A pint of Guinness, a placebo, and call me in the morning.

books:


	• An Irish Country Doctor (Irish Country Books) Patrick Taylor Forge Books, 2008 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

I'm sorry but I found this book somewhat dull.

I've obviously been spoiled by James Herriot's "All Creatures Great & Small". His vets are lively & memorable.

Also, no one can top Maeve Binchy with her characters that seem so real.

The book, 'An Irish Country Doctor'

This book is just a wonderful read. It is set in the 1960's era, and is about a young med-school graduate who takes his first job in a little northern Irish village, joining an elderly doctor in family practice. It is very heart-warming, and holds your interest to the very last page. The author, Patrick Taylor, is a medical doctor himself. I am anxious to read any future books he writes.

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Literacy is important so you can read books like this

The novel An Irish Country Doctortakes place in the 1960s, and although medical miracles are beginning to appear, the good Dr. O'Reilly practices his own medicine, his own way of treating this town full of eccentric patients. And he treats them very successfully, thank you.

Dr. Laverty, on the other hand, insistsmodern medicine and going strictly by the rulesare the only ways of properly healing patients.

It doesn't take long for Laverty to find a love interest, the beautiful Patricia Spence, a young lady determined to become an engineer.She soon becomes one of the many stumbling blocks Laverty must overcome to be the person and the doctor he wants to be.

As Laverty works as O'Reilly's assistant, he learns about love, loss of love and the hard knocks life can dish out in general and that he is not immune to experiencing some of life's more difficult situations himself.

Author Patrick Taylor has produced a beautiful story, intelligently written and filled with interesting characters. Richly illustrated with word pictures, the reader easily sees the beautiful Irish landscape, the rag-tag populace - O'Reilly's patients - that joyfully fill this novel's pages. Animals play an important role in the story. Laverty soon learns that everything has the ability to teach him something. I truly became involved in the lives of the doctors and their supporting cast of characters. The novel doesn't hold many surprises, but it is so lyricallywritten that it held my attention from the first page until the last.

The back of the book has a glossary which translates the "Ulster-Scots dialect," which is generously used throughout the book and lends much color and interest to the story, but does indeed, look like a foreign language to the uninitiated.

There is also an Afterword by Mrs. "Kinky" Kincaid, O'Reilly's faithful and wise housekeeper and cook. This portion of the novel offers a few of Mrs. Kincaid's recipes.

I found An Irish Country Doctor to be a refreshing change from the novels that line the shelves of today's book stores. If I had to put the book down while reading, I couldn't wait to get back to it, and for me, that's the sign of a good book.

The author was born and raised in Bangor County Down in Northern Ireland and did indeed work at one time as a doctor in rural Ireland. That's why his novel rings with such authenticity.

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A pint of Guinness, a placebo, and call me in the morning.

Travelers to the North of Ireland find wind-swept vistas, fog-blanketed coasts and a land so verdant it looks like it was brush-stroked by Thomas Kinkade. On the occasional clear day you can even see Scotland from the lush Antrim shoreline. A mere twelve miles, `tis, across the North Channel, and a cinch for the marauding Scots giants of lore to breach it in a dozen strides, seeking to do battle with Ireland's own giant, Finn McCool. Saint Patrick first landed somewhere nearby and lies buried beneath an eponymous cathedral in County Down. A land of provos and loyalists, the fervent prayer is that the North of Ireland has also entombed the Troubles.

Nestled astride close-by Belfast Lough, readers are introduced to the make-believe, picture-postcard village of Ballybucklebo. An emerald plucked from the Ireland of yesteryear, herein resides a laughable, affable and pitiable collection of all the Irish caricatures we'd ever want to meet. `Tis where we find our two Irish country doctors in residence plying a common sense and routinely placebo-driven brand of medicine mildly reminiscent of the old joke: A man goes to his doctor and informs him that his arm hurts terribly when he raises it. To which the doctor replies: "Then don't raise your arm. Next patient!"

Our crusty but learned Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly plays mentor, confessor and father-figure to wet-behind-the-ears Doctor Barry Laverty, late of Belfast's Queen's University Medical School. Gambling that rural Ireland might offer a more suitable lifestyle than Belfast, Dr. Laverty arrives in Ballybucklebo ("Bally" loosely meaning "town" in Irish) driving a beat-up Volkswagen, answering O'Reilly's advertisement for a physician to assist him. Following typically whimsical driving directions the Irish are renowned for, Laverty ultimately finds O'Reilly's combination rustic living quarters and surgery (in Ireland "surgery" equals doctor's office) where he's set upon by Arthur Guinness, Fingal O'Reilly's shaggy mutt, a brute armed with boundless affection for the human leg.

The two docs hit it off (without which---no story) and Laverty hires on after passing the muster of the matronly "Kinky" Kincaid, O'Reilly's cook, housekeeper, nurse, confidante, screening-committee and appointment scheduler. Kinky's the glue holding the practice together, protecting our doctoral duo from the likes of: Councillor Bertie Bishop, resident Orangeman and curmudgeon, an equal opportunity Scrooge bent on leaving misery in his path as he cuts a vicious verbal swath through the townspeople. We're soon introduced to the half-dozen or so listless folks who appear daily at the surgery patiently awaiting their turn to receive hypodermic injections of "the tonic", which O'Reilly confesses hush-hush to Laverty is merely vitamin B-12, a placebo which the patients think they cannot live without. We can`t forget about Maggie and Sonny either. He living down the county in his automobile until the roof on his cottage get's fixed. It's been fifty years and the two lovebirds just might get hitched when he gets the roof money together. The good doctors make automobile and house calls to the likes of Sonny and others who can't find a way to the surgery. Which brings us to Major Fotheringham and his wife, a hypochondriac couple who spend days conjuring up imagined maladies, luring a nonplussed Doctor O'Reilly to their house where he plays the game for a bit and takes leave after appearing duly concerned for their fragile health.

Another hapless patient, Seamus Galvin, learns wife Maureen is pregnant again; they're hoping for a turn of financial luck which will allow them to emigrate to Americay. Speaking of pregnant, unmarried Julie MacAteer is praying she's not (But aren't they always?), and none too keen to identify the father.

Spring is in the air and a young man's fancy turns to .....fishing. Not really. Laverty's good with the rod and reel but he's infatuated with a captivating lady he met in Belfast; yet she's unsure, hesitant, all of which leaves our good doctor pining away in Ballybucklebo. And what about Doctor O'Reilly's love life? It's a subject he plays close to the vest, not freely discussing the sad tale behind the one and only love of his life and what happened to her. Keeping his nose to the grindstone, O'Reilly stays steadfast to the task at hand, mindful that the July 12th Orange parade looms and with it the potential for violence and mayhem that accompanies that enduring symbol of the Troubles.

There's more, of course, lot's more: a life-and-death medical emergency; an embarrassing misdiagnosis. In the end of author Taylor's semi-autobiographical Irish charmer the sutures get tied and most, but not all, wounds heal. Some things you can't fix----people die; bad sometimes wins over good. But make no mistake, this is a feel-good anachronistic tale in the stead of The Quiet Man, the Irish heart-tugger that transferred so beautifully to the silver screen over a half-century ago and remains as fresh as it did in the 1950s.

Doctor Laverty's alter ego, author Patrick Taylor M.D., is alive and well, living the good life on Bowen Island off Vancouver, British Columbia, where he reminisces about his days as a physician in his native County Down, Northern Ireland.

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