What Did I Die Of?: The Deaths of Parnell, Wilde, Synge & Other Literary Pathologies

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, & Sir William Wilde; the deaths respectively of his celebrated son, Oscar, Charles Stewart Parnell & J.M. Synge are anatomized, as are the lives of the soldier-poet Tom Kettle & the northern Irish medievalist Helen Waddell. The volume concludes with James Joyce & Malcolm Lowry, unlikely but fascinating bedfellows, in a sympathetic study of alcoholism.