Authors: Patrick Taylor

A Dublin Student Doctor (55 page)

urchins:
Street kids, usually preteen.

walking out:
Going steady.

wean:
Pronounced “wane.” Child.

wee buns:
Ulster.
Very easy.

wee man, the:
The devil.

wee taste:
Ulster.
Small amount, and not necessarily of food. “That axle needs a wee taste of oil.”

well mended:
Healed properly.

wetting the baby’s head:
Taking a drink (or several) to celebrate a birth.

wheen:
Ulster.
An indeterminate number. “How many miles is it to the nearest star?” “Dunno, but it must be a brave wheen.”

whin:
Gorse or furze, a spiny shrub.

whole shebang:
Lock, stock, and barrel.

WREN:
Acronym derived from the initial letters of the
W
omen’s
R
oyal
N
avy. Akin to WAAF or WAVE.

ye:
You, singular or plural.

yiz:
You, singular or plural.

you’re joking me:
You are pulling my leg. You’re not serious.

youngwans:
Dublin.
Young ones, usually unmarried.

your man:
Someone either whose name is not known, “Your man over there? Who is he?” or someone known to all, “Your man, Van Morrison.” (Also, “I’m your man” as in “I agree and will go along with whatever you are proposing.”)

youse:
You, singular or plural.

A
UTHOR
’
S
N
OTE

Like book four,
An Irish Country Girl,
this, the sixth book in the Irish Country series, is a departure from what for many readers will be the familiar rural Ballybucklebo and the eccentric population of the village. So why leave and how did
A Dublin Student Doctor,
a book set in cosmopolitan Dublin in the 1930s, come about?

Just as a constant gnawing in my mind led to the story of Mrs. Maureen “Kinky” Kincaid in
Country Girl,
so did a subconscious grumbling drive me to ask what forces shaped Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly. How did his early life turn him into the man he had become by the mid-’60s in Ballybucklebo?

In
An Irish Country Doctor
the Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly my readers know sprang to life fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus, his physical character and his personality firm. But what of his past? I had decided that this book would start after Fingal, aged eighteen, left his public boarding school, an institution where his parents would have paid his fees, and follow his undergraduate days from 1931 to ’36, the intervening years in Dublin, his assistantship in Ballybucklebo, and finally his Royal Naval service up to the time of his postwar demobilisation as Surgeon-Commander O’Reilly DSC, and his purchase of the practice in Ballybucklebo in 1946.

But by the point in the story when O’Reilly’s medical studies still had one year to go, it was clear that the account of Fingal’s war years, critical as they were in his life, would have to wait. I hope you will find his doings in ’30s Dublin entertaining. His naval adventures will need a book of their own.

Young Fingal’s story would be a venture into uncharted territory. I like to write gentle stories, but from time to time, as in my short stories and Provisional IRA thrillers, I need to expand into the grittier aspects of life in Ireland in the twentieth century.

This book is set in the Dublin of the ’30s, for me a strange place and an unfamiliar time. It was a period of hiatus between two world wars, immediately following the Great Depression, and not a decade since England had granted twenty-six Irish counties partial independence and dominion status. Getting there had been bloody. All these events had left their scars in Ireland, nor could any adult alive in the ’30s fail to be aware of ominous political developments on the continent of Europe, constant leitmotifs to daily life.

All that was before I was born. My first experience of the city was when, as a small boy, I was taken to Dublin in the ’40s. I have three indelible memories: beggars, bicycles everywhere, and Sarah. She was the elephant at the Phoenix Park Zoo who gave children rides in a howdah and who for the bribe of a penny bun and on the command “Sing, Sarah,” would raise her trunk and trumpet ferociously.

I spent a great deal of time in Dublin during a recent two-year sojourn in Ireland absorbing the atmosphere, the patterns of speech, the pubs, but I could not visit the tenements, the slums that were so much a part of that “Strumpet City” as Denis Johnston called the place in his play
The Old Lady Says No!
Thank God they are gone.

Those parts of Dublin were so unlike the rural Ulster of the 1940s and ’50s where I grew up and which I may have idealised in my books. I have tried to capture the squalor and the existence of some of the tenements’ denizens and was aided greatly by
Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History,
by Kevin C. Kearns.

If the living conditions of the tenement dwellers were primitive, so was the medicine of the time. To ensure accuracy in matters medical I visited Trinity College, the Royal Colleges of Physicians and of Surgeons in Ireland, and the Rotunda Hospital, and have consulted their libraries. Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital was closed in 1987, but the hospital has been well described by others in the archives of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. The carved tabletops from the Dun’s students’ mess reside there. It was an eerie feeling to touch them and read the inscribed names of those who studied at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

My efforts were helped enormously by Professor Peter Gatenby, author of
The School of Physic: Trinity College Dublin,
and Professor Davis Coakley, who among other invaluable pieces of information gave me
The Regulations of the School of Physic,
the timetable and curriculum of the medical school for 1930.

It is staggering to realise how powerless medicine was before the Second World War. No antibiotics, no CPR, no portable defibrillators, no CT scans; rampant tuberculosis, typhus, typhoid, rickets, syphilis. And no contraception; women routinely delivered twelve or more babies. And yet the patients were human beings with all the same hopes and fears as those of today, but with fewer expectations and a more fatalistic acceptance of suffering and death. The physicians did their best with limited resources, tending more to practise the art rather than the science of medicine, and perhaps with a more personal touch.

I have tried and, I hope, succeeded in portraying that accurately, and have been aided by reference to the slim 1935 first edition of
The Essentials of Materia Medica Pharmacology and Therapeutics,
by R. H. Micks. I used its 1961 eighth edition in my own studies and the book is still in my library.

As I have done in all the earlier works, I have appended a
glossary
. Many readers say they find this helpful. I try to capture the speech and idiom of my characters and must warn my readers that some of the folks on these pages are blasphemous. I can only apologise to the offended, but I strive for accuracy in all things.

Any anachronisms in this work are mine, but they are not there for my want of trying to be true in all aspects to my characters and the periods in which they live.

I hope this short note will help you enjoy the next 480 pages.

Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly is waiting. Please enjoy his company.

P
ATRICK
T
AYLOR

Salt Spring Island,

British Columbia,

Canada

B
Y
P
ATRICK
T
AYLOR

Only Wounded

Pray for Us Sinners

Now and in the Hour of Our Death

An Irish Country Doctor

An Irish Country Village

An Irish Country Christmas

An Irish Country Girl

An Irish Country Courtship

A Dublin Student Doctor

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A DUBLIN STUDENT DOCTOR: AN IRISH COUNTRY NOVEL

Maps by Elizabeth Danforth and Jennifer Hanover

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Taylor, Patrick

A Dublin student doctor : an Irish country novel / Patrick Taylor.—1st ed.

p. cm.