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.