The donkey cure for whooping cough

The donkey cure for whooping cough is a remembered folk ritual that brings together illness, family separation, religious language, and a child’s return to his mother. In John McGahern’s account, its force lies not in a claimed medical result but in the circumstances around it: weeks behind a locked door, a freezing night under a star-filled sky, and the happiness of walking with his mother again.

Illness and separation

The episode began when McGahern came down with whooping cough. His paternal grandmother confined him to her room and locked the door when she left, keeping him from Susan McGahern for weeks. She argued that Susan had to go to school and that the twins and infant Margaret must be protected from infection. The child grew distressed at being unable to reach his mother, calling to her through the door; even the family Rosary was said while he remained shut in.

Susan urged him to be patient, pray, and wait until he was well enough to walk the lane to Lisacarn School again. McGahern later connected the confinement with his grandmother’s possessiveness and described her action as revenge. The memory therefore gives the cure a charged setting: it follows a prolonged separation imposed within the family, rather than appearing as an isolated country custom.

The nighttime ritual

Only once during those weeks was McGahern taken from the room. Very late one cold night, Tommy Quinn arrived at the back door with an animal variously remembered as a mule, jennet, or donkey. He lived with his brother Jim in a black house across the road, amid a rookery of trees; McGahern recalls that Tommy spent whatever money he had on drink and was considered somewhat simple. The lateness, he suspected, was meant to keep the rite from being observed.

Wrapped in a bundle of blankets, the child was passed beneath the animal three times in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The scene’s remembered details are stark and physical: frost glistening on the hard ground, stars overhead, and the child being handed back and forth beneath the animal. McGahern was certain that the idea for the cure had come from his grandmother, though the precise origin of the practice is not established. The memoir records the rite as something enacted through both bodily handling and Christian words, without asserting that it cured the illness.

Reunion and aftermath

The decisive change in the episode is McGahern’s return to his mother. He remembers intense happiness at being restored to Susan and walking the lane to Lisacarn School with her again. The ritual’s emotional consequence is thus inseparable from the end of his enforced isolation: the passage beneath the animal is followed by a passage back into his mother’s company.

The relationship with his grandmother remained complicated. McGahern says that he became her undisputed favorite, but a wary and unwilling one. She boasted that he had exceptional brains and could do anything, while Susan disliked the praise and tried to temper it. The cure belongs to a sequence of closeness and control in which the grandmother’s confinement of the child is followed by his favored status, but does not erase the earlier distress.

Religious life and the memoir’s frame

The ritual sits within a household where prayer ordered daily life. Prayers were said in the morning, work stopped at the Angelus, and the day ended with the Rosary; during the confinement, that same evening prayer continued with the door locked. Elsewhere, McGahern remembers the domestic Rosary beside the fire and describes church ceremonies as an early introduction to beauty, mystery, and sacrament. These recollections place the cure within lived religion, where formal devotion and a local healing practice could coexist.

In the memoir’s wider account, religious observance also provided a language for imagining life beyond the visible world. The cure’s invocation of the Trinity is therefore more than incidental wording, even though the passage does not explain the ritual as church teaching. Its narrative significance comes from the conjunction of a religious formula, a child’s physical vulnerability, and the return of the maternal bond that had been interrupted by illness and confinement.