Francis McGahern’s hypochondria

Francis (Frank) McGahern’s hypochondria turns sickness into a repeated drama of remedies, attention, and sudden recovery. His children learn to care for him and to fear his purges, while his most serious spell brings an elaborate deathbed plan that places the family’s future on his fifteen-year-old son. When the doctors find him in perfect health, the crisis ends without explanation or discussion, and the household’s old pattern resumes.

Recurrent Illness and Self-Treatment

Francis’s interest in medical books was longstanding, and the curtained medicine press in the barracks held an array of supplies: thermometers, senna leaves, sulphur, cascara, powders, measuring scales, and glasses. He used these to make cleansing prescriptions, administering them both to himself and to the children. The concoctions tasted bitter and often worked as violent purges. The materials of illness were therefore not merely his private equipment; they became part of family life, imposed on the children as treatment and remembered as something they dreaded.

His illnesses were recurrent rather than continuous. The children were accustomed to seeing him take to bed with complaints that could be named or left unnamed. They brought him food and medicines upstairs. When he wanted attention, he pounded the floorboards with a walking stick or boot, and grew angry if the response was not immediate. The gesture made his demand audible throughout the house: being unwell did not remove him from his position of authority. Even while confined to his room, he could direct the family’s movements and measure their attention to him.

The pattern also had a recognizable ending. Without warning or any obvious sign of recovery, Francis would rise one morning in a flurry of activity. He shaved, dressed, ate before the large sideboard mirror, issued instructions, and went downstairs to conduct the morning inspection. The household then returned more or less to normal until the next illness. That abrupt turn from bedbound patient to commanding sergeant makes the episodes feel cyclical: sickness suspends his ordinary duties, but recovery restores them at once.

Illness and Household Authority

The family’s role in these episodes was practical and compulsory. The children carried food and medicines to his room; when he called, they were expected to answer. His anger at delay gave care the character of obedience, while the purges he prepared extended his authority over their bodies as well as their time. Yet the account also distinguishes this repeated domestic routine from the later spell that seemed to threaten his life. On that occasion his voice was weaker, his movements slow and limping, and his children had to help him up and down the stairs. The old signs of illness were now joined by a visible loss of strength.

The altered seriousness registered across the household. Dr Vesey, the police doctor, came to the barracks every day, and the three guards looked grave and worried. At the end of the Rosary each night, the family prayed with Francis for his recovery. The prayers and daily visits mark a change in the family’s response: his sickness could no longer be treated simply as another return to the familiar routine. Even so, its meaning remained uncertain until Francis himself began to speak as though death were imminent.

Against the Background of Susan’s Illness

Francis’s medical behavior unfolded in a family already facing the grave illness of Susan McGahern. In a letter to a doctor in Dublin, he asked whether his wife should give up teaching and what her chances of recovery were. He had written at the beginning of her illness and received a detailed report; the memoir characterizes his later letter’s tone as defensive and slightly bullying, while also consistent with his manner. His concern about her medical outlook thus appears in correspondence that is anxious but not disinterested in tone.

As Susan’s symptoms returned, she suspected that her cancer might have come back. Those around her, including Francis, encouraged her to understand her stomach pain and recurring constipation and diarrhoea as an unrelated illness from which she could recover. She asked him to write again to Dr Corcoran, though he was reluctant because he had already written secretly. The memoir sets this concealment beside Susan’s own faith and suffering: her belief could sustain her, but could not erase the pain of losing the family she loved, and Francis accused her of losing faith. His hypochondria therefore sits within a household where sickness, medical information, and the possibility of death are managed unevenly—sometimes through attention and treatment, sometimes through concealment or denial.

The Deathbed Plan

During the more serious episode, the family was told that Francis would be sent to the Depot Hospital in Dublin. He asked his son to retrieve papers and documents, as well as a small metal box, the colour of grass and mud, which he had bought at an auction. A solicitor from Boyle came to the barracks and spent a long time with him. Afterward, Francis dressed slowly in uniform and went downstairs, resting at intervals on the banister. He told the girls what to pack for hospital and gave the barrack orderly the evening off.

He then called his son into the dayroom and shut the door. With the metal box open on the trestle table among the ledgers and inkstands, Francis said that he was unlikely to return alive from hospital but that he had made provision for everything. A wad of money secured with a rubber band was for the immediate funeral expenses. A large envelope held instructions, financial records, government bonds, and insurance policies; another held a copy of his will. He was to be buried with Susan in the family plot in Aughawillan. The boy was to open the instructions after the funeral and take them to the solicitor.

Francis also set out what he expected to happen to the children. They could not remain in the barracks, he said, because a new sergeant would soon replace him and they might otherwise be sent to an orphanage. His son was to buy a house and small farm and bring up the others. Francis directed him toward a particular property, Paddy Mullaney’s farm, which he described as inexpensive and better than the boy would find elsewhere. These instructions turned the reported illness into a transfer of responsibility: the son was asked to imagine himself as the head of a household and farmer before his father had even entered hospital.

Return and Narrative Significance

The son was fifteen and legally a minor. He later recognized that he could not have been allowed to control the money, buy a farm, and raise a large family alone. The nearest relatives, including Francis’s siblings-in-law, were never mentioned in the instructions, although Francis remained in contact with some of them. His son believed him at the time. The memoir presents the episode as a collision between Francis’s knowledge of the law and his insistence on his own fantasy of what would happen; the man who enforced rules was, in this instance, making plans that could not realistically be carried out. The children cried when they heard the news, before some of them broke into laughter and were reproached in their father’s manner.

Francis left for hospital the next day. Within a week he was back, and the doctors had found him in perfect health. The family’s relief was immediate: the silent anxiety of waiting for news of his death lifted. After shutting himself away upstairs for a day, he resumed the familiar ritual of recovery. He rose in a loud burst of activity, called for hot water, shaved, polished his silver stripes, buttons, and boots, and ate facing the sideboard mirror. At nine he put a white handkerchief inside his cuff and went downstairs to the morning inspection, banging the door behind him.

The son kept the key to the metal box for several days, unsure what to do with it and instinctively unwilling to return it. Eventually he left it beside Francis’s side of the bed; when he next looked, it had disappeared. Neither father nor son spoke of the matter. That silence completes the episode’s pattern: Francis’s announced death and the future he assigned to his son are followed by recovery, a return to command, and no reckoning with the fear or impossible responsibility he had created. The memoir does not supply a medical explanation for the discrepancy. Instead, it shows how the repeated illness routine could become, at its most consequential, a genuine crisis for the family even when the feared outcome did not occur.