Seamus O'Mahony

“We have disappointed each other, the ministry and me, watching each other grow from the breezy optimism of youth into crabbed middle age.”

Curiosity about the state of hospital services in countries other than the US, UK, and Australia is what prompted me to read The Ministry of Bodies by retired doctor Seamus O’Mahony, who writes of his final year of his career at what what he semi-affectionately calls the ministry, more formally known as Cork University Hospital.

“The management narrative – a cynically clever one – was that the ‘trolley’ [bed] crisis was due to ‘low number of discharges over the weekend’, not an inadequate number of beds.”

It’s depressing, though not surprising, to discover that Ireland is no more immune to the woes that affect modern hospitals the world over. The record of O’Mahony’s last year exposes yet another under-resourced hospital system, where the need for services is greater than bureaucracy provides.

“A round could not last longer than three hours....Assuming thirty patients over three hours (I had very often seen more than fifty), that gave an average of six minutes per patient.”

O’Mahony operates as a gastroenterologist consultant, practicing his specialty in his out-patient hospital clinic, and has a regular surgical list, but he spends much of his time in the hospital as a physician on the general medicine service. On the wards he sees patients whom other services refuse to claim, -alcoholics, the elderly, and somatic syndrome sufferers among them, documenting a daily litany of fear, frustration, courage, and crisis.

“I retired on 7 February 2020, the day before my sixtieth birthday.”

While there is some humour here in the absurdities, overall I found The Ministry of Bodies to be a disheartening read. At fifty-nine, O’Mahony finds he is tired of the expectation that he is to do more with less, by long hours, by management double-speak, and petty professional turf-wars, and really, who could blame him?… (més)

The author is a practicing physician in Ireland. He takes this opportunity to look at death and how we handle it. He makes some interesting points and some good advice about how to handle this difficult time in anyone's life. Having just gone through this process with my father, I disagree with some of his conclusions and am glad that my father died at home as he wished, no matter how difficult it was for us. It was well worth our effort to be with him through this whole process. It was still an interesting read.… (més)