Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685–1766: A Fatal Attachment by Eamonn Ó Ciardha (review)

86 a medical community on the apparently unpromising foundation of decentralized hospital teaching. An informal system of ad hoc private lectures and hospitalwardwalking , coupled with the growth of a prolific medical press, eventually created a newly articulate group of general practitioners who looked to the hospital physicians and surgeons to legitimate their claimsto authority andtraining.Itwasthe public world of the hospital rather than their private apprenticeships to which these men turned for substance. Charitable institutions became centers of social , intellectual, and pedagogical authority ; the hospitals’ status as public charities established and consolidatedthe elite status of hospital physicians and surgeons . Dignified, cautious, prudent, disinterested —institutional affiliations conferred these attributes to hospital doctors and, in more attenuated form, to those they instructed. Hospitals ‘‘promised a strong antidote to fraud, if not to error, with medical students and other practitioners subjecting patients to ‘public inspection.’’’ Where once practitioners might have been accompanied by a handful of apprentices or university men, they more and more drew crowds of short-term pupils who walked the wards with them, a pattern that ‘‘confirmed and strengthened hospital men’s prestige and influence as the arbiters of medical knowledge.’’Traditional distinctions were maintained between physicians and surgeons; the former deferring to surgeons when autopsies were called for, the latter deferring to their colleagues when issues of general, systemic disease were central. Surgeons confined their experiments to anatomy and physiology while physicians turned to chemistry and chemical experimentation. Both groups, as Ms. Lawrence subtly shows, ‘‘had a professional investment—as ‘pure’practitioners —to keep internal diseases and external disorders distinct,’’ no matter how blurred their boundaries. Ms. Lawrence’s book wears its extensive archival researchlearninglightly;itislively and illuminating, a first-rate piece of scholarship. Andrew Scull University of California, San Diego EAMONN Ó CIARDHA. Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685–1766: A Fatal Attachment . Dublin: Four Courts, 2002. Pp. 468. $55. Historians have tended to ignore Irish Jacobitism, but Mr. Ó Ciardha persuasively shows that it was embraced by most Catholics in Ireland until the rise of Republicanism at the end of the eighteenth century. Best of all, he cites bards who sang in the Gaelic tongue to prove that the Stuart claimant was widely perceived as a messianic figure who would return to liberate his fellow Gaels. Until now the native poets have been neglected as a source for Irish history of this era, even though they alone were able to spread political news with near impunity. As Mr. Ó Ciardha’s title intimates, fidelity to the Jacobite cause was a ‘‘fatal attachment ,’’ yet the Irish yearned not for revolution, but for restoration until 1766, the year James III died. Despite the large military force spread out in 263 barracks to guard them from the disarmed majority, Mr. Ó Ciardha shows that Protestants in Ireland had cause to fear. The Irish Catholics had an ‘‘army-in-waiting’’born of the 1688 Revolution ;by the TreatyofLimerick(1691), the Irish army had followed General Patrick Sarsfield to Europe, and afterwards (though enlisting was a capital offence) recruits flowed steadily into the Irish Bri- 87 gade abroad, conveyed by privateers on the coast often manned by IrishJacobites. Historians have dismissed the large numbers of recruits mentioned in contemporary correspondence, but Mr. Ó Ciardha persuades us that these numbers prompted ‘‘the more coercive aspects of the Protestant Ascendancy legislation .’’ Before 1715, it was reported that 17,000 Irish were in the service of France and that recruits werebeingpromised that they would return to Ireland in a year. In 1760, an Irish clergyman claimed that 450,000 Irishmen had died in the service of France since the 1690s, a number disputed by a modern historian, who puts the figure at 48,000. Even this number is impressive. No insurrection occurred in Ireland in 1745, Mr. Ó Ciardha explains, due to the famine of 1741, which ‘‘wiped out a quarter of the Catholics .’’ Among those captured in Scotland , the rank and file seemed ‘‘overwhelmingly Irish-born.’’ In 1685, a close tie was forged between theStuartsandtheCatholicChurchinIreland when Pope Innocent XI gave James II the right to nominate bishops. This right descended to his son, so that of 129 appointees to Irish sees from 1687 to...