UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland: Talks and Events

Speaker

Dr Lynsey Black (Maynooth University)

Chair

Associate Professor Catherine Cox (University College Dublin)

Title

Diagnosing Insanity: Women, Murder and Mental Health in 20th-century Ireland

Event

UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 20 September 2018

Summary

Mad, bad, sad – the familiar tropes deployed to explain women who kill. This paper explores the cases of three women who were convicted of murder in post-independence Ireland and who were understood through discourses of pathology. Taking these three cases, we can begin to see the ways in which ‘madness’ was applied at the individual level. The archival files demonstrate how diagnoses were contingent and inseparable from prevailing conceptions of gender, morality and class. The cases reveal the behaviours categorised as ‘sane’ and ‘insane’, routes to redemption, and the work of respectable femininity as a protective factor.

Lynsey Black

Lynsey Black is a Lecturer in Criminology in the Department of Law at Maynooth University. She received her PhD from Trinity College Dublin, this work examined the cases of women sentenced to death in post-independence Ireland. She was an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin from 2016 to 2018. She researches gender and crime, historical criminology, and the death penalty.

Speaker

Dr Fionnuala Walsh (University College Dublin)

Chair

Associate Professor Catherine Cox (University College Dublin)

Title

‘You will feel that that you are being of some use’: Irish nurses and the Great War 1914-1918

Event

UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 19 April 2018

Summary

The First World War resulted in the mobilisation of thousands of Irish women on the home front in a variety of roles. As in other combatant countries the nursing profession was profoundly affected by the war. This paper examines the contribution of Irish voluntary and professional nurses to the war effort, both in Ireland and overseas. It explores motivations for joining the war effort, war experiences and the impact of the war on the nursing profession in Ireland.

Fionnuala Walsh

Dr Fionnuala Walsh completed her PhD at Trinity College Dublin in 2015, under the supervision of Professor David Fitzpatrick. Her thesis examined the impact of the Great War on women in Ireland, 1914-1919. It was funded by the Irish Research Council. From 2015-2016 she held the research studentship in the National Library of Ireland where I catalogued the papers of Field Marshall Hugh Gough. In 2016 she returned to Trinity College Dublin to take up a twelve month Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship with the primary purpose of producing publications from my PhD thesis. In September 2017 she took up a teaching fellowship in University College Dublin where she currently lecture in medical history and social history in the School of History. Her publications include ‘Every human life is of national importance: The impact of the First World War on attitudes to maternal and infant health’, in David Durnin and Ian Miller (eds). Medicine, health and Irish experiences of conflict 1914-1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017) and ‘We work with shells all day and night: Irish female munitions workers during the First World War’. Saothar, 42 (2017), 19-30.

 

 

Speaker

Dr Jane Hand (Department of History, University of Warwick)

Chair

Associate Professor Catherine Cox (Director, UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland & School of History, University College Dublin

Title

Health on the High Street: Consumerism, the NHS and Low-Fat Diets in Britain since the 1970s

Event

UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 8 February 2018

Summary

Since the postwar period food choice and diet have become increasingly intertwined with wider health and food policies focused on disease prevention, public health and medical service provision. As epidemiological research into chronic disease causation identified high intake of particular nutrients or minerals as harmful to health, retailers recognised the potential of products that reduced or removed these components in order to encourage consumers to make healthy choices. The National Health Service (NHS) was an important educator in this respect, urging at-risk patients to engage in new health behaviours and make better lifestyle choices by changing diet and exercising more. It promoted the idea that individualised health risks could be overcome (at least in part) by complying with a myriad of health advice that included specific recommendations about food consumption. The resulting emergence of public anxiety around the role of unhealthy foods in disease causation enabled food producers, manufacturers and retailers to co-opt the health education message to create new health food markets that championed various foods as potentially disease-preventing.

This podcast charts the development of food choice as an important health behavior promulgated through both public health and primary and secondary care. It will emphasise the role food and health consumerism played in communicating scientific evidence about the impact of healthy eating on disease prevention to the public. To do so, it will examine the development of low-fat products by certain supermarkets, focusing in particular on the creation of market segmentation around low-fat milk. It uses this case study to emphasise the interconnectedness of the NHS and the retail sector in attempting to reduce chronic disease mortality rates.

Jane Hand

Dr Jane Hand is a Research Fellow for the Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award ‘The Cultural History of the NHS’ in the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick. She completed her PhD in 2015, which analysed the role and function of visual images in constructing knowledge about healthy eating and disease prevention in postwar Britain. She researches public health and health education in Britain with a focus on the visual components of health campaigning, chronicity and the place of prevention.

Speaker

Associate Professor Marc Caball (School of History, University College Dublin)

Chair

Associate Professor Catherine Cox (Director, UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland & School of History, University College

Title

Patrick Browne (c. 1720 – 1790), an Irish botanist and physician in the West Indies

Event

UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 28 September 2017

Summary

Patrick Browne was a significant figure among scholars of botany and tropical medicine in the eighteenth century. Born in county Mayo around the year 1720, Browne’s publication in 1756 of The civil and natural history of Jamaica was important contemporaneously in terms of the development of botanical nomenclature and the discovery of plants previously unknown to European experts.  Although his original contribution to the science of botany was recognised by his better known peer, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, Browne has been described recently as a ‘bit of an enigma and is scarcely celebrated in his native land’.

In fact, Browne was the first English-speaking botanist to deploy Linnaeus’ binary system of plant classification in a published study. Moreover, Browne discovered many plants which he could not accommodate within the Linnaean system of classification and described them in terms of new genera. It is proposed to review the career of Browne with particular reference to his writings on the botany of the West Indies. It is also argued that Browne is culturally significant not just because of his Caribbean research. On his return to Ireland in 1770, Browne began work on a study of plants in Galway and Mayo listing their names in Latin, English and Irish.

Browne’s experience provides a fascinating case study of a medical doctor raised within an Irish-speaking environment, educated on the continent and working as a physician and botanist in the West Indies. If Browne succeeded in incorporating knowledge of Gaelic botanical terminology within a contemporary global template of such expertise, his achievement is singular in the context of contemporary Gaelic scholarship which was largely characterised by an insular focus and manuscript dissemination. It is suggested that Browne’s incorporation of Irish terminology within a comparative context illustrates a broader epistemological weakness within Gaelic intellectual life in the eighteenth century.

Marc Cable

Marc Caball is an historian and senior lecturer in UCD School of History. He is the lead investigator on the Irish Research Council funded project Mapping readers and readership in Dublin, 1826-1926: a new cultural geography. His research centres on the cultural history of early modern Ireland in an Atlantic context. He has extensive experience of research policy and funding at national and European levels.  He was chairman of the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Domain Committee for Individuals, Cultures, Societies and Health from 2008 to 2014. He is a council member of the Irish Texts Society and a board member of the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM). He is on the management committee of COST Action 15137 (European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities) He served as director of the UCD Humanities Institute during the period 2005-2011 and the UCD Graduate School of Arts and Celtic Studies between 2006 and 2011. He was the director of the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) between 200...

Speaker

Victora Williams (Director Food Matters)

Title

Food Matters Inside & Out

Event

Inside Reform: Prison Healthcare Campaigns, Past and Present. Inside Reform was a policy workshop co-convened by Associate Professor Catherine Cox (UCD) and Professor Hilary Marland(Warwick), as part of their Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award Project, ‘Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000’. This event was hosted by the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland and held at the National Gallery of Ireland on 2 June 2017.

Summary

In this presentation, Victoria Williams, Director of Food Matters, a not for profit, UK-based, food advocacy organisation, talks about her experience of running the ‘Inside and Out’ project at Wandsworth Reform Prison. Funded by the Ministry of Justice, this programme’s principal aim was to improve the health and well-being of prisoners. The project has four strands: healthy eating workshops; peer mentors; staff training sessions; and consultancy to catering and food procurement services.

Victoria Williams

Victoria Williams is co-founder and Director of Food Matters. Victoria’s expertise centres on food poverty and food access issues, in particular the effect of national policies on local food initiatives. Victoria is currently working on “Food Matters Inside & Out”. It supports prison reform by improving the health and well being of prisoners by addressing their diets through the creation of a prison-wide healthy eating environment. Victoria is Chair of the Board of Directors, Brighton and Hove Food Partnership and a trustee at Sustain: the Alliance for Better Food and Farming.

Speaker

Dr Holly Dunbar (UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland)

Title

The Case of Prisoner Alpha: Hearing Prisoners’ Voices, Advocating for Health Reform

Event

Inside Reform: Prison Healthcare Campaigns, Past and Present. Inside Reform was a policy workshop co-convened by Associate Professor Catherine Cox (UCD) and Professor Hilary Marland(Warwick), as part of their Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award Project, ‘Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000’. This event was hosted by the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland and held at the National Gallery of Ireland on 2 June 2017.

Summary

This presentation focused on the case of Prisoner ‘Alpha’, a 24 year-old, anonymous, male prisoner suffering from epilepsy who was committed to Wandsworth Prison in 1943. Prisoner Alpha’s case was subsequently taken up by the Prison Medical Reform Council. Holly used this case to argue that prisoner’s voices can be powerful tools for communicating messages of reform and to highlight the fact that prison reform organisations also have a role in battling the intersection between stigma and the health conditions that some ex-offenders suffer from.

Holly Dunbar

Dr Holly Dunbar is a Research Fellow on the Wellcome Trust project, ‘Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000’, at University College Dublin. Her research project is on prisoner health and after-care. Her work examines the evolving relationship between philanthropic organisations and the state in medical provision and health promotion among released prisoners. Prior to moving to UCD, she completed her thesis on gender and the Irish nationalist daily newspapers, c.1912 to 1923, at the University of Southampton.

 

Speaker

Dr Rachel Bennett (University of Warwick)

Title

Identifying and Advocating for Women’s Health: The Duchess of Bedford’s 1919 Committee of Enquiry into Medical Care in Holloway Prison

Event

Inside Reform: Prison Healthcare Campaigns, Past and Present. Inside Reform was a policy workshop co-convened by Associate Professor Catherine Cox (UCD) and Professor Hilary Marland(Warwick), as part of their Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award Project, ‘Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000’. This event was hosted by the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland and held at the National Gallery of Ireland on 2 June 2017.

Summary

When it opened in 1852 Holloway Prison catered for male and female prisoners, however the closure of London’s Newgate Prison in 1902 and the increasing pressure for prison space prompted the decision to make Holloway a female only prison in 1903. This decision also facilitated the broader aim of achieving the absolute separation of the sexes. Holloway became the largest female prison in England but it was quickly faced with overcrowding and a new wing had to be added in 1906.

During the First World War the prison experienced shortages of provisions and medical staff and its wake the site became a site for inquiry and subject for debate over healthcare in prisons. The inquiry of 1919 was in part borne out of concerns that were being raised over the conditions of women being received into the prison.

Rachel Bennett

Dr Rachel Bennett is a Research Fellow on the Wellcome Trust project, ‘Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000’, at the University of Warwick. Her research strand is focused upon medical care in English and Irish women’s prisons and examines provisions for maternity care and childbirth in the prison, the distinct responses of women to the prison experience and the importance of women’s reform groups and charitable organisations in identifying and advocating for female prisoner health needs. Her broader research interests include several facets of crime and punishment in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, the intersections between medical advancement and the criminal justice system, and the pre- and post-mortem treatment of the criminal body.

Speaker

Anita Dockley (Research Director of the Howard League for Penal Reform)

Title

New Media, Old News: Strategies for Getting Penal Issues into Popular Discourse

Event

Inside Reform: Prison Healthcare Campaigns, Past and Present. Inside Reform was a policy workshop co-convened by Associate Professor Catherine Cox (UCD) and Professor Hilary Marland(Warwick), as part of their Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award Project, ‘Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000’. This event was hosted by the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland and held at the National Gallery of Ireland on 2 June 2017.

Summary

This presentation is divided into three parts: the first, introduced the audience to the Howard League and what it does; the second, was on research study commissioned by the Howard League on how to get penal issues into the media; the last, was a case study of media campaign by the League.

The Howard League, established in 1866 and named after John Howard, is probably the oldest penal reform organisation in the world. As an organisation, it is characterised by its independence, its maverick status, and the fact that it likes to investigate what is really going on in the prison system. Although a small charity, with a staff of under twenty, the League punches above its weight. The Howard League has four key divisions: a research team; a policy team; a campaign team and a legal team. It enjoys consultative status with both the UN and the Council of Europe. The key characteristic of the League is that it is about change and how change is to be achieved.

The Howard League does not always court media attention and can work behind the scenes with policy makers and politicians. But the focus of Anita’s paper was on its public orientated media campaigns. The general public lack reliable knowledge on penal issues and their view of prison life is often distorted and sensationalised by media representations. Despite this, it is important for prison reform groups to use the media as the criminal justice system, to be effective, requires public confidence and a poorly informed public can drive ineffective or unfair penal policies.

NGOs are enthusiastic about the opportunities presented by digital media as a low cost way of reaching a mass public. However, if such campaigns are to succeed they require genuine popular support. For the Howard League social media is more often about new ways of attracting the attention of journalists rather than creating ‘mass’ public interest or encouraging supporter action.

Anita Dockley

Anita Dockley is responsible for developing the Howard League’s research capacity, forging links with academics and universities, funders and partner organisations. Her own research interests include suicide and self-harm in prisons, women in prison and order and control in the prison environment. She has been appointed as a member of the law sub panel in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework assessments. She is also a member of the Perrie Lectures Committee.

Speaker

Fíona Ní Chinnéide (Acting Executive Director, Irish Penal Reform Trust)

Title

Improving Prison Health: Using Advocacy Tools to Affect Change

Event

Inside Reform: Prison Healthcare Campaigns, Past and Present. Inside Reform was a policy workshop co-convened by Associate Professor Catherine Cox (UCD) and Professor Hilary Marland(Warwick), as part of their Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award Project, ‘Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000’. This event was hosted by the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland and held at the National Gallery of Ireland on 2 June 2017.

Summary

In her presentation Fíona Ní Chinnéide, Acting Director of the Irish Prison Reform Trust(IPRT), focused on advocacy tools, provided a case study on solitary confinement, and finished with a word of caution on the possible unintended consequences of reform campaigns. Defining the IPRT as an independent campaign organisation focused on progressive policy change, Fíona stated that in regard to prison healthcare the organisation has focused on the equivalence of care principle, the promotion of preventative services and continuity of care following discharge.

Fíona argued that the failures of social policy contribute to higher prison populations – a point underlined by the fact that the Irish prison population is characterised by poor health, poor socio-economic backgrounds and the experience of social marginalisation. Some 70 per cent of male prisoners and 85 per cent of female prisoners have substance addictions. There is also a high proportion of poor mental health amongst prisoners and some 20 to 30 prisoners are currently in Cloverhill Prison awaiting transfer to the Central Mental Hosptial Dundrum.

Fíona then outlined the general workflow for IPRT campaigns. In the first instance they identify an issue and this identification may derive from the expertise of IPRT board members, from communication with individual prisoners, from research, from inspection reports or by monitoring prison issues that emerge internationally. Once an issue is identified, the IPRT, as a solution focused organisation, then seeks to develop evidence-based policy proposals. These proposals are first promoted through constructive advocacy by making submissions, engaging in process and building capacity in other organisations. If constructive advocacy yields no dividend, the IPRT then go to the media, particularly using international monitoring processes, such as the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, to embarrass the Irish government, if necessary, on the world stage.

Fíona Ní Chinnéide

Fíona is acting up in the role of Acting Executive Director to October 2017. Along with the functions of that role, Fíona is responsible for managing the implementation of Irish Penal Reform Trusts’ Campaigns and Communications Programme, in line with IPRT’s Strategic Plan, and ensures the effective management of staff and interns. Fíona joined IPRT in March 2009 as Campaigns & Communications Officer. In her former role, as PR & Communications Manager for the European Youth Card Association,

Speaker

Dr Janet Weston (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine)

Title

Reforming Prisons in the 1980s: The Impact of AIDS

Event

Inside Reform: Prison Healthcare Campaigns, Past and Present. Inside Reform was a policy workshop co-convened by Associate Professor Catherine Cox (UCD) and Professor Hilary Marland(Warwick), as part of their Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award Project, ‘Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000’. This event was hosted by the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland and held at the National Gallery of Ireland on 2 June 2017.

Summary

This paper looks at the various groups that engaged with HIV/AIDS in prisons in England and Ireland during the 1980s. It delineates how AIDS in the prison environment was conceptualised  and its longer-term impact on prison healthcare. In the early 1980s the linkage between HIV/AIDS, as a blood-borne virus, and intravenous drug use was first established. This linkage brought attention to the prison as a site of HIV infection and transmission. International studies found that prison populations had rates of HIV seropositivity far in excess of any other group and that  the response of prison medical services to the issue was often scientifically unsound and ethically dubious.

In England, at the national level, both groups and individuals began to pay attention to the problem of AIDS and the prison from the mid-to-late 1980s. This included the UK’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, a body established by statute in the early 1970s, which produced a series of highly influential reports between 1988 and 1993 on drug use in relation to HIV and AIDS. These reports intended to fundamentally transform the UK’s drug policy in the light of HIV/AIDS and as part of that aim they focussed extensively on prisons and made specific recommendations. The National AIDS Trust, a body set up by the Department of Health, was also becoming interested in HIV in prisons at this time. Additionally, the UK Prison Reform Trust, reflecting its pre-existing concern with prison healthcare, was also increasingly occupied by the problem of HIV and AIDS in the prison population. Prison medical care in England had been the object of considerable scrutiny during the 1970s and 1980s and this informed many of the subsequent investigations into AIDs in prisons.

In Ireland, during the 1980s, HIV and AIDs in prisons occupied a lower profile than in England. There was relatively little official or public interest in prisons generally and even less in prison healthcare. The response to HIV and AIDS in prisons in Ireland remained quite low-key until the 1990s. The Department of Justice was generally unwilling to engage on the issue and reluctant to receive advice from external bodies. National strategies in Ireland around AIDs and drug use, when they did begin to emerge, only touched very briefly on prisons. More proactive and specific engagement came from individuals who were directly involved in the criminal justice system, such as social workers, probation officers and welfare officers. However, the critiques of these practitioners tended to be quite muted since they were normally talking about their colleagues and places of work. Prison Visiting Committees also mentioned HIV/AIDS as part...