Against the Tide by Noël Browne

appearing and then disappearing people, landmarks, and relationships had dismantled my relatively stable old world, with its constant warm
and loving mother ‘whistling us home’. While very young, I had had to learn to form instantaneous, superficially warm relationships with total strangers, and a succession of friendships
in different families. My own identity as a member of the Browne family merged into all of these sensations and was no more.
    Each of those whom I had known and loved had disappeared and left me. I had lost the belief that I could ever again form permanent friendships or lasting relationships. My always limited
capacity to believe in or to trust anyone I only regained much later, and with great difficulty. Yet I had known nothing but support and kindness from everyone. It was the suffering of others and
of my own family which I could not ignore. I had learned to expect that each new encounter must end.
    On the loss of our temporary home in Worthing, after the death of Miss Salter in the late 1920s, it was my brother Jody who was to suffer most. Eileen was told that she also had advanced
tuberculosis. I recall the evening on which she returned to the tiny single-room flat in Bayswater where we both lived. She threw herself on the bed and wept bitterly, not for herself I am sure,
but for the rest of us who had been entrusted to her care by my mother. It was now the turn of my sister Kitty to take on that role. She has since told me about her hopeless trek from door to door,
to convents, orphanages, institutions, hospitals for the disabled throughout London, looking for shelter and help for Jody. Finally in great distress she had to decide to have him admitted to a
London workhouse. So was finally smashed Jody’s last vestige of a sheltered life, empty, miserable, purposeless though it had been.
    It was then, and in my own experience in hospital still is, the practice for surgeons, in pursuit of experimental material on which to perfect a new surgical procedure, to scour the wards of
non-paying patients for individuals needing such a procedure. Such was to be the fate of my brother in the London workhouse. His cleft palate and hare lip greatly interfered with his speech, adding
to the humiliation and discomfort of his hunched back. He was a pitiable, totally dependent creature. A surgeon decided to operate on his hopelessly inoperable cleft palate and hare lip. Jody died
on his twenty-first birthday, in great distress and pain, following the operation. He had made one friend in that workhouse, a nursing sister. On the day preceding his operation he went out to a
florist and bought her a small bouquet of flowers, in gratitude to her for her kindness to him. He is buried in a pauper’s grave in the heart of London, as our mother was.
    In September 1933 I passed the entrance examination to Trinity College medical school and began my course as a medical student. This was to be the first occasion on which, without any malicious
intent, I ignored the dictat of the Archbishop of Dublin. It was forbidden at the time, if one was a Catholic, to attend Trinity College. My attitude stemmed from my experience as a Catholic in
England, where the easy attitude to religion had been noticeable throughout my stay. Catholics there were grateful if they were permitted to live their lives in uninterrupted peace with their
fellowmen, very much as do Protestants behave in Ireland. English Catholicism had none of the hectoring arrogant triumphalist contempt of other religions which I later came to associate with Irish
Catholicism.
    A Trinity degree brought its own inbuilt disadvantages. In pursuit of employment I was to find that there were occasions when I was passed over in favour of younger doctors. I know of only one
other Trinity doctor of my year who survived this boycott by the public service of Trinity medical graduates in Ireland, other than by succession to a father’s practice.
    Yet bigotry was not