'THERE ARE MANY facets to Samuel Beckett's writing - humour,
despair, love, poignancy, suffering - but for me there is one
dominant characteristic, compassion, compassion for the human
condition of existence.' So begins Eoin O'Brien's title essay, an
observation that encapsulates the collection as it broadens out
into convergent streams of essays on literature and medicine. Part
One focuses on the nature of friendship and connectivity, on the
role of the 'good doctor' and the individual in society. Intimate
portraits of literary Dublin of the twentieth century and earlier,
Samuel Beckett, Con Leventhal, Nevill Johnson, Denis Johnston,
Micheal MacLiammoir and Petr Skrabanek; Corrigan, Gogarty and
Korotkoff, Chekhov and Handel, speak of exemplars past and values
present, as the influence of the arts is inscribed on a doctor's
life and work. The Beckett essays alone yield remarkable commentary
on Ireland's greatest early modernist, and include a little-known
account of the Irish Hospital at Saint-Lo in Normandy, where
Beckett worked as a storekeeper in a poignant drama of 'humanity in
ruins' that informed his subsequent work. 'The Corruption of
Privilege', addressed in Part Two, looks incisively at the practice
and history of the author's profession within Ireland and
elsewhere, at medical education and the medical establishment; at
medical journalism, humanitarian involvement, and at broader issues
- landmines in the Third World and the plight of colleagues in
Bahrain. Invaluable archival images of Beckett, Con Leventhal,
Nevill Johnson and others - some sixty in all - underpin the
writings of this chronicler and observer of Ireland's recent past.
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