Eoin OBrien - The Weight of Compassion: And Other Essays

In gratitude to the discipline of medicine for endowing me with the ability to reason on the basis of scientific evidence, and to the humanities for tempering any intuitive deductions with the sensibilities of compassion and feeling for the human condition.

Contents

by Gerald Dawe

Acknowledgments

The Weight of Compassion would never have come into being were it not for Gerald Dawe, who in his gentle but persuasive way suggested some years ago that I should bring a selection of my non-scientific writings together for publication. Gerald being Gerald did not let the matter rest there; once I had undertaken to draw essays from times past into what I hoped would be a coherent form he was a constant editorial presence. The collection owes much to his guidance and advice and I only hope his belief in the work is justified by their content. The collection owes much to Edith Fournier, who, not for the first time, gave me helpful advice on structure and content as well as applying an eagle-like editorial eye to the text. I am grateful to her also for the translation of the poem Mort de A.D. by Samuel Beckett.

Kieran Taaffe and the late Daniel McGing were receptive to my request for assistance in bringing the past to light through the use of illustrative historical material, highlighting the role in particular of The Charitable Infirmary in the illustrious Dublin School; and I am grateful to The Charitable Infirmary Charitable Trust for its support.

These essays in The Weight of Compassion are drawn from many publications dating back to the nineteen-seventies and I am grateful to the various authors and publishers who gave me copyright for text and illustrative material. I am especially grateful to David Davison whose photography has been so important to many of my writings.

To Michael Colgan, my sincere thanks for agreeing to launch The Weight of Compassion on the trust of friendship, ahead of his having read the book.

The staff of Lilliput Press in particular Antony Farrell, Fiona Dunne and Kitty Lyddon have been most patient and tolerant in seeing the collection into print, and Jonathan Williams has been a kindly Welsh source of encouragement.
I am grateful to my daughter Aphria for compiling the index at short notice.

Finally, to Tona, my thanks for her advice, patience and tolerance.

Foreword

IT CAN HARDLY BE A coincidence that when he looks out one of his front windows Eoin OBrien looks across Dublin Bay at the seascape hundreds of thousands viewed leaving from and arriving in to the Irish capital; a wonderful vista which carries the private histories of so many. For the sense of historical movement and flux that underpins these fascinating essays is itself rooted in a deeply felt ethical understanding of individual experience. History may well be tidal but the human story in Eoin OBriens writing and practice as a doctor is highly tuned to the personal.

The men and women doctors, writers, artists, actors and scientists who inhabit these pages are not cut-out representative figures who stand in for large scale ideas on politics or artistic movements. The Weight of Compassion is about individual lives. Indeed the bounty of these essays and the intellectual narrative that underlines them is the essential value of individuality at a time when bureaucratic mission statements and administrative targets occlude the much more important human contact between doctor and patient, writer and reader, artist and audience, teacher and student. While the politics of the medical profession are robustly challenged with a series of forthright analyses in The Corruption of Privilege a phrase that will be long remembered from this book the critical balance is always placed upon the individual conscience and the individual imagination.

To survive and flourish in spite of difficulties, including illness, political chicanery, folly, and stern tests of one kind or another such as Samuel Becketts experiences working for the Irish Red Cross at the end of WW or Nevill Johnsons restless artistic journeys throughout England and Ireland in the forties, fifties and beyond is the moral focus of The Weight of Compassion . The book is also a powerful witness to great literary and scientific innovators including Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett, Denis Johnston, and Nicolai Korotkoff.

As a collection, The Weight of Compassion reveals the work of a widely read and astute scholar whose professional life as a doctor and specialist has been dedicated to the alleviation of pain and suffering and who, as an academic, has spent decades exploring the circuitry of the heart. No symbols where none intended. Precious wonder that Samuel Beckett, along with Chekhov, should prove to be the books pre-eminent influence, for in many ways Eoin OBrien, who did so much in his ground-breaking study, The Beckett Country , introduces the general reader to their unique company as an equal.

The torment that afflicted so many during the twentieth century from the persecution of the Jewish minority of Europe to the abominable legacy of landmines in our own day, to the current plight of medical doctors in Bahrain, to the bureaucratic and social struggle for a fit-for-purpose medical system in Ireland, is viewed with hope, commitment and, critically, an energetic enthusiasm; its democratic vision of what makes a decent egalitarian society possible is inspiring.

Eoin OBrien expresses his wish in these pages that the essays, written at different stages of [his] career, reflect a progression rather than a retrospection. He need have no worries on that score. The Weight of Compassion is a spirited, playful, humorous, forthright and impassioned self-portrait of a great Irish man of letters. What makes a doctor good , an artist or writer significant , a mentor trustworthy , authority just , an experiment a breakthrough, are questions at the formidable core of this timely, necessary and provocative book.

Professor Gerald Dawe

School of English, Trinity College Dublin

Introduction: Influence of the Arts on a Doctors Life and Work

I WAS PERSUADED by Gerald Dawe to bring together the essays of a non-scientific nature I had written over many years. He sensed, correctly I hope, that there was ample diversity in what had intrigued me outside of scientific medicine to be of wider interest, but I approached the task with some trepidation. I had, it is true, been attracted to write on art and history and on issues related to the generality of medicine rather than its science, which has been, of course, my main preoccupation, but these essays scattered over many years and numerous journals and periodicals had to be collected and then made acceptable for contemporary printing.

The task of assembling the essays into an order that would give the whole a coherence that was not chaotic was more daunting. After all these essays had been written according to the demands of editors and the topicality of the subject to its time; how then could they be given a semblance that might bring to the whole an order that was not contrived? In gathering the essays I had to ask myself on more than one occasion if my interests in the humanities and friendship with artistic talents had influenced me for the better as a doctor, or had I been distracted from what I had been trained to do, namely caring for sick people? This leads inevitably to the question as to what are the essential ingredients that constitute a good doctor? And the answer lies of course in the eye of the beholder insofar as any definition will be influenced by the vantage point from which the view of goodness in a doctor is perceived.

The academicians, whose business it is to train doctors and who are given as many as six years to do their job, will define the best doctor as the one who achieves first class honours and heads the class. To these pundits the qualities of compassion and feeling for fellow man in the doldrums is, as often as not, a far remove in their exegesis of what constitutes a good doctor.