Medicine, Disease and the State in Ireland: 1650-1940 Book

This book represents a pioneering attempt to open up a previously neglected area of Irish social history. It covers the impact of disease on Irish society, alternative healing, the growth of the medical institutions and of the professions of medicine and nursing. It also explores the relationship between politics and medicine.Four of the essays deal in turn with typhus, smallpox, tuberculosis and mental illness. There are histories of the founding of Irish medical and learned scientific societies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the role of William Wilde in the Dublin School of Medicine in the early nineteenth century, and the growth of medical schools. The relationship between religion and medicine in Ireland is discussed in chapters on the influence of female religious orders in nursing, the church, the state and hospitals in inter-war Ireland. The part played by the state in the development of poor law services in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is examined paying particular attention to the attempt made by the newly formed Irish state after 1922 to regulate sexuality. The physical and architectural environment of the public lunatic asylum created in early nineteenth-century Ireland is described.This collection of essays by established scholars in the field is informed by recent developments in the social history of medicine.Read More