Fingal O'Reilly, Irish Doctor (55 page)

Please let me explain and start by offering new readers
cead mile fáilte,
a hundred thousand welcomes, and a short note of introduction. This work, by telling two parallel stories separated by twenty-nine years, continues to explore the character of Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly and ask what formed him in his medical youth in 1930s Dublin and turned him into the man he has become in 1960s Northern Ireland. I hope you enjoy the journey with him, and no prior knowledge of him and the other characters in this work is required, so please feel free to climb aboard.

Many regular readers (and welcome back to you, good to see you again) post notes on my Facebook page or write to me through my Web site. Thank you not only for telling me how you’ve enjoyed (or disliked) my work but also for asking such questions as “Will Doctor Barry Laverty marry Sue Nolan? Will Barry come back to work in Ballybucklebo in the ’60s? Why did Fingal and Kitty split up in the ’30s? What career did he choose immediately after he qualified and why did he choose it?” It was from such questions that the framework of this book developed.

Why not, I asked myself, answer those and other questions by telling two stories, one which followed on from
A Dublin Student Doctor
in Dublin in 1936 and the other set in Ballybucklebo in 1965, picking up where
An Irish Country Wedding
left off? It seemed to be a reasonable skeleton to work round.

The setting of the Dublin story in the tenements of the Liberties owes much to
Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History
by Kevin C. Kearns, to whom I will be eternally grateful. The timing of the story, 1936, allows young Fingal’s character to be shaped by two vital forces: the patients he works with as a G.P. in the dispensary system of the slums, and the primitive but increasingly science-driven medicine of that time, about to be revolutionised by the development of antibiotics.

I hope you will be interested in a short historical note about that subject. In Germany in 1932, a Doctor Gerhard Domagk had been studying aniline dyes produced by his colleague Josef Klarer. Domagk experimented with mice infected with
Streptococcus.
Those treated with red prontosil survived. Those left untreated died. Further trials seemed promising in humans. The work was done in Wuppertal-Elberfeld, where, as an aside, as a reserve soldier I attended a military summer camp in 1960 and from where we were taken to inspect the Möhne Dam, one target of the famous Dam Busters raid in 1943. In 1935, Domagk’s six-year-old daughter Hildegarde drove an embroidery needle into her palm. A few days later she was dying from septicaemia (blood poisoning), and it was doubtful if even amputation of the infected limb would save her life. Domagk gave her massive doses of Prontosil. Two days later she walked out of the hospital. He did not mention her when he published his findings in 1935, so Fingal would not have known about her. Domagk’s initial report was largely pooh-poohed by the medical establishment at the time. He subsequently was awarded the Nobel Prize.

In 1936, a sulphonamide medication, the active agent of Prontosil, cured President Roosevelt’s son FDR Jr. of a potentially lethal streptococcal throat infection, and following extensive press exposure of this cure in November 1936 the sulpha drugs gained rapid and widespread acceptance. The antibiotic era had begun.

How his own experience with Prontosil changed Fingal O’Reilly is part of the Dublin story.

Nor was Fingal’s life in Dublin insulated from events in his wider world. The involvement of Irish men and women on both the Nationalist and Republican sides in the now-being forgotten Spanish Civil War affected him and Kitty O’Hallorhan deeply. My interest in this war was initially sparked by a wonderful work,
Winter in Madrid
by C. J. Sansom, and my introduction to the Irish Blueshirts came in the pages of the haunting
The Secret Scripture
by Sebastian Barry.

Interwoven with the Dublin story is the tale of the doings in Ballybucklebo in 1965. This juxtaposition illustrates how radically the practice of medicine had changed in the twenty-nine intervening years and how O’Reilly had matured and was continuing to do so.

By 1965, although his ways were becoming more set, those closest to him, like Kitty O’Reilly née O’Hallorhan, Kinky Kincaid, Doctor Barry Laverty, and Doctor Jenny Bradley, influenced the still-growing man that he was. And so did the practice of medicine, which once more was on the threshold of two massive innovations: electrical cardiac defibrillation leading to the portable defibrillator, and laparoscopy, which was the beginnings of minimal-access surgery and in vitro fertilisation. Both are things we take as routine today.

Purely by chance I was houseman to the remarkable Doctor Frank Pantridge in 1965 when he introduced cardiac defibrillation to the Royal Victoria Hospital and, with Doctor John Geddes and Mister Alfred Mawhinney, was developing a portable defibrillator. I have taken a one-month liberty with the first use of the cardiac flying squad, which used the world’s first portable device in 1966. I trust you will forgive me.

And I have, for reasons of personal conceit, once more played a little with dates when the story involves another, for the time, revolutionary technique. When, in 1965, Jenny Bradley suggests that one of O’Reilly’s patients be sent to Dundonald Hospital, laparoscopy was still a few years away from coming to Northern Ireland. In 1969, I had just qualified as an OB/GYN specialist and my then chief at Dundonald, Mister Matt Neely FRCOG, a most prescient man, arranged for me to be sent to Oldham in England. There I was taught the then revolutionary technique of laparoscopy by a Mister Patrick Steptoe, whose work with Professor Robert Edwards led to the birth of Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby in 1978. In 2010 Professor Edwards won the Nobel Prize and was knighted a year later. The laparoscope is also the foundation stone of all of today’s minimal access surgery.

In a much lesser way, that month in England gave me a lifelong interest in laparoscopy and the treatment of human infertility. My last textbook on the subject,
Diagnostic and Operative Gynaecological Laparoscopy
, first edition, written in conjunction with Professor Victor Gomel of Vancouver, Canada, was published in 1995 and is now considered more medical history than medical textbook.

And on a further historical note, although doctors like Fingal O’Reilly, Phelim Corrigan, Charlie Greer, and Bob Beresford in 1936 and Fingal’s young colleagues in 1965 are all figments of my imagination, all other figures are real. Those senior doctors alluded to in the Ballybucklebo story were all known personally to me. For example, Doctor Adgey, now Professor Adgey, was a classmate; Mister Jimmy Withers was the first Ulster specialist orthopaedic surgeon; and Mister Cecil Calvert set up the first neurosurgery unit. Sir Samuel Irwin, president of the IRFU when Fingal was trying to achieve the honour of playing for his country, had a son, Sinclair, who followed in his father’s footsteps both in the game of rugby football and as a surgeon. I was his houseman in 1965.

Doctor Jack Sinton was a G.P. in Belfast, and he did go wildfowling with my father, Doctor Jimmy Taylor, and me as I grew old enough.

Doctor Graham Harley, who became Professor Harley, was instrumental in my training as a gynaecologist, and I was privileged to work in my final position in the department of obstetrics and gynaecology in Vancouver, British Columbia, as a colleague of Doctor David Boyes.

It is my hope that this book will amuse, inform, and please you—and finally put to rest many, but not all, of my readers’ questions. I’m afraid I must ask those who want to know about Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly’s first wife, Deirdre Mawhinney, and his wartime naval service on HMS
Warspite
to be patient—but tomorrow I promise I’ll be starting to write number nine in the Irish Country series as fast as I can.

P
ATRICK
T
AYLOR

Salt Spring Island

British Columbia

Canada

September 2012

G
LOSSARY

To each of the seven previous Irish Country books I have appended a glossary. Judging by the letters I receive, they are appreciated. The English spoken in Ireland not only differs from standard English, but the language of regions is equally diverse. So is the Irish Gaeilge, but that is another story. Aspects of the Ulster and Dublin dialects are as far apart as those from Brooklyn, New York, and Bowling Green, Kentucky. Despite these differences many of the expressions in Ireland are shared, so in this glossary by preceding the definition with “Dublin” or “Ulster” I have tried to identify those more likely to be heard in the city on the Liffey and those prone to crop up near where the Lagan flows. Without those modifers the expressions are fairly universal.

I spent October ’07 to May ’10 in Ireland and frequently visited Dubh Linn, the Black Pool, or as it is properly known in Gaelic, Baile Atha Cliath, the town of the ford of the hurdles.

In my early years in the north of Ireland I had never heard expressions like “gameball,” evincing great approval. My northern versions would be “wheeker” or “sticking out a mile.” “Mind your house,” exhorting a sports team to be on the lookout for a tackle from behind, would be translated by us roaring, “Behind, ye.” A scruffy individual in Dublin would be “in rag order.” Up north they would have looked “as if they’d been pulled through a hedge backwards,” or “like something the cat dragged in.”

But, not all is different. North and south we’d both “go for our messages” when running errands, wonder what that “yoke” (thingummybob) was for, and might end up “shitting bricks” (very worried) because our pal had got himself “steamboats” or “elephants” (utterly inebriated).

I have in previous works explained the ubiquitous use of “feck” and its variants in Dublin. Believe me, it is now so hackeneyed by overuse it has ceased to be offensive and I could not render the speech of Dubliners without it.

Usually I try to avoid phoenetics in writing dialogue, but in Roscommon, where I lived from 2008 to 2010, “ye” for “you” is universal and in Dublin the “th” sound does not exist and, for example, “them” becomes “dem,” nor does the letter “g” have any place in “ing.” I hope the apostrophes are not feckin’ irritating.

Here are the words, expressions, and explanations. Please enjoy them.

Aldergrove:
Belfast International Airport.

An Gorta Mór:
Irish pronounced “an gortash more,” literally “the Great Hunger.” The potato famine of 1845–52.

anyroad:
Anyway.

arse:
Backside (impolite).

astray in the head:
Insane.

at myself, not:
Ulster. Unwell.

away off and chase yourself/feel your head:
Ulster. Don’t be stupid.

babby:
Baby.

banjaxed:
Exhausted or broken.

banshee:
From the Irish
Bean sidhe,
literally “woman of the mounds,” whose keening foretells a death.

barging:
Trying to force one’s way past. Also (Ulster) a serious telling-off.

barmbrack:
Speckled bread. See Kinky’s recipe in
An Irish Country Doctor.

barrister/solicitor:
Attorney. Barristers represented clients in court, solicitors did not, but handled legal matters not requiring judicial intervention.

bashtoon:
Bastard.

beagle’s gowl:
Ulster. The gowl (not howl) of a beagle dog can be heard over a very long distance. Not to come within a beagle’s gowl of something means missing by a very long way.

beat Banagher/Bannagher:
Ulster. Far exceed realistic expectations or to one’s great surprise.

bee on a hot brick:
Running round distractedly.

beeling:
Suppurating. Producing pus.

bejizzis/by Jasus:
By Jesus. In Ireland, despite the commandment proscribing taking the name of the Lord in vain, mild blasphemy freqently involves doing just that. Also commonly heard are Jasus, Jasus Murphy, or Jesus Mary and Joseph.

bespoke:
Tailored rather than ready-to-wear.

bide:
Wait patiently.

bite the back of me bollix:
Dublin. Slightly more polite version of “feck off.”

black pudding:
Traditional Irish blood sausage.

blether:
To talk excessively about trivia or an expression of dismay.

blow out:
End a love affair, or a big night out.

bog trotter:
Pejorative. Country person (bumpkin implied).

bollix/bollox:
Testicles (impolite). May be used as an expression of vehement disagreement or to describe a person of whom you disapprove.

bollixed/bolloxed:
Ruined.

boozer:
Public house or person who drinks.

bowsey/ie:
Dublin. Drunkard.

boxty:
Potato pancake.

braces:
Men’s suspenders.

’brake:
Abbreviation of “shooting brake.” English term for a vehicle that used to be called a woody in North America.

brass monkey weather:
In Nelson’s navy, cannonballs were kept ready for use by being stored in small pyramids held in place at the base by a brass triangle called a monkey. In very cold weather the brass would contract and the cannon balls roll off, hence, “It would freeze the balls off a brass monkey.”