Review Essay: Making Doctors, Preventing Disease – Medicine in 19th- and 20th-Century Ireland

Admission to the medical pantheon comes, at the very least, only after widespread acceptance of an eponymous technical term. Based on this criterion alone, one can understand why not a few Irish medical practitioners have been so honoured as gods. The name of Robert Graves lives on with Graves Disease (exophthalmic goitre). Cheyne–Stokes breathing and Stokes–Adams syndrome (both cardiac conditions), along with Stokes' sign and Stokes' law, are all reminders of the clinical acumen of Robert Stokes. And many a Canadian who has slipped on an icy sidewalk, shot out their arm with the hand flat to break the fall, and ended up injuring their forearm (radius) will suffer what is known as a Colles' fracture. Not only was this injury named after the Irish surgeon Abraham Colles, but so too were the anatomical terms Colles' fascia and Colles' membrane.

These practitioners, however, were all of an early generation of nineteenth-century Irishmen, so how has Irish medicine evolved since then? One could turn to John Fleetwood's History of Medicine in Ireland, first published in 1951 and revised 30 years later, for an answer.¹ Perhaps tellingly, however, neither of the two books under review, Irish Medical Education and Student Culture, c. 1850–1950 by Laura Kelly and Strangling Angel: Diphtheria and Childhood Immunization in Ireland by Michael Dwyer, cite Fleetwood's chronologically and historiographically dated survey, demonstrating that medical history in Ireland has turned a corner. Analyzing Kelly's and Dwyer's bibliographies confirms that in the last couple of decades, several doctoral dissertations in history have been completed, which deal with Irish health and medicine. In addition to those by the two authors reviewed, many articles have been published, and several monographs and collections of essays have appeared.² Also important to this renaissance of scholarship was the creation in 2006 of the University College Dublin (UCD) Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland based in the UCD School of History (https://www.ucd.ie/chomi/about/), which is doubly heartening as history of medicine as a discipline in universities is often under siege from, and under threat of absorption by, nebulous medical humanities units, or predatory bioethicists.

Yet knowledge of the history of Irish medical history remains somewhat restricted to scholars in Ireland, as many, but admittedly not all, publications are produced by local publishers and therefore do not circulate widely to international audiences. The two books reviewed here are among the notable exceptions, as they are both published by Liverpool University Press (LUP) as part of its Reappraisals in Irish History series, which "offers new insights into Irish history and culture from 1750 … [and] showcases new and exciting scholarship on subjects such as the history of gender, power, class, the body, landscape, memory, and social and cultural change." To have these medical history volumes selected for this series because they conform to these exacting standards speaks to their quality, and also to the fact that publishers still consider this subfield of history innovative and interesting. It is to be hoped, too, that as these LUP books are distributed worldwide by Oxford University Press, a wider audience will be able to avail itself of them. But a price of approximately $140 for each volume is steep (British academic publishers do not receive subventions to offset costs).

Laura Kelly is a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Irish Medical Education and Student Culture, c. 1850–1950 is her second book about Irish medical students, as she has previously written specifically about Irish women training in medicine.³ According to a recent interview, Kelly has been "interested in the history of medical student experience ever since my master's thesis which focused on the social backgrounds and careers of Irish students who studied at the University of Glasgow in the nineteenth century."⁴ Paying...