A Dublin Student Doctor

Patrick Taylor€™s devoted readers know Doctor Fingal Flahertie O€™Reilly as a pugnacious general practitioner in the quaint Irish village of Ballybucklebo.

Now Taylor turns back the clock to give us a portrait of the young Fingal€”and show us the pivotal events that shaped the man he would become.In the 1930s, fresh from a stint in the Royal Navy Reserve, and against the wishes of his disapproving father, Fingal O€™Reilly goes to Dublin to study medicine.

Fingal and his fellow aspiring doctors face the arduous demands of Trinity College and Sir Patrick Dun€™s Hospital. The hours are long and the cases challenging, but Fingal manages to find time to box and play rugby€”and to romance a fetching, gray-eyed nurse named Kitty O€™Hallorhan.

Dublin is a city of slums and tenements, where brutal poverty breeds diseases that the limited medical knowledge of the time is often ill-equipped to handle. His teachers warn Fingal not to become too a