Discursive Essay: A better known territory? Medical history and Ireland

Abstract

Academic research into the history of medicine in Ireland has attracted increased scholarly enquiry in recent decades and the subjects explored encapsulate a broad chronological and geographical breadth. This article provides an overview of the roots of the discipline in Ireland and its intellectual trajectory. It identifies particular themes that have preoccupied historians of the past decade, including the rise of lunatic asylums in the nineteenth century, campaigns to eradicate diseases and the emergence of state medicine. In contrast to earlier work on Ireland that has been criticised as narrow and Whiggish, scholars have increasingly produced fine-grained case studies that situate aspects of Irish medical history within broader economic, social and cultural contexts in Ireland, and have linked Irish experiences to key themes in the discipline internationally. Nonetheless, there remain some very basic lacunae in our knowledge, especially in relation to periods before 1800. Introduction The meanings, theories and practices of medicine, welfare, illness and disease in Ireland have attracted increased scholarly research and enquiry in recent decades. The work produced encapsulates a broad chronological and geographical breadth and is pursued by both established academics with pedigrees in political, medical, social and cultural history and by 'early career' scholars entering a field or discipline of medical history that they regard often mistakenly as entirely new. This vibrancy constitutes a significant development since 1999 when Greta Jones and Elizabeth Malcolm assessed the field in Ireland and described it as a 'largely unknown territory'.1 The 1990s was a period of reflection among social historians of medicine in general, especially those working on Britain and North America, who debated with some rigour Andrew Wear's claim that the subject had 'come * Author's e-mail: catherine.cox@ucd.ie doi: 10.331 8/PRIAC.201 3. 1 13.11 1 Greta Jones and Elizabeth Malcolm, 'Introduction: an anatomy of Irish medical history', in Greta Jones and Elizabeth Malcolm (eds), Medicine, disease and the state in Ireland, 1650-1940 (Cork, 1999), 9. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Vol. 113C, 341-362 © 2013 Royal Irish Academy This content downloaded from 207.46.13.131 on Sun, 16 Oct 2016 05:18:29 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms