A Dublin Student Doctor--Fingal Takes a Walk Down Memory Lane!

A Dublin Student Doctor by Patrick Taylor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Finally, Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly has proposed to Kitty and she, after all these years has accepted. We readers know that as students the two had fallen in love but, with Fingal's procrastination and dedication to work over personal life, their romance had folded and each went on to separate lives. After a day at the races, as Fingal was taking Kitty home, they come upon a motorbike accident. Who but Donal Doherty is lying in the road regaining consciousness after a severe blow to the head. Fingal sends Kitty home with Barry Laverty and goes to the hospital with Donal, who requires surgery to relief the pressure of blood building in his bruised brain. The surgeon is none other than Dr Crombie with whom Fingal studied medicine in Dublin many years ago. Finding himself again with Crombie and in a hospital setting for several days, surrounded by med students and student nurses to say nothing of the true ward bosses, the ward Sisters, Fingal finds himself transported back to his own student days.

And so, we meet his family, Ma and Father, his brother, Lars and learn of his home life. His relationship with his parents and his struggle to convince his father that medicine is his choice of career despite his father's wishes for him to study nuclear physics. Once he manages to get into med school after a stint in the Royal Navy we are introduced to his best pals, Crombie, Charlie Greer and Bob Beresford. We follow the four through their five years of study. We meet Kitty, a student nurse and watch the development of their romance. Each of these characters are so well defined it is as if they step off the page or rather that we step into the page and hang out with them--doing rounds, treating patients, going to the pubs, to the tenements, taking exams.
They become our friends, too. The secondary characters are just as developed and complex and many of them have appeared in the earlier five books--some, like Fitzgerald as irritating and arrogant as always.

Though this book takes place, mostly in the '30's and during Fingal's young manhood, it fits perfectly into the series. It is like hearing stories about your parents' youth or the history of a new contemporary friend--interesting and gives insight into how they became the people you know in the present. Read the series from the beginning--the book that now and then appears to be out of sequence is background to the present and gives a sense of reality to the whole.


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