Holles Street Hospital - Oxen of the Sun

Bloom pays a visit to the maternity hospital in Holles Street where Mina Purefoy is about to give birth. This chapter is a “”chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle” representing the gestation of the English from Latin to Anglo Saxon to Elizabethan prose to Gothic novels and ending with a jumble of pidgin English and broken doggerel. Bloom is invited to join the band of young medicals who are carousing in mess room despite the nurses pleading for them to keep quiet. Stephen Dedalus and Lenehan are there. Mulligan and Haines join them later. Stephen becomes afraid of a black crack of thunder and Bloom attempts to sooth him. Eventually a baby boy is born. “and the brave woman had manfully helped. She had.” The men leave for more drinks in Burke’s.