Sep 29, 2026 · 1 hr 13 min · 15 segments
He saved a mother and child on a kitchen table by candlelight. He fought cholera with clean water and open windows. And he kept one secret for fifty years. Tonight, drift off to the story of Dr…
It is a port town built on an island in a river.
The tide climbs the quays twice a day and slides back out, and the whole city smells of salt and hemp and wet stone.
Ships come up the channel from the sea with sugar and timber.
Along Merchants' Quay, the shopkeepers open their shutters in the morning fog.
One of those shops belongs to a grocer named Jeremiah Bulkley.
He weighs out flour and tea.
He holds a small position at the city's weigh house, checking the loads that come in off the boats.
His wife is named Mary Ann, and somewhere in that household, in the year seventeen eighty-nine or thereabouts, a child is born, and the child is named Margaret.
The exact year is not certain.
Records from that time and place are thin.
Most historians say seventeen eighty-nine.
Others have argued for a few years later.
Hold the date loosely, the way you hold anything from long ago.
What matters is the child and the river and the tide going in and out.
The child is bright, sociable, a little fierce.
The family is comfortable for a while, and then it is not.
The older son, John, is sent to Dublin to train as a lawyer, and the money goes with him, and then the money is gone.
Jeremiah ends up in debtors' prison.
He leaves.
Mary Ann is left with a daughter and no income in a house that used to have a shop under it.
But Mary Ann has a brother, and her brother is famous.
He is a painter, a royal academician, a difficult and brilliant man who has spent years covering the walls of a great hall in London with enormous paintings of the progress of human culture.
It is a port town built on an island in a river.
The tide climbs the quays twice a day and slides back out, and the whole city smells of salt and hemp and wet stone.
Ships come up the channel from the sea with sugar and timber.
Along Merchants' Quay, the shopkeepers open their shutters in the morning fog.
One of those shops belongs to a grocer named Jeremiah Bulkley.
He weighs out flour and tea.
He holds a small position at the city's weigh house, checking the loads that come in off the boats.
His wife is named Mary Ann, and somewhere in that household, in the year seventeen eighty-nine or thereabouts, a child is born, and the child is named Margaret.
The exact year is not certain.
Records from that time and place are thin.
Most historians say seventeen eighty-nine.
Others have argued for a few years later.
Hold the date loosely, the way you hold anything from long ago.
What matters is the child and the river and the tide going in and out.
The child is bright, sociable, a little fierce.
The family is comfortable for a while, and then it is not.
The older son, John, is sent to Dublin to train as a lawyer, and the money goes with him, and then the money is gone.
Jeremiah ends up in debtors' prison.
He leaves.
Mary Ann is left with a daughter and no income in a house that used to have a shop under it.
But Mary Ann has a brother, and her brother is famous.
He is a painter, a royal academician, a difficult and brilliant man who has spent years covering the walls of a great hall in London with enormous paintings of the progress of human culture.
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