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

Speaker

Clare Hickman (King’s College London)

Title

Botanic Gardens as Spaces and Places of Medical Teaching – The example of the Glasgow and Edinburgh Botanic Gardens.

Event

Paper given at the symposium, ‘Medical training, student experience and the transmission of knowledge, c.1800-2014’, organised by Laura Kelly, at CHOMI, UCD, October 2014

Summary

This paper will explore the ways in which botanic gardens were utilised as spaces and sources of material for teaching medical students at the turn of the nineteenth century. It will

focus two University botanic gardens in Scotland. Firstly, I will discuss the early nineteenth century development of Glasgow Botanic Garden (opened 1817) with its designated role as

a place for medical education as well as a public garden. This will be compared with the earlier Edinburgh botanic garden, which was also both a teaching resource and a public garden. Of particular interest is the period under Dr John Hope, who as King’s botanist for Scotland and Superintendent of the Royal Garden in Edinburgh created the new botanic garden in the 1760s and also taught within it.

This last example is particularly important because there are surviving records of notes made by students at his lectures, diagrams of his botanical experiments and plans of how the gardens were laid out. There are also plant lists sent to the College of Surgeons. His roles as teacher, botanist and garden designer can be used to illuminate how spaces outside the lecture theatre, laboratory and the hospital were utilised and give context to the development of the Glasgow botanic garden.

One of the key questions I hope to explore is how these gardens were used as part of the medical education and did their design reflect their educational function? Therese O’Malley’s work on botanic gardens has explored the relationship between aesthetics and scientific knowledge (Conan, 1992) and David Livingstone has identified the University botanic garden as an important space for scientific knowledge (Livingstone, 2003). I will extend this by further interrogating this idea and analysing how teaching was conducted within the gardens and how botanic specimens were taken from the gardens and used in lectures and demonstrations. The central primary sources for this will be accounts of teaching practices and lecture notes held in archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh and Glasgow University. This research forms part of my wider Wellcome Medical History & Humanities Fellowship exploring the ‘Garden as a Laboratory’ in the long eighteenth century.

 

Speaker

Dr Laurence Geary (University College Cork)

Title

Medical Education in Nineteenth-Century Australia

Event

Paper given at the symposium, ‘Medical training, student experience and the transmission of knowledge, c.1800-2014’, organised by Laura Kelly, at CHOMI, UCD, October 2014

Summary

For the first three-quarters of a century of white occupation of Australia, residents who wished to pursue a medical career had to obtain their qualifications overseas. Many were precluded from doing do because of the distance, time, inconvenience and expense involved. The first Australian medical school opened inauspiciously at the University of Melbourne in 1862, with two teachers, three enrolled students, and no buildings, followed by two other university schools, Sydney and Adelaide, in 1883 and 1885 respectively. As the Australian medical schools expanded and overcame their initial difficulties students were attracted to them in ever increasing numbers. By 1900, the Melbourne and Sydney schools had produced about 650 graduates between them and had another 500 students on their combined rolls. This paper traces the evolution of these schools, the influences on their development, and their gradual consolidation over the course of the nineteenth century.

Towards the end of 1862 George Britton Halford arrived from England to take up the Chair of General Anatomy, Physiology, and Pathology at the newly opened medical school at Melbourne University. Halford, one of the most distinguished experimental physiologists of the day, was expected to lend tone and character to the medical school and to add lustre to the university generally. In May 1863, six months following his arrival in Melbourne, Halford inaugurated his course of lectures by means of the traditional introductory address – one that proved to be verbose, rhetorical and platitudinous. He was also extremely short on the specifics of medical education that one might have expected on such a historical occasion. Shortly afterwards, Halford conducted the first anatomy class in the southern hemisphere. It took place in a hastily converted shed in his own backyard with three medical students and two qualified practitioners in attendance.

The Melbourne Medical School gradually developed from these humble beginnings but it was its counterpart in Sydney that was most immediately successful of three nineteenth-century Australian teaching and licensing bodies. This is almost entirely due to the determination and energy of the twenty-six-year-old Foundation Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, the Scottish-born and educated T.P. Anderson Stuart. Anderson Stuart’s ability, ambition and vision were matched only by his arrogance and conceit.

Speaker

Ailish Veale (Trinity College Dublin)

Title

The dual training of medical missionaries, 1940-1960

Event

Paper given at the symposium, ‘Medical training, student experience and the transmission of knowledge, c.1800-2014’, organised by Laura Kelly, at CHOMI, UCD, October 2014

Summary

Prior to 1936 Catholic nuns were forbidden by Canon law from practicing medicine or midwifery, as these were deemed a threat to their vows of chastity and obedience. Only after a lengthy campaign of propaganda and action by a number of pioneer women doctors, and male and female religious was this Canon law rule amended.

The Medical Missionaries of Mary is an Irish congregation of medical and nursing nuns, founded in 1936 by Mother Mary Martin directly after this reversal of the Canon Law ban. From the very beginning Mother Mary had intended to recruit nurses and doctors to tend to ‘the mother and child in Pagan lands’. Issues quickly arose however over how to properly integrate a religious vocation (that demanded obedience, subservience and humility) with a medical profession (that demanded decisiveness, independence and authority). One way of managing these contradictory claims was through a strict religious and medical training. The Sisters training to be Doctors resided as a student community in the congregation‟s House of Studies, under the watchful and controlling eye of Archbishop Charles McQuaid. The student-Sisters lived a regimented life of prayer and study, learning to cultivate and master their interior selves. In the Catholic University, they were to behave as secular students. They wore discreet lay dress and attended all the required lectures.

Using missionary magazines, oral history and personal letters, this paper will examine the unique experience of Irish nuns who trained as doctors in the mid-twentieth century. It will first examine how the Sisters’ narrated their experience of this dual training, and will then briefly consider whether this training was ultimately successful by examining their experience on the missions.

Speaker

Gillian McClelland (Queen’s University Belfast)

Title

Lady Dufferin’s Fund and Medical Training for Women Educated in Colonial India 1885-1920

Event

Paper given at the symposium, ‘Medical training, student experience and the transmission of knowledge, c.1800-2014’, organised by Laura Kelly, at CHOMI, UCD, October 2014

Summary

The vicereine of India, Harriot Dufferin’s Fund for Providing Medical Aid for the Women of India, established lying-in hospitals, it trained local women in midwifery and funded medical education in the United Kingdom and Ireland for women who had qualified as medical practitioners in medical schools in Madras, Agra, Lahore, the Punjab and Calcutta; Indian medical schools had allowed women entry to diploma courses in the early 1870s. This was earlier than the large majority of medical schools in the United Kingdom. The records provide a wealth of detail of twenty-five applicants, their Indian qualifications, training and experience in the Dufferin Hospitals which were located in many Indian states such as Durbhungha, Rangoon, Partabjarle and Calcutta. These women were unable to progress in their careers as the colonial authorities did not accept Indian training as equal to that gained in Britain. The women could spend up to two years in their choice of medical schools, including the Female Medical School, Edinburgh, The Rotunda and Coombe Hospitals, Dublin or the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, London . Their experience varied from the newly qualified to the more experienced doctors, for example Dr D’Abru had been in charge of the Dufferin Female Hospital, Partabjarle for one year. For the three years before her 1896 application she had worked as the third Lady Doctor in Lady Lyall Hospital Agra and lecturer in Clinical Medicine and Surgery In the Female Medical School, Agra.

The ‘lady doctors’, aged from twenty-three to forty-two, came from all over India; from different ethnic groups including Eurasians, Hebrews, Anglo-Indians, Portuguese, Bengalis and Burmese. The applications for British training and the letters between the ‘students’ and Lady Dufferin, both before and during their time in Britain, provide us with a great insight into colonial attitudes, the process by which women were chosen for the coveted British training and an opportunity to reconstruct their experiences.

 

Speaker

Anne Hanley (University of Cambridge)

Title

Venereology at the Polyclinic – Postgraduate study among general practitioners in England, 1899-1914

Event

Paper given at the symposium, ‘Medical training, student experience and the transmission of knowledge, c.1800-2014’, organised by Laura Kelly, at CHOMI, UCD, October 2014

Summary

In 1899, the British Medical Journal enthusiastically announced that a new postgraduate teaching college was to open in London. The aim of the Medical Graduates’ College and Polyclinic was to provide continuing education to general practitioners. It drew upon emerging specialisms and in so doing built upon the generalist training received at an undergraduate level. Postgraduate study was intended to introduce general practitioners to new knowledge claims and clinical practices. It offered general practitioners access to a constantly changing body of medical knowledge, allowing them to pursue special interests whilst maintaining their general practices. The establishment of postgraduate institutions such as the Medical Graduates’ College marked an important stage in the development of medical education in England.

A general practitioner’s formal training was no longer thought to necessarily end with undergraduate study. The generalist nature of the undergraduate curriculum was beginning to be recognised as insufficient for effective and safe clinical practice. Postgraduate training recognised the fact that a practitioner’s knowledge constantly needed to be refreshed and augmented in systematised ways that could not be achieved simply in the course of general practice. Yet these institutions, and the emergence of postgraduate medical education more broadly, have been largely overlooked by historians. Moreover, the history of venereological training among medical undergraduates and postgraduates alike has been overlooked. The study of such special subjects characterized postgraduate study. This paper examines the dissemination of venereological knowledge among subscribers to Medical Graduates’ College as an important case study for the development of institutionalized postgraduate medical education in England at the turn of the twentieth century.

A version of this paper has been published in Medical History (2015).

Speaker

Professor Greta Jones (University of Ulster)

Title

The Irish Response to Flexner and the Transformation of American Medical Education in the Twentieth Century

Event

Paper given at the symposium, ‘Medical training, student experience and the transmission of knowledge, c.1800-2014’, organised by Laura Kelly, at CHOMI, UCD, October 2014

Summary

Following the Second World War North America and, in particular the United States, began to attract, on a much larger scale than had hitherto had been experienced, graduates of foreign medical schools. Irish medical graduates were part of this global movement. The process raised questions about accreditation and therefore about the standard of medical education in the countries exporting their graduates to the USA. Tensions arose between the perceived interests of indigenous American physicians and those of the migrating doctors. This paper looks at how this was experienced in Ireland.

In 1865 Ireland had twenty per cent of the population of the UK as a whole but had thirty-six per cent of all first-year medical students. In 1935, when the Irish population had declined to less than ten per cent of the total population of the British Isles, Irish medical schools still educated twenty per cent of all first-year students. This level of student numbers in Irish medical schools was sustained by emigration. The Irish medical profession did not see this as a loss but as an advantage. Deans of medical schools would often lecture their students on the great advantages open to the Irish medical graduate by emigration. Medical emigration was what kept Irish medical schools in existence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was the largest faculty in nearly all of the the Irish third-level institutions from the nineteenth century to the first couple of decades of the twentieth.

By the 1950s other faculties were becoming as important as the medical faculty in sustaining universities but for a long time the lack of a thriving medical school was a sure sign a university would soon be in difficulties. This was likely to have been one of the reasons why the National University of Galway was enticed to offer themselves to American G.I. undergraduates. The medical culture and institutions in Ireland were also sustained at a much higher level than might otherwise have been possible by the large numbers of medical students they had enrolled which exceeded for all the period from 1860 to 1960 the number of medical posts available in Ireland itself.

The possibility of medical migration depending upon access to the medical marketplace in the destination country. Britain and the British Empire was the most important destination for Irish medical graduates from 1860 to 1960. This was facilitated by the inclusion of Ireland in the medical register of the United Kingdom established in 1858. However, Irish political independence from 1922 was feared to threaten access. In 1925 to 1926, this led to a major confrontation between Irish doctors and the Irish Free State when the Irish government intended to create a separate medical register and disciplinary body which in the view of many Irish doctors and especially the representatives of Irish medical schools had the danger of potentially complicating access to the medical marketplace of Britain and the British Empire.

Speaker

Professor Nadav Davidovitch (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

Title

Alternative Visions of Scientific Medicine – Homeopathic Medical Education in the Post Flexner Era

Event

Paper given at the symposium, ‘Medical training, student experience and the transmission of knowledge, c.1800-2014’, organised by Laura Kelly, at CHOMI, UCD, October 2014

Summary

In an editorial published on September 15, 1921 in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, John P. Sutherland the Dean of Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) announced, “Reorganization, which for three years has been in progress in Boston University School of Medicine, is practically completed.” BUSM, a homeopathic medical school until then, went through a reorganization process that included the renouncing of its sectarian title. The decision was adopted in 1918 and was supported by most of the faculty and alumni. BUSM decision of relinquishing their homeopathic identity overwhelmed the American homeopathic profession. In these years the derogatory term “To Bostonize Homeopathy” was coined meaning “to act dishonorably, to give up a sacred trust handed down from one‟s predecessors.”

The aim of this paper is to follow the debate over what should be the relationship between science and homeopathic medical practice. The questions of what is the relevance of the new laboratory discoveries to the bedside and how the ethos of medical research should be incorporated into homeopathy tormented the homeopathic profession at the turn of the century. The development of Boston University School of Medicine, since its foundation in 1873, would serve as a case study focusing on these questions. A comparison would be made to another closure of a homeopathic school of medicine that was followed by a very different reaction of its alumni. University of Michigan Homeopathic Department was merged with the orthodox medical department in 1922. The amalgamation program involved a bitter struggle from the local homeopathic profession and active alumni that perceived the merger as a humiliating plan of extinguishing homeopathy. The different visions of how scientific homeopathy should be taught and practiced and the relationship of homeopathy to the orthodox medical profession will be compared and situated in the different local mode of homeopathic practice.

These ideals of scientific medicine will be considered in the context of the Flexner Report on the status of medical education in the U.S. and Canada, published in 1910 and broader changes in the American perception of science in the Progressive era.

A theatrical examination of diaspora, displacement and mental disorders in the 19th century

At a time when the issues of migration and mental health are seldom out of the news, CHOMI has worked with the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick (CHM) and Talking Birds to develop a new theatre production, ‘A Malady of Migration’, which explores why the mid-19th century saw a prevalence of mental disorders among Irish migrants.

This follows CHM’s successful collaboration with Talking Birds on ‘Trade in Lunacy’ in 2013, and again used original music, song, humour and sharp characterisations to tell a series of intertwining stories.

A Malady of Migration

The new piece is called ‘A Malady of Migration’ and is based on research being carried out by Professor Hilary Marland of Warwick and Dr Catherine Cox of University College Dublin, in a project called Madness, Migration and the Irish in Lancashire, c.1850-1921, funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Professor Hilary Marland, explains:

‘A Malady of Migration’ is a chance to showcase our research in a way that is interesting, informative and sensitive, weaving in stories based on patients’ case histories and experiences. The aim is to make the findings of the research available to wider publics and to stimulate thinking and debate about mental illness in the past and present.

The performance, based on an insightful and compassionate interpretation of the historical material, reveals both change and continuity in how we view mental illness, its causes and in particular its relationship to displacement, migration, isolation and poverty.

There were expert panel discussions after the Thursday evening performances in each venue and a post performance discussion on Saturday lunchtime, providing opportunities for audience members to discuss the making of the piece with researchers and the theatre company, and to engage in debate on issues raised by the performances.

A series of short briefing sheets have been produced to complement the drama and provide background information. These can be accessed from the Background Reading page.

 

Event

‘A Malady of Migration’, Expert Panel Discussion, filmed Thursday 3 July 2014 at the New Theatre, Dublin

Panel Members

Dr Catherine Cox (Director, CHOMI, University College Dublin), Professor Hilary Marland (University of Warwick), Peter Cann (Writer and Director, Talking Birds) and Laura Kelly (CHOMI, University College Dublin), Professor Brendan Kelly (University College Dublin)

Institutions

Commissioned by the Centres for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick and University College Dublin.

Funding

Supported by the Wellcome Trust, Arts Council England & Institute of Advanced Study.

Production

A Talking Birds Production

Event

‘A Malady of Migration’, Expert Panel Discussion, filmed Thursday 26 June 2014 at the Shop Front Theatre, Coventry.

Panel Members

Panel Members: Professor Hilary Marland (University of Warwick), Dr Catherine Cox (University College Dublin), Peter Cann (writer and director, Talking Birds) and Vivan Joseph (University of Warwick).

Institutions

Commissioned by the Centres for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick and University College Dublin.

Funding

Supported by the Wellcome Trust, Arts Council England & Institute of Advanced Study.

Production

A Talking Birds Production