With the Olympic Games officially getting under way today, we thought we’d look at some of RCSI’s Olympic connections. Pat O'Callaghan (1906-1991, Lic. 1927) First and foremost there is RCSI Licentiate Pat O’Callaghan (1906–1991, Lic. 1927). A hammer-thrower, he won Gold at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, the first competitor to do so under the Irish tricolour. ‘I am glad of my victory,’ he later said, ‘not for the victory for myself, but for the fact that the world has been shown that Ireland has a flag, that Ireland has a National Anthem, and, in fact, we have a nationality.’ Four years later, he took home Gold again from the Los Angeles Games. In 1936, owing to an internal dispute, Ireland did not send a team to Berlin – but O’Callaghan was there nonetheless, personally invited by Adolf Hitler (he was a hammer-throw enthusiast; the winner that year threw two metres short of O’Callaghan’s personal best). In later life O’Callaghan turned down Louis B. Mayer’s invitation for him to
It’s Bloomsday this Sunday, celebrating the day on which Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) takes place. RCSI has many Joycean connections, probably the most prominent of which is the appearance in Dubliners (1914) of the clock over the front door of 123 St Stephen’s Green (‘He went as far as the clock of the College of Surgeons: it was on the stroke of ten’). RCSI Professor and President (and bon viveur ) Charles Cameron is one of the real-life people named in Ulysses itself (‘The annual dinner you know. Boiled shirt affair. The lord mayor was there… and sir Charles Cameron’). But did you know that Joyce had originally aspired to a career in medicine? In April 1902, he enrolled at the Catholic University Medical School in Cecilia Street (now the Temple Bar home of Urban Outfitters). At the time this School opened, it was unlicensed and unchartered, meaning its students were on the road to receiving essentially worthless qualifications. But in 1856, RCSI solved the problem by of