hall Life Member and former Visiting Fellow Professor Emeritus Allen Thiher explores the relationship between literature and medical authority in his new book, Modernists versus Medicine in Literature (Routledge, Sep 2026).

The book examines a major shift in Western thought: the growing understanding of disease as a natural process rather than divine punishment. It considers how medicine came to assume roles once held by the Church, shaping understandings of birth, life, death and human suffering.

Through close readings of three modernist writers, Professor Emeritus Thiher explores how they both accepted medicine’s growing influence and questioned its authority. Their works use irony and satire to examine the tensions between medical explanations of human behaviour and the complexities of individual experience. The study also considers the benefits and potential abuses of medical power, particularly in relation to the early twentieth-century eugenics movement.

By tracing these literary responses, the book offers an insight into how modernist writers grappled with medicine’s expanding role in defining what it means to be human.

Allen Thiher is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Romance Languages Emeritus at the University of Missouri.