Description

Published 1933: First Edition / Hardcover / Very Good Condition

Original blue cloth with black faint titles on the spine. 190 very clean and bright pages, mild speckled foxing on the endpapers and edges. Boards slightly rubbed and faded with time and bumped on the corners consistent with age but remain firm and intact. Scarce! (LP188)

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John Hackett Pollock, (‘An Philibín’) (1887–1964), writer and doctor, was born in Dublin, son of Hugh Pollock, a protestant barrister who later became registrar of the land commission, and Mary Pollock (née Donnelly), a catholic. He was educated at the Catholic University School, Leeson St., and the Catholic University Medical School, Cecilia St., receiving the MB and B.Ch. of the NUI. Appointed assistant pathologist to the Richmond hospital, during the 1916 Easter rising he courageously went through the city streets wearing a Red Cross armlet to assist the wounded. Although his subsequent fiction would reveal contradictory feelings about political commitment, during the civil war he collaborated with Patrick Little (qv) (with whom he remained a lifelong friend) on producing republican propaganda pamphlets. Thinking that he had a late vocation to the religious life, he resigned his hospital position and entered Buckfast abbey, a Benedictine foundation in Dorset, England, but left after a time and resumed his career in pathology. Becoming pathologist and bacteriologist to the Cork St. fever hospital, and pathologist to Mercer's hospital, he held both positions into the 1960s. Reinstated as pathologist to the Richmond in the 1940s, and remaining till his death, he gave Saturday morning classes in morbid anatomy, notable for the theatricality of his presentation and graphically witty descriptions of naked-eye specimens, such as ‘strawberry gall-bladder’, ‘sago-spleen’, and ‘nutmeg liver’. He published some dozen articles on pathological subjects in the Irish Journal of Medical Science (1922–9). Assistant professor of pathology in the RCSI (1937–63), he had a private practice in Rathmines, which he relinquished in the 1940s.

Pollock published prolifically as a poet, critic, playwright, and novelist, producing nineteen volumes, all with Irish publishing houses. His poems appeared in the Catholic Bulletin, Ireland To-day, and the Irish Monthly, and he wrote book reviews for Irish Book Lover and other periodicals. All of his poetry and most of his prose (save for several novels and some criticism) appeared under the penname ‘An Philibín’ (‘The Plover’).

https://www.dib.ie/biography/pollock-john-hackett-philibin-a