It's Friday 22 January 1847. A bleak day. The wind gusting cold and wet. A doctor

Daniel Donovan is at home in Skibarine, a small town in West Cork in Island. There is a

rap at his door. But these days visitors rarely bring good news. As he wearily opens up on the

threshold before him is a bedraggled woman he knows, Mrs Keating. She's gaunt and pale,

a skin tinged yellow. Despite the winter weather beads of sweat gather at her brow. She has

somehow dragged herself the two miles from home to beg for help. Her seven-year-old son died

11 days ago she says, only a couple of days after her husband. Now she and her two surviving children

have what she calls the sickness. No one will come even to give them a drink of water, a fear of the

contagion. This morning she managed to drag her son's body out of the house, placing him in a ditch.

But she fears that the dogs will come and get him. It would pains him to do it. Donovan takes a

step back. He produces a shilling coin from his pocket and gives it to her on condition that she

leave at once. She doesn't even have the strength to argue. The doctor dreads moments such as these.

He is a compassionate man, but it does not take much medical training to see that on top of the

malnutrition she is gravely ill, even if the precise cause is uncertain. Perhaps it's cholera or

typhus or dysentery. It hardly matters. The result will be the same. As she disappears into the distance

Donovan sighs, though he has a moral duty to protect himself from illness, so as not to spread it

to his other patients. He can't merely abandon her to her fate. He pulls on his coat and walks

up the path to his friend Crowley, the apothecary. These days there are no children playing tag

or singing songs on the dirt road, only emaciated rafes staring vacantly through him.

One woman sits wailing in grief, another holds out her hands begging him for arms.

As he nears the apothecary's house, two dogs chase around his feet and bark playfully at each other.

Across the road, he sees a pig snuffling through the detritus on the street. The animals round here

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