A Dublin Student Doctor, by Patrick Taylor. Forge, 492 pages, $28.99
Less than 100 years ago, when medical education was less an academic process than a hands-on apprenticeship, medical students such as my late father-in-law learned their trade at patients' bedsides from starchy ward sisters and imperious hospital matrons, from harried senior registrars and godlike consultants.
Mostly, however, young doctors learned by trial and error, and professional legends and lore were as much part of a young doctor's training as hospital Grand Rounds. The stories were passed around wherever physicians gathered socially, in pubs and clubs, over port and Stilton, in doctors' lounges during the long watches of the night. Yarns were spun about student high jinks and larger-than-life characters, but these professional anecdotes were cautionary as well as entertaining: What happened when doctors became too big for their britches, the cost of overlooking advice from experienced nurses, the dangers of treating patients as cases rather than people.
A Dublin Student Doctor, a novel about the education and coming of age of a young Dublin doctor in the 1930s, belongs to this almost-vanished professional storytelling tradition. Readers of Patrick Taylor's previous novel, An Irish Country Doctor, will recognize the elderly Dr. Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly as the eccentric but kindly senior medical practitioner in the quaint Ulster village of Ballybucklebo. A Dublin Student Doctor looks back to an earlier period in Irish medical life, to O'Reilly's years of medical training during the 1930s, like my father-in-law, in Dublin's Sir Patrick Dun's Hospital.
Fresh from his service in the Royal Navy Reserve, the young Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly (a nod to two middle names of fellow Dubliner Oscar Wilde) sets off to study medicine in Trinity College Dublin despite his father's opposition. To O'Reilly's patrician father, medical doctors are intellectual dullards and social inferiors. To O'Reilly, however, becoming a physician is as much vocation as profession, a conviction cemented by his medical education.
Then as now, medical training was gruelling. O'Reilly spends long hours over his textbooks, and longer hours in Sir Patrick Dun's Spartan hospital wards and clinics, ministering to Dublin's sick. In a medical world before antibiotics, O'Reilly learns the art of diagnosis and the craft of often brutal medical procedures. He learns diplomacy and how to navigate the hospital's complex hierarchies of doctors and nurses. Slowly but surely, the novel charts O'Reilly's progress toward achieving the difficult balance between compassion and professionalism.
Despite his long hours, O'Reilly still finds time for rugby and boxing and pints in cozy Dublin pubs. He squeezes in a few high-spirited but harmless student pranks. He meets and falls in love with a grey-eyed young nurse living in the cloistered precincts of the nurses' home. More Rudyard Kipling than James Joyce, O'Reilly's Dublin is populated by courageous men and stout-hearted women, larger-than-life hospital characters and salt-of-the-earth working-class Dubliners.
Training in Sir Patrick Dun's Hospital, the privileged O'Reilly comes face to face with the brutal, widespread poverty of Dublin's slums, which in the 1930s were among the worst in Europe. The patients he meets may live less than a mile from the O'Reilly home on prosperous Lansdowne Road, but Dublin's dockland poor inhabit a different planet.
Like Sir Patrick Dun's Hospital itself, much of this novel's Dublin has vanished, and despite a certain nostalgia for dear old dirty Dublin, the elderly Dr. O'Reilly recognizes that modernization has improved life for his patients. The polite drawing-room sectarianism is gone, together with Dublin's cast-iron class system. Sir Patrick Dun's Hospital may now only survive as a Facebook page, but public health and modern medicine have eliminated the medical and social horrors a younger Dr. O'Reilly was once powerless to cure.
Jovial and charming, A Dublin Student Doctor tells a gentle tale of more genteel times. We shall not see their like again.
A Dubliner and Trinity College Dublin graduate, Elizabeth Grove-White is a faculty member in the University of Victoria's Department of English.