Catheter
Catheter
In Brief
In response to Eglinton's "Have you found those six brave
medicals," Stephen's thoughts drift off into a bit of lewd
doggerel: "First he tickled her / Then he
patted her / Then he passed the female
catheter. / For he was a medical / Jolly
old medi..." This sounds very much like another of
Mulligan's facile verses, but there is no evidence that Oliver
St. John Gogarty ever composed such a thing.
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Mulligan is himself a medical student, and he loves to joke
about intercourse,
masturbation,
urination,
pregnancy,
and lewd desires. Much later in Scylla and Charybdis
he launches into a poem about medical students: "Then outspoke
medical Dick / To his comrade medical Davy..." This was an
actual Gogarty poem, and Gifford assumes that the lines
Stephen recalls at the beginning of the chapter must be a
"fragment" from it. The assumption is plausible enough, since
Gogarty's poem is bawdy and "Dick" is so named because of his
sexual ardor. But Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner observe that
no such lines can be found "in Jeffares's edition of his
poetry."
Whether the lines were written by Gogarty or by Joyce, the
cleverness of rhyming "patted her" with "catheter" is
characteristic of the limericks and other light verse with
which both men regularly entertained one another. And the
rhyme is exact: Irish people pronounce "th" as "t."
