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

Speaker

Associate Professor Catherine Cox (UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland)

Title

Opening Address at the Inside Reform Policy Workshop

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 opening address, Associate Professor Catherine Cox welcomes the attendees, provides an overview of the project, ‘Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health’, and gives a broad outline of the goals of the policy workshop, Inside Reform.

Catherine Cox

Associate Professor Catherine Cox, School of History, UCD, is the co-founder and Director of the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland. Her publications include: Negotiating insanity in the southeast of Ireland, 1820-1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); with Hilary Marland, Migration, Health, and Ethnicity in the Modern World (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); with Maria Luddy,  Cultures of Care in Irish Medical History 1750-1970 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and numerous articles. With Dr Graham Brownlow, Catherine is the editor of Irish Economic and Social History. She currently holds a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award entitled Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000′ with Professor Hilary Marland at the University of Warwick.

This is the video version of this talk by Dr Michael Sappol and includes slides of the images discussed. To listen to an audio only version of this talk please go to our previous podcast episode.

Speaker

Dr Michael Sappol (EURIAS Senior Fellow, Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala)

Chair

Associate Professor Catherine Cox (Director, UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland)

Title

Anatomy’s Photography: Objectivity, Showmanship and the Reinvention of the Anatomical Image, 1860–1950

Event

UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 20 April 2017. This seminar series was funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Summary

Historians have intensively studied medical photography — photographic clinics, medical portraiture, forensic medicine, photomicrography, and so on. But missing from that list is the field that for centuries stood at the heart of the medical curriculum, and whose images had a privileged status in the hierarchy of medical print culture: anatomy.

Photography, with its famously powerful “reality effect,” was an emblematic technology of science and modernity. Physicians and surgeons eagerly adopted it, showed an ardent desire to photograph pathological conditions,  microscopic views, laboratory experiments,  surgeries, etc. The medical photograph had rhetorical advantages, seemed to show the object as if directly presented to the viewer, without any mediation.

But anatomists were slow to  embrace photography. When, in the 1870s and after, Nicolaus Rüdinger, Eugène-Louis Doyen and other anatomists finally took to it, they took liberties. They cut, sliced, posed, and lit their cadavers and body parts in odd, idiosyncratic ways. Their photographs were retouched, silhouetted or colored, and outfitted with haloes of captions. The artist’s pen and brush was as evident as the anatomist’s saw and scalpel — and both were subject to an aesthetic impulse. The resultant photographic objects were eccentric, provocative, powerful and very modern. And yet, photography never displaced the artist-drawn anatomical illustration.

This illustrated talk will consider the epistemological status, rhetorical power, aesthetics,  and moral implications of anatomical photography as they were debated long ago—and as we debate them now.

Michael Sappol

Dr Michael Sappol is a Senior Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala. He is the author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies(2002) and Dream Anatomy (2006), and co-editor of A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Empire (2010). His new book, Body Modern: Fritz Kahn, Scientific Illustration and the Homuncular Subject, was published by University of Minnesota Press in February 2017.

 

 

 

 

This is the audio only version of this talk by Dr Michael Sappol. To see a video version of this talk – which includes the images discussed – please go to our next podcast episode.

Speaker

Dr Michael Sappol (EURIAS Senior Fellow, Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala)

Chair

Associate Professor Catherine Cox (Director, UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland)

Title

Anatomy’s Photography: Objectivity, Showmanship and the Reinvention of the Anatomical Image, 1860–1950

Event

UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 20 April 2017. This seminar series was funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Summary

Historians have intensively studied medical photography — photographic clinics, medical portraiture, forensic medicine, photomicrography, and so on. But missing from that list is the field that for centuries stood at the heart of the medical curriculum, and whose images had a privileged status in the hierarchy of medical print culture: anatomy.

Photography, with its famously powerful “reality effect,” was an emblematic technology of science and modernity. Physicians and surgeons eagerly adopted it, showed an ardent desire to photograph pathological conditions,  microscopic views, laboratory experiments,  surgeries, etc. The medical photograph had rhetorical advantages, seemed to show the object as if directly presented to the viewer, without any mediation.

But anatomists were slow to  embrace photography. When, in the 1870s and after, Nicolaus Rüdinger, Eugène-Louis Doyen and other anatomists finally took to it, they took liberties. They cut, sliced, posed, and lit their cadavers and body parts in odd, idiosyncratic ways. Their photographs were retouched, silhouetted or colored, and outfitted with haloes of captions. The artist’s pen and brush was as evident as the anatomist’s saw and scalpel — and both were subject to an aesthetic impulse. The resultant photographic objects were eccentric, provocative, powerful and very modern. And yet, photography never displaced the artist-drawn anatomical illustration.

This illustrated talk will consider the epistemological status, rhetorical power, aesthetics,  and moral implications of anatomical photography as they were debated long ago—and as we debate them now.

Michael Sappol

Dr Michael Sappol is a Senior Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala. He is the author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies(2002) and Dream Anatomy (2006), and co-editor of A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Empire (2010). His new book, Body Modern: Fritz Kahn, Scientific Illustration and the Homuncular Subject, was published by University of Minnesota Press in February 2017.

 

 

 

Speaker

Dr David Durnin (UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, University College Dublin)

Chair

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

Title

‘It is our Duty’: Medical Provision and the Irish Experience of the First World War

Event

UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 30 March 2017. This event was funded by kind support from the Wellcome Trust.

Summary

Some 210,000 Irish personnel enlisted to serve with the British Armed Forces during the First World War. Among these were Irish medics – doctors, surgeons and general practitioners who participated in the conflict.

This paper looks at the response of Irish medical personnel to the First World War. It analyses enlistment patterns and determines how international initiatives, such as the creation of specialised recruitment committees, were adopted in Ireland and influenced the trends of Irish medical enlistment into the Royal Army Medical Corps – the medical wing of the British Army. Irish medical involvement in the First World War was not just limited to the enlistment of men into the British Army medical services.

The Royal Army Medical Corps command also identified Ireland’s network of hospitals as an appropriate support system for Britain’s military hospitals. This paper, therefore, also explores the effects of the Royal Army Medical Corps Irish Command’s attempts to establish a suitable medical set-up to receive sick and wounded soldiers who were returned to Ireland and outline how this impacted on civilian medical care.

David Durnin

Dr David Durnin, historian of medicine and war, was an IRCHSS Doctoral Scholar at the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland. He is the winner of the 2011 RCPI History of Medicine Research Award. His recently published edited collection,Medicine Health and the Irish Experience of Conflict 1914-45, is currently available from Manchester University Press.

Speaker

Dr James McGeachie (Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, University of Ulster)

Chair

Dr Fiachra Byrne (UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland)

Title

A Network of Enterprises and a Centre of Calculation: Becoming Sir William Wilde

Event

UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 6 October 2016

Summary

This paper looks at the foundational years of William Wilde’s career and explores what they can tell us about how you became a leading member of the Dublin medical elite between the 1830s and the 1850s. Drawing on approaches and methodologies developed by historians and sociologists of medicine and science, Dr McGeachie argues that being the savant and public intellectual that Wilde became should not be seen as a manifestation of him as an individual Hibernian virtuoso in a cluster of other virtuosos in the Dublin of that time. Rather it was a crucial part of how you fashioned yourself as an elite medical man in these islands during the nineteenth century and right through to the early twentieth century.

 

James McGeachie (May 2016) ‘Wilde’s worlds: Sir William Wilde in Victorian Ireland‘, Irish Journal of Medical Science 185(2): 303–307.

James McGeachie

Dr James McGeachie is an Associated Staff Member at the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, University of Ulster. He is a leading expert on the medical elite and public intellectuals in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland. He has published extensively on figures such as William Wilde and George Sigerson and is contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Dictionary of Medical Biography. His current research is on Sir William Wilde and nineteenth-century medical biography and on the Victorian exhibition impressario John Connellan Deane.

Speaker

Dr Rosemary Wall (University of Hull)

Chair

Dr David Durnin (UCD Centre for the History Medicine)

Title

The British Red Cross in 1916: Conscription, the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme

Event

UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 6 October 2016

Summary

This paper looks at the British Red Cross during the First World War and the year of 1916 more specifically. It is drawn from what will be a chapter in Rosemary’s forthcoming book on the history of the British Red Cross. It examines the effect of the Military Service Acts, Conscription, the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme on the British Red Cross.

The British National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded was founded during the Franco-Prussian War to provide medical relief to both sides in the conflict. In 1905 this organisation was renamed as the British Red Cross. In the wake of this reorganisation, voluntary aid detachments were established throughout Britain from 1909 onwards.

In some regions, such as Derbyshire, these were primarily male detachments that were formed out of the existing territorial forces. Between 1909 and 1914 some 50,000 women also joined the voluntary aid detachments. While women formed the bulk of the membership it is often overlooked that during the period of the First World War fully one-third of the members of the voluntary aid detachments were in fact men.

Rosemary Wall

Dr Rosemary Wall is Senior Lecturer in Global History at the University of Hull. Rosemary’s research looks at the history of medicine in Britain and in British overseas territories. She is currently the Principal Investigator, with Professor Barry Doyle (University of Huddersfield), of a project entitled ‘Crossing Boundaries: The History of First Aid in Britain and France 1909–1989’, which is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. As part of this research, Rosemary is presently writing a book on the history of the British Red Cross. She is also in the process of finalising a book, co-authored with colleagues at King’s College London, on British colonial nursing. Her doctoral research examined the role of bacteriology in hospitals, places of work and in local communities. In 2013, she published a monograph on this topic, entitled Bacteria in Britain, 1880–1939 (Pickering and Chatto). This work was republished as a paperback by Routledge in 2015.

Speaker

Dr Janet Greenlees (Glasgow Caledonian University)

Chair

Dr Fiachra Byrne (UCD Centre for the History of Medicine)

Title

The Tenuous Relationship Between Gender Health and Work in Britain and America, c.1860–1960

Event

UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 3 March 2016

Summary

This paper looks at the intersection of public health and the working environment in Britain and America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses particularly on gender and how workers, male and female, understood the perceived occupational health risks in the two countries.

In her talk, Janet explores the experiences of occupational ill-health of male and female workers  when they worked alongside each other, and their responses in managing health and in seeking reforms to an unhealthy work environment. She presents a rich, multi-layered narrative involving employers, workers, politicians, social reformers, and purveyors of medicines – with these different groups of actors being important in different situations as both individuals and as groups of men and women who daily calculated the health risks associated with work and who sought to address such risks within the boundary of what they deemed acceptable working conditions. This boundary was fluid and it only sometimes corresponded with either trade union or political agendas. Workers’ agency also varied depending on the relative personal, economic, and labour market constraints at play.

Janet Greenlees

Dr Janet Greenlees is a Senior Lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University and Deputy Director of the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare. Janet’s research interests extend across nineteenth and twentieth century Britain and America with a particular focus on occupational and environmental health, women’s health, and the textile industry. She has published numerous research articles in peer-reviewed journals including, Social History of Medicine, Medical History, Social History, and Urban History. Janet has also edited the collected volumes Western Maternity and Medicine (2014) and Caring for the Poor in Twentieth Century Scotland (2015). Her monograph Female Labour Power: Women Workers’ Influence on Business Practices in the British and American Cotton Industries, c. 1790-1860 was published by Ashgate in 2007. She is currently working on a book, to be published by Rutgers University Press, provisionally titled, When Air Became Important: A Social History of the Working Environme...

Speaker

Dr Alice Mauger

Chair

Dr Catherine Cox (Director, UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland)

Title

The Cost of Insanity: Public, Voluntary and Private Asylum Care in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Event

UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 4 February 2016

Summary

How did Irish medical practitioners and lay people interpret and define mental illness? What behaviours were considered so out of the ordinary that they warranted locking up, in some cases never to return to society? Did exhibiting behaviour that threatened land and property interests, the financial success of the family or even just that which caused embarrassment eclipse familial devotion and render some individuals ‘unmanageable’?

The nineteenth century saw the evolution of asylum care in Ireland. While Jonathan Swift famously left most of his fortune to found Ireland first lunatic asylum in 1746, it would be 70 years before the government followed his lead. In 1817 it enacted legislation permitting districts throughout Ireland to form asylums and by 1900, twenty-two such hospitals accommodated almost 16,000 patients. Growing demand for care for other social groups prompted the decision, in 1870, to admit some fee-paying patients, charged between £6 and £24 per annum, depending on their means. Out of this 16,000 only around 3% actually paid for their care. Private asylums, meanwhile, charged extremely high fees that were out of reach for the majority of society (usually several hundred pounds per year) and by 1900, thirteen private asylums housed 300 patients. Occupying a sort of middle ground, voluntary asylums, established by philanthropists, offered less expensive accommodation to those who could not afford high private asylum fees (from around £24 to a few hundred pounds). By 1900, these four voluntary asylum had outstripped the thirteen private ones, providing for 400 patients.

Alice Mauger

Dr Alice Mauger successfully completed a PhD at UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland in 2014. Her doctoral thesis examined institutions for the non-pauper insane in nineteenth-century Ireland. Prior to this she completed the MA programme on the Social and Cultural History of Medicine at the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, UCD. Both her MA and PhD were funded by the Wellcome Trust. Dr Mauger has published on the history of psychiatry in Ireland and is currently writing a monograph stemming from her doctoral research.

Speaker

Dr Lindsey Earner-Byrne (University College Dublin)

Chair

Dr Catherine Cox (Director, UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland)

Title

‘Dear Father my health is broken down’: Writing health in Irish charity letters, 1922-1940

Event

UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 18 September 2014

Summary

This paper focuses on the perspective of those who experienced poverty, rather than those who decided policy, in the first decades of the newly-independent Irish state. It forms part of a wider project examining the issue of poverty in Ireland in the 1920s.

The principal archival source from which this talk was drawn is a collection of letters held at the Dublin Diocesan Archives.  These letters, written by ordinary people, were addressed to the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin,  Archbishop Byrne, between 1920 and 1940. The topic of this paper emerged due to the ubiquity of questions of health as an overwhelming theme in these sources.

The title of the paper, ‘Dear Father my health is broken down’, is taken from one source letter – but it is phrase that was used in many such letters and constituted a common idiom to express general ill-health in the 1920s and 1930s.

 

Lindsey Earner-Byrne

Dr Lindsey Earner-Byrne is a lecturer in the School of History, University College Dublin and an Associate Staff Member of the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland. She is an expert on poverty, gender, sexuality, the history of medicine and the development of welfare services in modern Ireland. In addition to her numerous scholarly publications, she is the author of a major monograph on the development of Irish maternal and child welfare services, Mother and Child: Maternity and Child Welfare in Ireland, 1920s-1960s (Manchester University Press, 2012) and a further monograph, The Letters of the Catholic Poor: Poverty in Independent Ireland, 1920-1940 (Cambridge) is forthcoming. This latter publication has emerged out of the research project, of which she was the director, ‘Evolution of the Irish States Project, 2008-2011: Poverty and the Poor in Modern Ireland‘.

Lindsey has featured extensively on radio and television programmes as an authority on the social history of Ireland. You can listen to Lindsey discussing the importance of the of the Mother and Child Scheme Controversy via a HistoryHub podcast.

Speaker

Dr Angela Davis (University of Warwick)

Chair

Dr Lindsey Earner Byrne (University College Dublin)

Title

Developing Bodies and Minds: Children’s Experiences of Pre-school Childcare, Britain c. 1939-1979

Event

Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 29 January 2015

Summary

Dr Angela Davis, author of Preschool Childcare in England, 1939-2010: Theory, Practice and Experience, discusses her research on the history of pre-school childcare in day nurseries in England, 1939-1979. In the middle of twentieth century the question of how to care for the under-fives was apparently an uncontroversial one in Britain as it was commonly assumed that such children were best left at home with mother. Yet, when probing beneath this assumption, it becomes clear that the issue was in fact subject to intense debate. Arguments against childcare outside the home centred on the fear that separating infants from their mothers caused them emotional harm whilst its proponents believed that it provided children with opportunities for physical, cognitive, and social development.

If most people agreed that very young children should be at home with their mother, until what age this should be was not always clear. Should this be until they were two, three, or even five? Should care or education be the main goal of pre-school childcare? And what about children that couldn’t be looked after by their mothers? Children whose home conditions meant that their health would benefit from time spent outside the home? Or, indeed, the only-child who lacked the company of other children? And casting a shadow over all these debates was the rising rate of female employment. What should be done about the children of working mothers?

There were no simple answers to any of these questions with issues of resources combining with ideological concerns about the respective roles of the state and the family as well as competing theories of child development also determining the provision of care for the under-fives. A lack of funding for many child health and welfare schemes meant they could not always meet societal aspirations.

The research for this paper forms part of a wider project looking at pre-school childcare in post-war Britain. This talk examines children’s experiences of one form of pre-school childcare – the day nursery – using a range of different published and unpublished material, including both written documents and oral history interviews. There was a wealth contemporary sociological and medical studies conducted in the post-war decades into the health and well-being of children in different forms of pre-school provision. There was research into the preferences of parents, the economics of care, and the job satisfaction of practitioners. There were also a number of studies into how women were able to combine home and work. This paper also looks at archival records, government records and reports at the local and national level looking at decisions made around the provision of pre-school childcare. It also makes use of oral history interviews, conducted by the author, in order to think about the experiences of those involved in pre-school childcare, including practitioners, mothers, and those who attended childcare as children.

Angela Davis

Dr Angela Davis currently holds a Wellcome University Award at the University of Warwick. Previously she has been the recipient of a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship.