HEART BEAT/Maurice Neligan: As I write this I am sitting in my study looking across a May garden. This is what should properly be called "exam weather". All of us remember May-June weather when the sun shone day after day, while you endeavoured to make up the study deficiencies of a whole year in the few weeks remaining before the exams.
A key factor in the selection of the Mater as my hospital, apart of course from the excellence of its staff and the sanctity of its nuns, was the fact that I had a car. This vehicle ZO 3059 remained with me until graduation when I could afford to crawl slightly higher on the vehicular ladder.
It was a small green Fiat 500 and as I was learning the rudiments of medicine, I was also grappling with the basics of car maintenance. Just about everything possible went wrong and for a student the option of leaving the car with a garage was not a reality. So simultaneously with learning about brains, bladders and livers, I became familiar with distributors, fan belts and carburettors. You may think I am wandering again in my narrative but the transport issue was very germane to the students of the time.
The aristocracy had cars. Even with one as clapped out as mine, you were a de facto prince and found friends easily. Then came the middle classes with scooters, motor cycles and even bicycles with an engine on the back wheel. Then came the ranks of the cyclists and lastly the peasantry afoot.
Initial instructions on how to take a medical history, and demonstrations of the physical signs of disease were the mainstays of our lives. For many of us this was where the bug took hold. The fascination still holds me after so many years. It was an endless challenging jigsaw with the different organ systems and the manifestations and inter-relationships of the disease processes forming the difficult pieces. The elements of differential diagnosis were instilled to analyse a symptom, for example, pain in the backside and then consider the possible causes: piles, politicians, promises or pie in the sky. All the various causes of chest pain, back pain, weight loss fever etc were analysed.
Medicine got learned the hard way with the bits fitting together slowly to provide often an initially blurred picture. We were launched on the irreplaceable apprenticeship of medicine.
The next step was attachment to one of the clinical teams in medicine or surgery or possibly to the A&E department. This was our first real involvement and constituted what was called our residence year, although we only lived in for a relatively short period as students. We learned that we were not the only downtrodden group in the hospital, student nurses were also of that ilk, indeed more so, because they were in immediate and constant contact with the real powers in the hospital. I refer of course to the good Sisters of Mercy who owned and ran the hospital.
The Sisters of Charity likewise ran our UCD sister hospital, St Vincent's. Many hospitals throughout the State were owned and managed by different religious congregations. To the unsuspecting male medical students this was a rude awakening. Our female counterparts had more understanding as many had been educated by the nuns. I think there should have been a handbook for male students, something like The Observer's Book of Irish Nuns and maybe a companion volume The Nun Spotters guide.
Such books might have helped us plot a path through the minefields we now faced. There were many tough and resolute ladies in the orders but they ran their charges efficiently and well. The fact that they put the fear of God into us medical students was incidental.
I have had since a lifetime working with the good Sisters of Mercy, some of the best nurses and kindest people I have ever met. That being said, they ran the show and even the consultants trod warily. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, of a surgeon who, failing to contact the hospital one weekend, sent a telegram to the Mother Superior suggesting the removal of the corpse from the switchboard. He was summoned to the presence on the Monday morning and told in no uncertain terms that good telephonists were hard to get, but surgeons were 10 a penny.
The making of a vampire comes next, but before then I must tell another story to the children to explain why grown-ups are climbing up lampposts and sticking bits of paper on them. This is really a lovely game.
Maurice Neligan recently retired as a leading cardiac surgeon.