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On Writing A History of RCSI
from 2024 RCSI Alumni Magazine
by RCSI
Dr Ronan Kelly describes his approach to writing the history of RCSI
Every story has its backstory, and every book has its own biography. While RCSI’s story begins in 1784 (and if you didn’t know that before, I can recommend a book on the subject), its backstory variously takes in the medieval Guild of Barber Surgeons and even, before that, the theories of Galen and the teachings of Vesalius. But the history of RCSI is not the subject of this article; what follows here is something else: it is the backstory – the biography – of my history of RCSI.
I called that book Every Branch of the Healing Art, and its story technically begins in October 2019, when I was invited to meet Professor Cathal Kelly, RCSI Vice Chancellor, in his office to discuss ‘a project’. But before that meeting, before the official narrative begins, there was another kind of backstory –in fact, there were two of them, and in classic biographical fashion, both concern parents.
The Paternal Branch
First, there’s my dad’s story. His name is Peter Kelly and through most of the 1990s he was part of the RCSI Estates team, or Building Services as it was known then. My father loved his time working in RCSI, loved the vibrancy and diversity of the place, and he often told me of the eccentric antics perpetrated by both staff and students. In 1997, when I began a Masters in English Literature at Trinity and I needed extra cash, he suggested I send my CV to RCSI’s Librarian, Beatrice Doran. Soon enough, I was coming in to RCSI with Dad at some ungodly early hour (to beat the traffic, he said), so that I could gather up books scattered by students the night before and put them back on the shelves. I kept this up as my Masters became a PhD, when I also graduated to manning the Issue Desk in the late evenings.
Life, and postdoctoral research, took me away from Dublin – first to New York, then to York (or as I called it, Old York). By the time I came back, I’d written a book, a biography of the poet and songwriter Thomas Moore, which came out in 2008. I knew I wanted to keep writing, and I knew too that I wanted to return to library work. While working in bookshops by day, I retrained by night with a distance-learning Diploma in Information Studies from the University of Aberystwyth. When the economic crash happened, I got recessioned out of my first library job. I worried about my decisions – especially the promising academic career I had more or less thrown away – but a short time later, while walking down Fade Street one Culture Night, I ran into Carol Creavin from RCSI Library and she suggested I send in my CV That was the best part of 15 years ago, and I’ve been part of the library team ever since.
The Maternal Connection
Unbeknownst to me, there were thoughts at this time among RCSI senior management about a new history of the college, as the last one was written by Professor J.D.H. Widdess in 1949 with only minor revisions in the years since. All they needed was a writer to do it. This is where the story of my mother, Sarah, comes in. Very sadly, in the early 2000s, Mum developed dementia and she was cared for – magnificently, heroically, tirelessly – by my father for many years; eventually, though, a nursing home was needed, and in that nursing home, Mum found herself sharing a dining table with a charming couple, Jack and Elizabeth Lee. When their son visited, it turned out he already knew Dad. He was Clive Lee, RCSI’s Professor of Anatomy.
“So what do you do?” Professor Lee asked me one day.
“I work in RCSI Library,” I said.
Normally, that would be enough of an answer for anyone. But not Clive. “Yes, but what else do you do?” he asked.
“Oh. Well, I write ”
What happened next was very unusual. Not the fact that Clive and I swapped books, but the fact that he actually went and read mine, after which he came to me with a proposal:
“Would you be interested in writing a new history of RCSI?”
I thought about this for a while, then told him: “No, but thanks for thinking of me.”
Privately I thought it would be a mammoth task, one that it would engulf the life of anyone who dared to take it on. (In this I was not wrong.) But in addition to his encyclopedic anatomical knowledge, Professor Lee has another singular talent: he can gently talk a person off a ledge, or equally gently convince them to walk the plank, without them knowing which is which. And this is how I found myself in Professor Kelly’s office some months later saying yes to the ‘project’.
The Supporting Cast
I was not alone in the making of the book. To guide me, Professor Kelly assembled a formidable Editorial Board chaired by Dr Maurice Manning, NUI Chancellor and author of multiple books including an acknowledged modern classic, The Blueshirts. Providing insights into RCSI’s last 50 years were two former Registrars, Professor Kevin O’Malley and Michael Horgan. Whenever there is a question of what belongs or doesn’t belong in a book, the answer is best found by considering who the book is for – and no one knew that better than Aíne Gibbons, Head of Development & Alumni Relations. The fifth Board member was Professor Lee (who clearly had a lot to answer for!). The six of us met for the first time on Wednesday, 11 March 2020. I remember it clearly because we all wondered aloud about whether we should be shaking hands or not; the very next day, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar announced the closure of all schools, colleges and childcare facilities. As a group, the Editorial Board did not meet again in person until 6 October 2022. The book thus became my pandemic project, and my one joke on the subject – which I hereby use for the last time – was that it saved me from making a whole lot of banana bread.
How to Write a Book in Two Easy Steps!
Some scholars have a field of expertise. Mine is more garden-sized, given that the subject of my first book, Thomas Moore, was born in Aungier Street, a stone’s throw from RCSI. That project wasn’t just useful for local lore, but because it taught me the key lessons in how to write a book, which are as follows: first, advance the work, even incrementally, every day, and second, try not to consider the bigger picture for very long because it will only make you freak out.
I also learned that books are made from various things – not least blood, sweat and tears – but chiefly from other books (and, of course, essays and articles and reports and newspapers and websites). Before lockdown, I hauled shelf-loads of books home with me (they’re back now, library colleagues!), and in the depths of the pandemic I went online for digitised historical documents like Colles’ Descriptive Catalogue of Preparations in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (thank you, Wellcome Collection!). Whenever I was stuck, all I had to do was read more. I always had a pen in my hand to make notes on everything; I filled about 800 pages of spiralbound A4 notebooks this way. Perhaps higher-tech methods work for some, but I find that information stays in my brain much more securely if there’s a Biro involved.
Once RCSI researchers were allowed back on site, I spent weeks and months on end in the Heritage Collections Reading Room, poring over decades of handwritten Council Minutes and other RCSI muniments that exist nowhere else. (And OMG, the handwriting: it was a good day for my eyes when, in 1963, someone finally bought a typewriter.) For much of that time, as I foraged for primary material, the only people in the entire building were the security guard on the ground floor and me on the top floor, and morning and evening we’d have nice, socially distanced chats.
Facts are all very well, but they don’t make a story, so once I’d gathered my notes, I set about mapping a narrative, working out what themes and details should follow each other to keep a reader interested. When I look back on these maps now, they don’t make a lot of sense, but I can still feel the intensity with which I made them. Joining of all those dots to create a flowing narrative was probably the most difficult aspect of making the book; it’s also, as a consequence, the aspect I’m probably most proud of. The great irony, of course, is that if I did it well, all that stitching and unstitching should be largely invisible to the reader (at least until now, I suppose).
Judging a Cover by its Book
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. My book weighs in at just over 130,000 words, but it also has more than 300 full-colour images, many of which take up entire pages. So by a certain metric, it’s more of a picture-book than anything else. (Indeed, if you are really pressed for time, the eight images I chose to open each chapter represent the most basic elements of the RCSI story.) But from the start – from the initial conversation with Professor Kelly – I knew that the finished book had to be visually striking.
As I worked on each chapter, I made a wish list of associated images and, for the most part, my brilliant colleagues Susan Leyden and Jessica Handy were able to supply these from our in-house collections. Other images came from outside institutions, such as the National Library of Ireland, Dublin City Library and Archive, Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI) and Wellcome Collection. In other instances again, new photography was required. A very talented photographer, Patrick Bolger, spent some days with us and set up a makeshift studio in the Board Room; he came to the Heritage Collections Reading Room and did the same. He also suggested things I would never have thought of and – even better – he steered me away from my own bad ideas by saying, simply, “It won’t look good.” That, to me, is an ideal collaboration.
Thinking of images is one thing, taking photos another, but laying them out in a stylish fashion is another skill entirely, and our graphic designer on the book, Fiachra McCarthy, is one of the best in the business. Early on, he walked through the college with me, absorbing the vibe and suggesting themes, and later he and I had multiple Zoom conversations (he’s based in Kerry) about ‘look and feel’. When I asked for red page numbers and red superscript for the endnotes, he found the perfect shade, font and size that worked (and were not, as he put it, “like someone dripped blood on the page”). He cropped and zoomed (and occasionally ‘warmed’) images; he added colour pages behind some images, watermarks under others. And he designed a suite of potential covers, all with their distinct merits. For a long time, the front-runner was the stained-glass crest from the Colles Room; it was classic, it spoke of tradition, it was rich in symbology. But something wasn’t quite right. I had written a book with a beginning, middle and end, but the subject was different: yes, RCSI has a beginning, and conceptually at least, a middle; but it has no end in sight, not by a long shot. We wanted the cover to tell that story too, and so, late on, I suggested Mary A. Kelly’s painting, inspired by the White Coat Ceremony. Representing both the (future) clinician and the patient, the chairs she depicts are not just pointed forward – like the institution – but also slightly angled towards one another – that is, in conversation. Just as the patient is at the centre of all that we do in RCSI, the College’s history is itself an ongoing conversation.
The End and the Beginning
After three and a half years on the project, I finally hit ‘send’ on the final document on 3 October 2023. While my partner and I spent a few days decompressing in Genoa (I wanted to see the hotel where Daniel O’Connell died, and to visit Constance Wilde’s grave; I’m that kind of fun on holiday!), the printers took over, and the first physical copies arrived in to RCSI a month later, on 2 November. That was a very special moment. There they were in a corner of the Council Room, heavy boxes full of everything that I’d been carrying in my head for so long – every find, every phrase, every picture, every punctuation mark, every decision about what to cut and what to keep. I took one book from the box and flipped through it, not breathing very well, and found it was everything I’d hoped for – and more. When I got home, I popped it on the shelf. All weekend, its bright red-and-white spine – Fiachra’s great idea, recalling the barber-surgeons’ poles – caught my eye and made me grin from ear to ear. The book was finished, the story was told.
Or was it? There was the launch, of course, a few days later, by Dr Mary McAleese, a magnificent occasion I will remember forever (and then there was The Swan afterwards, an occasion I could only dimly recall the next morning – again, Professor Lee has a lot to answer for). That surely represents the end of the story? But actually no, it’s quite the opposite: my role in putting together the history of RCSI may be at an end, but the part that really matters, in the long run, is just beginning: I gave this book my all, I poured my heart and soul into it – but only readers now can make it come alive.
■ Every Branch of the Healing Art, Eastwood Books, €40, is in good bookshops and online at www.wordwellbooks.com and www.easons.com.
