Growing Pains: Childhood Illness in Ireland, 1750–1950 ed. by Anne Mac Lellan and Alice Mauger (review)

This is the first collection to deal with the history of childhood illness in Ireland and is thus groundbreaking in its extent and concerns. The volume is structured around four main themes: the sites of care for sick children, child patient experiences, those who played a key role in their treatment, and the eventual emergence of pediatrics as a discrete medical sphere in Ireland. Consisting of ten chapters, it explores infectious and noninfectious diseases such as rickets, smallpox, tuberculosis, Spanish flu, epilepsy, and ophthalmia among children. It reveals, for instance, that in 1750 one in every three children died of small pox; by 1800, 20 percent of infants still died in their first year, and it was not until the 1950s that real inroads were made into reducing the levels of infant mortality in the country. Rather than having a systematic network of pediatric care in Ireland, this volume shows that Irish institutions, such as workhouses and industrial and reformatory schools, became accidental sites of medical care. The first hospital dedicated to children in Ireland was the Dublin Institution for the Diseases in Children, founded in 1822. At first it provided an outpatient service only, but its existence predated the establishment of children’s hospitals in Britain by almost thirty years. Pediatrics as a clinical specialism was slow to develop, with only a handful of such specialists in Britain by 1900. The British Journal of Diseases of Children was first published in 1904 and was followed by the establishment of the British Paediatric Association in 928, with the formation of the Irish Paediatric Club in 1933.

This volume is full of information and insights into a range of childhood illnesses and their treatment over two hundred years. The significance of maternal care for ill children is a major feature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century health provision. Ashford argues convincingly that it was the introduction of compulsory small pox vaccination in Ireland in 1863 that turned the rural poor away from itinerant smallpox inoculators, to whom they had previously remained firmly committed. Ward explores the range of children’s clinics, wards, and hospitals established in Dublin in the nineteenth century and uncovers the debates that arose concerning the increasing specialization of institutional medical provision for Irish children. Walker examines the treatment of syphilitic children in Dublin’s Westmoreland Lock Hospital, a specialist hospital treating venereal diseases from the late eighteenth century. Further chapters deal with the epidemic of ophthalmia among children in Irish workhouses between 1849 and 1861, when children had been weakened by the impact of the Great Famine. Another examines the treatment of epileptic children confined to Richmond District Lunatic Asylum, an institution where such children probably received a greater level of medical assistance than if they had remained at home or as was more usual for such children, in the workhouse.

While there is a strong history of tuberculosis in Ireland two chapters in this present volume are the first to deal historically with the disease in children. One reveals how the neglect of testing children for tuberculosis or the misdiagnosis of tubercular children affected treatment, while also revealing how the focus on tubercular children allowed for both the visibility and the continuing development of pediatrics as a clinical specialism. A second chapter uses oral histories to access childhood patient experiences of tuberculosis. Milne’s chapter also utilizes oral histories to shed light on childhood memories and experiences of the Spanish flu. Kelly’s chapter looks at Irish children with rickets and the establishment of the Children’s Sunshine Home by Dr. Ella Webb. She shows how Webb’s work can be viewed as part of a system of welfare work carried through by Irish women doctors in Dublin in the twentieth century. Such work in itself revealed the extent to which the diseases of children were the result of Irish...