HEART BEAT Maurice NeliganTime carries all things, even our wits, away - (Virgil) Memory is indeed fallible and recollection of the events of 40 years ago can be difficult, as I have found of late. So much so, that I feel much biography can be highly selective. We can conveniently forget the tedium and sheer hard work that brought us to the present. Perhaps this is just as well.
September is the month that many people associate with the resumption of the working rhythm of the year. Back to school or back to college after a summer of indolence, or time spent earning money for the next student year.
For us medical students, our third year marked the end of all that. The long holidays were to be a thing of the past. However insignificant we were in the hospital scheme of things, we were part of a team. True we were the least important part, but your absence would be noted, in so far as somebody else would have to do the scut work.
As an example of such vital work carried out by the student corps was the task of transmitting large containers containing 24 or 48-hour collections of stool (faeces) from the wards of the Mater to the laboratories of UCD across the city. The specimens would be tested there for evidence of malabsorption of nutrients from the intestine. In the text books, such motions were described as "pale, bulky and offensive". This was certainly economical with the truth.
Few fellow students were willing to accompany the bearer of this burden. A lift in somebody's car was out of the question, and the containers were too unwieldy to be transported by bicycle. The unfortunate future doctor had to resort to public transport. Bus queues melted away as by magic, and very often the unfortunate students found themselves sitting alone on one of the bus decks, even in rush hour.
I proposed at one stage they should be given a bell like the lepers of old to warn the populace of their approach. This suggestion was not well received. I am certain, however, that some of the students involved were saved from assault only by the reluctance of the angry citizenry to come to close quarters.
Like any group of young people, our activities were disparate, but our little group based much of our social lives on Hartigan's pub in Leeson Street, known to this day as Harto's, the haunt of medical students (male only then), and the UCD rugby club. I remember my parents being singularly unimpressed some years later, when one of the congratulatory telegrams at my wedding stated simply "Ad Multos Annos Hartos".
We gravitated there at weekends to the very centre of the universe and sallied forth from there looking for parties in flat land. We were a freemasonry and looked after one another. Romances were infrequent, and those involved objects of curiosity. Entertaining ladies other than to the prescribed dress dances was frowned upon and a student who preferred women to beer was held highly suspect.
Talking about such things, however, was a different matter and a casual listener might have thought that he had fallen in with a most dissolute group. By and large, the lady students and most certainly our own classmates knew us for the posturing cowardly lot we were.
Time passed pleasantly enough and our resident year drew to a close. An ever intruding thought now was that we had only two years to our finals. Furthermore, there were subjects other than medicine and surgery that we had not yet encountered. Some were very minor and I seem to remember that a cheque through a certain letter box in Fitzwilliam Square produced for all of us a certificate of competence in some minor subject such as leech breeding.
There were serious, hard modules ahead - paediatrics (children), obstetrics and gynaecology (midder). We also had to acquire some knowledge of eyes and ears, of infectious diseases, and of psychiatry. Even the most relaxed among us realised that things were about to change. Only 24 months for all of this while increasing our knowledge base in medicine and surgery. The truth, of course, but not appreciated by us at the time, is that of all the professions, medicine demands life-unceasing learning. These years prepared us well. We accepted without demur that the art came first and that we would build our lives around it.
Dr Maurice Neligan is a cardiac surgeon