Fridays, when the Petty Sessions’ Court sits, are almost as busy. Mr. Timothy Flanagan, a magistrate in virtue of the fact that he is Chairman of the Urban District Council, administers justice of a rude and uncertain kind in the Court House. While angry litigants are settling their business there, and repentant drunkards are paying the moderate fines imposed on them, their wives ask the doctor for advice about the treatment of whooping cough or the best way of treating a child which has incautiously stepped into a fire. Fair days, which occur once a month, are the busiest days of all. Everyone is in town on fair days, and every kind of ailment is brought to the doctor. Towards evening he has to put stitches into one or two cut scalps and sometimes set a broken limb. On Mondays and Thursdays the doctor sits in his office for an hour or two to register births and deaths.
But Tuesdays, unless a fair happens to fall on Tuesday, are quiet days. On this particular Tuesday Dr. Lovaway was pleasantly aware that he had nothing whatever to do and might count on having the whole day to himself. It was raining very heavily, but the weather did not trouble him at all. He had a plan for the day which rain could not mar.
He sat down at his writing table, took from a drawer a bundle of foolscap paper, fitted a new nib to his pen and filled his ink bottle. He began to write.
“A Study of the Remarkable Increase of Lunacy in Rural Connaught.”
The title looked well. It would, he felt, certainly attract the attention of the editor of The British Medical Journal.
But Dr. Lovaway did not like it. It was not for the editor of The British Medical Journal, or indeed, for a scientific public that he wanted to write. He started fresh on a new sheet of paper.
“Lunacy in the West of Ireland: Its Cause and Cure.”
That struck him as the kind of title which would appeal to a philanthropist out to effect a social reform of some kind. But Dr. Lovaway was not satisfied with it. He respected reformers and was convinced of the value of their work, but his real wish was to write something of a literary kind. With prodigal extravagance he tore up another whole sheet of foolscap and began again.
“The Passing of the Gael Ireland’s Crowded Madhouses.”
He purred a little over that title and then began the article itself. What he wanted to say was clear in his mind. He had been three weeks in Dunailin and he had spent more time over lunatics than anything else. Almost every day he found himself called upon by Sergeant Ra-hilly to “certify” a lunatic, to commit some unfortunate person with diseased intellect to an asylum. Sometimes he signed the required document. Often he hesitated, although he was always supplied by the sergeant and his constables with a wealth of lurid detail about the dangerous and homicidal tendencies of the patient. Dr. Lovaway was profoundly impressed.