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

Speaker

Robbie Roulston (University College Dublin)

Title

The Adelaide Hospital and Upholding Protestant Healthcare in Ireland 1950-1972

Event

Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 3 April 2014

Summary

This paper has emerged out of research into the the Church of Ireland’s approach, during the 1950s and 1960s, to medicine, medical ethics and healthcare. As an institution delivering healthcare to predominantly Church of Ireland patient’s, with a predominant Church of Ireland ethos, and a predominantly Church of Ireland staff, the Adelaide Hospital enjoyed the position as the lead institution in Church of Ireland healthcare. It is the only hospital envisaged as, in some way, belonging to the Church at the central level. The strong sense of familiarity between the church and the hospital leaves an imprint in the archival records that reveals the culture and priorities of the Church of Ireland healthcare.

The Church of Ireland Gazette was not hesitant in acknowledging the special relationship between the church and the hospital and this sense of ownership does not pertain to any other hospital in Ireland. The Adelaide is also unusual among voluntary hospitals in that it was especially well-preserved from external influence. It was not a local authority hospital and a local authority representative only appeared on the board in 1953 when it agreed to receive some limited local authority funds. It refused money from the Hospital Trust Fund until the mid-1950s and as an essentially religious and Protestant institution it was free from the direct involvement of the Catholic Church. Therefore, of the dominant players in Irish healthcare other than the Department of Health – the Irish Medical Association (IMA), the Hospital Trust Fund, the Catholic Church, and local authorities – only the IMA could make itself within the corridors of the Adelaide Hospital until the 1950s. Therefore it is an ideal test study of the Church of Ireland’s approach to healthcare and Irish protestantism more generally.

 

Speaker

Professor Mary Daly (University College Dublin

Title

Rhythm and Blues – Natural Family Planning in Ireland, 1930s-1980s

Event

Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 6 February 2014

Summary

The typical historiography of contraception in Ireland focuses on well-known landmarks such as the 1935 Criminal Law Amendment Act, the Mary Robinson bills, and the contraceptive train. While these are no doubt important events, this paper takes a different and broader historical approach.

There are many different methods of ‘natural’ family planning with thirteen different varieties listed in The Furrow. However, they all have one feature in common, which is to identify the phases in a woman’s menstrual cycle when she’s likely to conceive. The Catholic Church and all advocates of ‘natural’ family planning are very careful to state that it is not contraception. While its study has largely been omitted by Irish historians it is an exceedingly important topic.

In 1974, market research revealed that fifty-five per cent of women using family planning in Ireland were using ‘natural’ methods. In 1985 a survey of the contraceptive history of mothers who had recently given birth in the Rotunda, Dublin, showed that thirty per cent had used natural family planning; a further thirty per cent, mostly first-time mothers, had not taken any steps to avoid contraception. Natural family planning is central to the story of Ireland’s fertility decline or lack thereof.

This paper attempts to build the first narrative of natural family planning in Ireland. Apart from establishing this narrative the underlying questions are, ‘Is Ireland different from other Catholic countries? What does natural family planning tell us about the Catholic church in twentieth-century Ireland? What does it tell us about Irish society?

In demographic terms, Ireland is different. It is a country of late marriages and a high level of permanent celibacy; but those who married had lots of children. In 1961 the Irish birth rate was almost double the British or Greek rates and two-and-half-times the Swedish. The Irish pattern is one of large families well into the second-half of the twentieth century. In 1967 twenty-three per cent of mothers giving birth in Holles street were giving birth to their fifth or greater child; by 1976 the figure is ten per cent. The decline happening then was at the level of very large families. Holles could claim in 1976 that the days of the grand multipara were over but the grand multpara account for one in ten of all babies born in the Rotunda in 1963. But it’s not until the 1980s that there was a significant fall in Ireland’s fertility rate and Ireland family size was still, in the 1990s, decidedly larger than the EU average. There is a story to be explained about Ireland’s fertility

While natural family planning has a much higher failure rate than the pill or modern barrier methods, the historical evidence shows that most of the long-term historical decline in fertility rates was achieved in the absence of modern reliable methods of birth control. The work of Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher in Britain highlights the importance of abstinence and withdrawal in reducing fertility. From the late nineteenth century until the 1960s, Fisher claims that despite the increasing use of barrier methods, for the period before the pill, withdrawal remained the most dominant method of birth control. According to John Marshall, a British neurologist who worked closely with the Catholic Marriage Advisory Council and the papal commission on contraception in the 1960s,

Speaker

Dr Laura Kelly (CHOMI, UCD).

Title

“Some of these Gentlemen may be a little Wild”: Irish Medical Student Culture, Gentility and Professional Identity, c.1830-1900

Event

Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 7 November 2013

Summary

In 1831, sixteen-year-old Robert Thompson from Kilkenny began his medical studies at Dr Steeven’s Hospital, Dublin. During this year he resided at the hospital, ‘where a number of wild fellows messsed in our room, generally spent our evenings sparring and drinking punch and going into the upper gallery at the theatre’. He then went on to train at the Royal College of Surgeons, remarking that, in 1834, he spent ‘a jolly winter, drank a great deal of punch’ and went to the theatre at least two times a week. Thompson’s recreational activities were not, however, confined to drinking punch and going to the theatre. On his twentieth birthday on the 20 October, 1836, he noted the following in his diary. ‘I am twenty today. Dined at O’Hara’s in the evening. At Bull’s got into a fight. Browne and I well beat by six or seven fellows. J Healy lodged a pound for me and him. In the morning went to College Street. No prosecution’.

As historians of medicine have shown, the medical student of the early nineteenth century possessed a dire reputation. Incidendence of criminal, drink-fueled, and rambunctious activity among Irish medical students were widely reported in the first-half of the nineteenth century. In particularly, Irish students had a reputation for being less gentlemanly and less educated than their counterparts from other countries. William Stokes, the Irish physician, speaking in 1855, commented that an acquaintance of his who was head of one of the departments of the public service had remarked: ‘We get from Ireland some of our very best and very worst men’. Stokes asked him what the latter were lacking in, to which he replied, ‘in conduct and in common letters’.

Keir Waddinton’s work has explored how and why the image the image of the rowdy medical student came to be perpetuated in early nineteenth century London. He has suggested that such stereotypes emerged as a consequence of fears about the city and rising crime rates with their reported behaviour embodying the corrupting influence of the city. At the same time, these stereotypes reflected the low and uncertain status of medicine. The flexible system of training whereby students selected which lectures and schools to sign up for left a considerable amount of time for the sights an delights of London. Lecturers at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in the late nineteenth century were willing to accept certain types of behaviour because they were familiar with student culture and recognised that such behaviours were an important release from the demands of study.

This paper examines Irish medical student culture and behaviour . It argues that class and the economic aspects of the Irish context are important factors to bear in mind. Irish medical schools competing for students were more likely to turn a blind to students’ rambunctious behaviour. The social backgrounds of medical students were also important. Finally, this paper dissects these instances of boisterous behaviour from the student perspective, emphasising that it was the gruelling nature of medical study, poor living conditions and lack of supervision and colleagiate accommodation which also resulted in student engagement in these activities. This paper also touches on student involvement i...

Speaker

Dr Sean Lucey (Queen’s University Belfast)

Title

Municipal Health Care and Maternity and Child Welfare in Inter-War Belfast

Event

Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 17 October 2013

Summary: Maternity and Child Welfare in Inter-War Belfast

In 1935 the Medical Officer for Health for Belfast, Charles Thompson, wrote in his annual report that, ‘It is truism that public health is a purchasable commodity’. Thompson’s comments were aimed at prompting Belfast Corporation to increase its expenditure on the city’s public health services generally and specifically on the municipal maternity and child welfare schemes. Although initially introduced in 1918, Belfast’s maternity and child welfare services lagged far behind similar schemes in British cities. The lack of such provision was highly controversial due to the city’s infamously high infant and maternal mortality rates.

This paper examines the political, social, economic, administrative, medical and religious factors which led to the underdevelopment of Belfast’s maternity and child welfare provision. The paper in particular is influenced by a number of recent trends in Irish and British historiography. Within a British context, there has been a renewed focus on inter-war municipal healthcare and services – that is, the services provided by the county boroughs such as Belfast Corporation, Dublin Corporation as well as county councils as opposed to voluntary charitable healthcare and Poor Law healthcare which have been the traditional focus of attention. The Inter-War Period is viewed as the zenith of local municipal authority and autonomy and as a result provides insights into locally controlled public health systems and issues relating to local responsiveness and democratic accountability.

The period particularly contrasts with modern-day healthcare systems such as the NHS or the Irish health system which tend to be centrally and bureaucratically controlled. Much of the recent historiography has primarily concentrated on the issue of finance and patterns of expenditure which has been seen as a proxy for local authority effort and standard of service.

Sean Lucey

Sean Lucey is a historian of healthcare and welfare with a specific expertise in medical and poor relief and hospital provision. He is currently a Research Fellow on the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project ‘Poverty and Public Health in Belfast and the North of Ireland’. He is writing a monograph on poverty and public health in Belfast and its environs during the period 1898-1973. Sean previously held an Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences Fellowship (two years) in the Centre for Contemporary Irish History in Trinity College Dublin. The project explored attempts during the 1920s and 1930s of the newly established Irish Free State at reform of the poor law and workhouse system. This research is the focus of a forthcoming monograph.Previously Sean worked as an Economic and Social Research Council (E.S.R.C) Postdoctoral Associate on the ‘Irish welfare regimes under the Irish Poor Law, 1850-1921’ at Oxford Brookes University. This project explored the workhouse and outdoor relief system in Ireland.He has held research positions in the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, University College Dublin and the Centre for the History of Nursing and Midwifery, University College Dublin.

Speaker

Dr Juliana Adelman (St Patrick’s College Drumcondra)

Title

Cows, Contagion and Sanitation in Victorian Dublin

Event

Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 26 September 2013

Summary

This paper examines the relationship between humans and animals and specifically how the animal economy of the city of Dublin in the nineteenth century effected public health policy and practice. It looks at certain ideas around contagion and germs that became salient with the impact of various epidemics in both humans and animals over three distinct time periods: the first, between 1849-1865, encompasses the Dublin Improvement Act and before the cattle plague; the second, 1865-1874, which encompasses the cattle plague, two cholera epidemics, and a problem with smallpox; and finally, 1874-1880, when, in the run up to the Sewerage and Drainage Inquiry, increasing concerns about Dublin’s death rate were being voiced. The main diseases of concern for this paper are contagious bovine pleuropneumonia and smallpox.

Juliana argues in ‘Cows, Contagion and Sanitation’ that there is evidence for a shift in ideas over this timer period for both how animals are viewed and how their impact on public health is understood. There is a slow but perceptible shift away from a focus on disease in dead animals and thus slaughterhouses and meat to one that suggests disease by living animals should be a priority, leading to a focus on dairy yards and milk. The starting point is Michael Worboys work on cattle plague and its contribution to the acceptance of ideas about contagionism and his argument that veterinarians and medical men took different paths in terms of how they viewed disease, with veterinarians advocating a culling and compensation policy where animals were essentially quarantined and then slaughtered and having little interest in vaccination. Conversely, doctors and sanitarians, no matter how much they might have wished, could have hardly proposed the same solution for diseased persons.

Worboys is largely concerned with how contagion and germ theories spread among medical practitioners and the effects of bacteriology on laboratory medicine and he sees the 1870s as a key period for the acceptance of germ theories and how they effect practice and public health; although other writers have suggested that there was resistance to these practices well into the twentieth century. This paper, approaching the problem from a different angle, is interested in how attitudes towards animals and animal disease played into debates about public health and also how the spread of ideas about germs effect and were effected by how public health officials dealt with animals.

Juliana Adelman

Juliana Adelman is a lecturer in the History Department of St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra. Her research interests include the economic and social history of nineteenth-century Ireland, the history of disease, the history of science, urban history and environmental history. She is the secretary of the Economic and Social History Society of Ireland, the chair of the

Speaker

Professor Cara Delay (College of Charleston and Fulbright Scholar at UCD Humanities Institute)

Title

Illegal Abortion Cases in Twentieth-Century Ireland.

Speaker

Professor Joseph Ziegler (University of Haifa)

Title

Physiognomy and the Rise of Scientific Observation c. 1500

Event

UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 28 February 2013

Summary

This paper explores physiognomy during the Middle Ages. Physiognomy belongs to a group of practices, including medicine, that revolve around the semiotics of the body. The physiognomer has always used the same analytical categories – colour, movement, shape, texture, temperature – that help the physician determine a diagnosis. What really lies behind this symptomatic model, shared in this case by medicine and physiognomy? Intuition, access to occult or even divine knowledge, for a solid theoretical framework which can crown these practices with the desired diadem of a science. If this question was asked before the year 1200 in the Latin West the answer would probably have been that with this kind of knowledge factors are at play which cannot be measured. A whiff, a glance, an intuition. But parallel to a well-documented process that led to the recognition of medicine as a medieval science, a similar but slightly slower process can be detected in physiognomy. The great contribution of the Middle Age’s to physiognomy would be to free it from this intuitive, conjectural stage by supplying it with a firm theoretical foundation. But this happened gradually and not without some serious opposition. The long list of signs and significances, very often badly ordered and unsystematic and always lacking an attempt to provide some sort of causal explanation could not be received to the Pantheon of the sciences just like that. The approach of combination of evidence whereby several pieces of evidence support the specific conclusion even if the individual pieces are weak adopted by the ancient physiognomers to stabilise the uncertainty characterising the subject did not remove the doubts engulfing physiognomy. Something else was needed, From the late twelfth century two important classical authorities which became came available to all provided significant argument …

Dr Susan Grant (UCD). The Development of Early Soviet Nursing, 1917-1941.

Prof Greta Jones (UU). The Border in Irish Medicine.

Dr Fiachra Byrne (UCD). Patient Subjects, Medical Objects. Encounters in the Irish Mental Hospital 1900-58.