One might expect that a discussion about the invention of defibrillators would make strange bedfellows with stories of poets and literary critics — including one scene where Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh sing The Sash My Father Wore on a dimly lit bar-room tabletop — but Eoin O’Brien navigates this territory in his memoir, set in Dublin’s swaying sixties.
O’Brien, a cardiologist in his mid-80s, belongs to a family of high-achieving éminences grises. Both parents were medical doctors, and his aunt was a highly distinguished psychiatrist at St Brendan’s Psychiatric Hospital in Grangegorman. His father’s father was a district inspector in Sligo in the early 1900s, while his maternal grandfather advised Michael Collins on financial details pertaining to the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and was later appointed Envoy of Dáil Éireann in Washington in the 1920s.
For all that, O’Brien’s memoir is primarily a record of his professional adult life, and as the majority of his life has been lived in the capital, his memoir is replete with insights into the Dublin of yesteryear, experienced through the lens of O’Brien’s twin preoccupations, medicine and literature. This is a Dublin where Vatican prelates are treated like nobility, where patients suffering from Parkinson’s have a hole drilled in their skull so that their brain can be “ablated with an electrode”, and where “Baggotonia” is a thriving hotbed of literary and artistic talent. Belonging to the latter are Behan, Kavanagh, Robert Ballagh and Samuel Beckett, along with figures whose bright lights have faded with time; the playwright Micheál Mac Liammóir, painter Niall Sheridan, and writers Denis Johnson and Arland Ussher, to name but a few whom O’Brien extols.
Supplementing the historical value of O’Brien’s prose, the author has a talent for evoking the present within his recollections, often involving a strong emotional nucleus: I see my father in an armchair, grey-haired, sitting alone listening to the music playing from an enormous gramophone … I tell him that the record has finished and needs changing. He asks if I understand the music. I don’t know what he means but I put my arms around his neck and cry.
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These moments punctuate the stately movement of O’Brien’s memoir. Filled with pithy anecdotes — some amusing, some tragic, but all compelling — A Life in Medicine is a fascinating biography that illuminates Dublin’s bygone medical and literary circles.
