Poetry in Ulysses: Medical Dick and Medical Davy

Scylla & CharybdisStephen DedalusPoetry and Music in Ul...

May 6

In the opening scene of “Scylla and Charybdis,” Ulysses’ ninth episode, our Hero-Artist Stephen Dedalus finds himself in the librarian’s office of the National Library in a flurry of literary repartee. The other men in the scene, Lyster and John Eglinton, chat and banter, while Stephen tosses in a few snarky comments. Eglinton lobs back:

“—Have you found those six brave medicals, John Eglinton asked with elder’s gall, to write Paradise Lost at your dictation? The Sorrows of Satan he calls it.”

Eglinton’s retort inadvertently unzips Stephen’s psyche. The young Artist’s mind darts to a bit of verse, but not from from Milton, Goethe or even Shakespeare:

First he tickled her
Then he patted her
Then he passed the female catheter
For he was a medical
Jolly old medi...

This verse is a pure, unadulterated Buck Mulligan original - “The Song of Medical Dick and Medical Davy.” These two will pop up here and there throughout Ulysses as little more than a silly pair of names. Their full “Song” was written by Buck Mulligan’s real life counterpart - author, doctor, and statesman Oliver St. John Gogarty - and started as an in-joke shared with James Joyce when they were both students. Medical Dick and Medical Davy appeared for the first time in an illustrated ballad that Gogarty dedicated to its recipient, “James Augustine Joyce, Scorner of Mediocrity and Scourge of the Rabblement, Dedicated as I wish to have before my work the holder of the highest of contemporary names and the longest of contemporary tools.”

Ulick O’Connor described the “Song” as “unprintable” in his biography of Gogarty, but luckily for us, A. Norman Jeffares had no such compunction, as he included it among many such uncouth ditties in his 2001 compilation The Poems and Plays of Oliver St John Gogarty. So as not to deprive you, dear reader, I will also gladly share in full “The Song of Medical Dick and Medical Davy”:

The first was Medical Dick
The second was Medical Davy
The first had a Bloody Big Prick
The second had Buckets of Gravy
To show-- to show-- to show what medicals are.
Then out spoke Medical Dick
To his colleague Medical Davy
'I'd swap my Bloody Big Prick
For you with your buckets of Gravy'
To show etc.
'Steady Medical Dick'
Said Sturdy Medical Davy
'There's very little value in a prick
When you haven't got the passage of the gravy.'
To show etc.

'Every bullock were a bull
But for the little matter of a ballocks
If your prick can keep the women full
You'll find they never grumble at its small looks.'
To show etc.

I wouldn’t think I’d need to spend much time analyzing “Medical Dick and Medical Davy” as the subtext is really just text. I do want to throw my hat into the ring on one point of discussion, though - the implication of Medical Davy’s “Buckets of Gravy.” I’ve come across several references insisting that “gravy” refers to Medical Davy’s immense wealth. For instance, in Gifford and Seidman’s Ulysses Annotated:

“The poem plays Dick’s extraordinary sexual prowess off against [sic] Davy’s extraordinary financial prowess.”

No, I’m sorry sirs, but it’s two varieties of sexual prowess. Sure, gravy can mean money, but here, I’m fairly certain that they are debating the pros and cons of having a big dick versus having a big jizz. Why am I so certain? Because this is clearly the grosser, and therefore funnier, option. It’s the thing you would say to make your college buddy belly laugh. I rest my case.

Ulysses is not Medical Dick and Medical Davy’s only literary outing, as it turns out. If you flip a few pages further into the The Poems and Plays of Oliver St John Gogarty, you’ll come across a rather interesting three-act play called Blight: The Tragedy of Dublin, in which both Medical Dick and Medical Davy feature as characters. Blight follows a group of characters living in a Dublin tenement and the various authority figures that bedevil their lives. Despite its title, the first two acts of Blight are comedic, as the main character Stanislaus Tully verbally jousts with a series of holier-than-thou charity workers and landlords. Tully lands a windfall of cash in a workers’ compensation case, buys the tenement where his extended family lives and eventually wins elected office. The Medical D’s are fairly minor characters who are presiding over the pregnancy of Tully’s sister Mary. When Tully’s sickly nephew Jimmy announces Medical Dick’s arrival in the second act, his mother Mary admonishes him:

“Ye mustn’t call the gentleman names, but learn to have respect for yer superiors. He’s a very kind doctor and much better than the usual midwifery cases they send out.”

The third act reveals Tully’s corruption as he has joined the establishment he once despised - a charity case turned landlord, politician and board member of a hospital charity. The finale is largely dominated by a Gogarty self-insert character called Dr. Tumulty who argues passionately in favor of Gogarty’s own political views, as he does here in his closing speech:

“All your benevolent formulism only makes the position more and more hopeless. The less you spend on prevention the more you will pay for cure. Until the citizens of this city realize that their children should be brought up in the most beautiful and favorable surroundings the city can afford, and not in the most squalid, until this floundering Moloch of a Government realize that they must spend more money on education than on police, this city will continue to be the breeding-ground of disease, vice, hypocrisy and discontent. I leave you to erect your tripartite edifice over the children of the city of blight.”

Blight was largely inspired by Gogarty’s own experiences working as a doctor to patients living in Dublin’s vast network of what he called “corpse-converting slums.” In the 1910’s, Dublin was one of the poorest cities in Europe, with higher death rates than large cities like Moscow and Calcutta. Gogarty portrayed the working poor as desperate but clever in their own right and directed his outrage at the arrogance and hypocrisy of the moneyed classes. The characters, particularly Tully, make unethical choices within the story, but Gogarty intended to show that people like Tully and his neighbors are pushed into dishonest and destructive actions by the desperation of their inescapable circumstances. However, in Gogarty’s view, the true scandalous evil is that folks like Tully and his family are forced to rely on the fickle generosity of wealthy hospital funders to get their basic needs met. To add insult to injury, they are in turn resented by the wealthy for accepting these same handouts.

Blight was well-received by the audiences at the Abbey Theatre during its short runs in 1917 and 1918. However, given its subject matter, it was quite controversial and closed after just a week in its first run, despite playing to packed houses. 1917 was the year after the Easter Rising in Dublin and performing a play that was pointedly critical of both the government and the ongoing war effort was highly inflammatory. Blight’s notorious reputation in part resulted in those packed houses, as rumors that the play would be suppressed encouraged audiences to make sure they caught it before it disappeared from the stage forever. Classic Streisand effect.

On-stage talent included Michael MacLiammoir in the role of Tully’s disabled nephew Jimmy. Playwright Sean O’Casey was in the audience on opening night. Blight was the first of a wave of so-called slum plays that became a staple of the Irish stage, including the plays of O’Casey (who denied being influenced by Blight). Blight made record box office sales for the Abbey, though Gogarty donated his portion of the profits to the Herald Boot Fund, in part to expose publicly how poorly Lady Gregory paid writers.

Naturally, there is a Joycean connection to Blight as well. John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello, co-authors of a 1998 biography of John Stanislaus Joyce, strongly speculated that Gogarty based some of the characters and situations in Blight on the Joyce family. Though the Joyces never occupied a tenement, Gogarty recalled being shocked by the poverty of the Joyce household (poverty also depicted in Ulysses). The name “Stanislaus” stands out in particular, as this was the Joyce patriarch’s middle name and the name of one of his sons, making it easy to connect the dots that Stanislaus Tully was likely based on John S. Joyce. It’s probably no coincidence, then, that the nephew in Tully’s care is called Jimmy. It also seems likely that the similarities between the Joyces and the family in Blight would have been clear to any members of their social circle in the audience. James’ brother Charlie saw Blight in its original run, but it doesn’t seem that John Joyce ever saw it. Jackson and Costello recount how Charlie, in classic Joycean fashion, wrote to Gogarty after the run of the play asking for a pound. The biographers interpret this as Charlie looking to collect royalties for the use of his family’s likeness.

It’s interesting to see the parallel creative impulses shared by the former friends Gogarty and Joyce. Though Joyce’s writing is held in higher esteem a century later, both dipped into their own struggles in Dublin for artistic inspiration and hoped to reflect a dark but honest version of Dublin and its people. Like Joyce, Gogarty also freely used the names and likenesses of people he knew, only vaguely obscuring their identities. We can’t accuse Gogarty of any kind of artistic vengeance in Blight in retaliation for Gogarty’s own unflattering likeness in Ulysses, as Blight’s stage debut predated Ulysses by several years. It’s also unknown to me whether Joyce sought any literary vengeance against Gogarty for Blight specifically or just over Gogarty’s perceived betrayal more broadly. Finally, I can’t help but be amused that, when in need of a comic turn, both Gogarty and Joyce reached back to an in-joke from their student days about two pervy doctors.

Poetry in Ulysses: Medical Dick and Medical Davy

Further Reading:

Who Were the Real Men in the Library from "Scylla and Charybdis"?