An Irish Country Doctor

An Irish Country Village

Only Wounded

Pray for Us Sinners

Now and in the Hour of Our Death

Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly made his first appearance ten years ago. His gradual development was gently supervised by Simon Hally, editor of
Stitches.

O’Reilly’s growth to maturity has been nurtured by three remarkable people:

Carolyn Bateman, who edits, advises me about, and polishes all my manuscripts before submission.

Adrienne Weiss, editor at Insomniac Press of Toronto, which first published this book in 2004 under the title
The Apprenticeship of Doctor Laverty.

Natalia Aponte of Tor/Forge Books, New York, who has had unswerving faith in the inhabitants of Ballybucklebo and has constantly encouraged me.

To you all, O’Reilly and I tender our unreserved thanks.

Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly and the denizens of Ballybucklebo first appeared in 1995 in my monthly column in
Stitches: The Journal of Medical Humour.
It was suggested to me that these characters might form the foundation for a novel.

I had just finished
Pray for Us Sinners
, and hesitating to delve once more into the misery of the Ulster Troubles, I found the idea of something lighter to be appealing.
An Irish Country Doctor
began to take shape.

Like
Only Wounded
and
Pray for Us Sinners
, the book is set in the northeast corner of Ireland, but unlike its predecessors, which I strove to make historically accurate, this story has taken some liberties with geography and time.

The setting is a fictional village, the name of which came from my high-school French teacher who, enraged by my inability to conjugate irregular verbs, yelled, “Taylor, you’re stupid enough to come from Ballybucklebo.” Those of an etymological bent may wish to know what the name means.
Bally
(Irish, b
aile)
is a townland—a mediaeval geographic term encompassing a small village and the surrounding farms,
Buachaill
means “boy,” and
bó
is a cow. In
Bailebuchaillbó
, or Ballybucklebo—the townland of the boy’s cow—time and place are as skewed as they are in Brigadoon.

Little Irish is spoken in the North, but I have been at pains to use the Ulster dialect. It is rich and colourful, but often incomprehensible to one not from that part of the world. For those who may have some difficulty, I have taken the liberty of appending a glossary (page 345).

My attention to the spoken idiom is as accurate as I can make it; however, the purist will note that in 1964, the Twelfth of July fell on a Sunday, not a Thursday, and Seamus Heaney’s first book of poetry was not published until 1966. No salmon river called the Bucklebo flows through north County Down. The nearest is the Shimna River in the Mourne Mountains. But everything else is as accurate as extensive reading and memory permit.

The rural Ulster that I have portrayed has vanished. The farms and villages still look much as they did, but the simplicity of rural life has been banished by the Troubles and the all-pervasive influence of television. The automatic respect for their learning shown to those at the top of the village hierarchy—doctor, teacher, minister, and priest—is a thing of the past, but men like O’Reilly were common when I was a very junior doctor. And on that subject, may I please lay to rest a question I am frequently asked by readers of my column in
Stitches?
Barry Laverty and Patrick Taylor are
not
one and the same. Doctor F. F. O’Reilly is a figment of my troubled mind, despite the efforts of some of my expatriate Ulster friends to see in him a respected—if unorthodox—medical practitioner of the time. Lady Macbeth
does
owe her being to our demoniacally possessed cat, Minnie, and Arthur Guinness owes his to a black Labrador, now long gone but who had an insatiable thirst for Foster’s lager. All the other characters are composites, drawn from my imagination and from my experiences as a rural GP.

P
ATRICK
T
AYLOR