Renowned Irish comedian and artist Niall Toibin officially launched a book by Professor William Kirwan entitled ‘Political Correctness and the Surgeon’ at RCSI today.

A new collection of nine contemporary photographic portraits of leading academic staff has been officially unveiled at RCSI. The portraits, by photographer Amelia Stein, recognise and celebrate the achievements of the extraordinary academic staff at RCSI.

Professor Kirwan is a RCSI Council member and a Professor of Surgery at University College Cork (UCC). In his book, he satirises political correctness which is rife in all public institutions and particularly in those related to medicine.

In particular, he explores the absurdities and correctitudes visited upon the working surgeon including the spending of vast sums on those removed from the patient interface; the advancement beyond their ability of those gifted more with ambition than energy; the depredations of rapacious litigation; the emergence of ‘the Friday hospital’ and the abandonment of proven structures in favour of those transparently doomed to failure.

All of these are portrayed in a procession of characters who inhabit the writers ‘bad dream’ in which he is undergoing surgery himself and cause him to have no small anxiety about his prospects in the new ‘fully corrected’ hospital environment.