What Did I Die Of?

This sparkling collection of essays combines literature with science in a delightfully peripatetic excursion through Irish history. It delineates the pioneering 18th-century Limerick surgeon Sylvester O'Halloran, his contemporary Oliver Goldsmith MD, Dublin's Milton editor Edward Hill, and Sir William Wilde; the deaths respectively of his celebrated son, Oscar, Charles Stewart Parnell and J.M. Synge are anatomized, as are the lives of the soldier-poet Tom Kettle and the northern Irish medievalist Helen Waddell. The volume concludes with James Joyce and Malcolm Lowry, unlikely but fascinating bedfellows, in a sympathetic study of alcoholism.