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een at the expense of wider themes within the social history of medicine in Ireland.
In 1993 Jordanova claimed that the social history of medicine in Britain had not yet
come of age, but rather, was experiencing growing pains. 17 The same words could
be applied to the Irish social history of medicine in its current state in terms of
sources and secondary literature that are available to researchers.
As has been recently pointed out, the most common type of literature in the Irish
history of medicine has tended to be histories of institutions often written by past
employees of the institutions concerned. These types of studies tend to ignore the
experiences of the individuals who are gaining most from the institutions in question
(the patients and medical students gaining their experience there). Rather, they
tend to focus on the financing, administration and medical staffing of the institution
in the form of chronological narratives. 18 Medical biographies of ‘great men’
represent a large bulk of the scholarship within the Irish history of medicine and
have been joined more recently by the occasional ‘great woman’. 19 This thesis will
avoid employing the techniques of these types of narratives. Instead, it will
contribute to the new way of doing the history of medicine in Ireland, through
drawing on less commonly used sources to give a deeper insight into the
experiences of women medical students and graduates in Ireland in the period.
There have been works on women medical students at the University of Glasgow
and more recently, of medical students, both male and female, at the University of
Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh, and these provide useful case studies for
hospital, Dublin, 1746-1989, (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1989); Hanora M. Henry, Our Lady’s
hospital, Cork: history of the mental hospital spanning 200 years, (Cork: Haven Books,
1989). For histories of great men see: Davis Coakley, Irish masters of medicine, (Dublin:
Town House, 1992); Davis Coakley, The Irish school of medicine: outstanding practitioners
of the 19 th century, (Dublin: Town House, 1988); T.G. Wilson, Victorian doctor: being the life
of William Wilde, (London: Metheun, 1946).
17 Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Has the social history of medicine come of age?’, The Historical
Journal, 36:2, (June 1993), pp.437-449, on p.448.
18 Greta Jones and Elizabeth Malcolm, ‘Introduction: an anatomy of Irish medical history’, in:
Greta Jones and Elizabeth Malcolm, Medicine, disease and the State in Ireland, 1650-1940,
(Cork University Press, 1999), p.1
19 For example: Coakley, Irish masters of medicine is typical of this genre: it consists of forty
biographies of Irish medical men with the purpose of highlighting the ‘achievements of Irish
doctors who have enhanced the knowledge and practice of medicine on an international
level’. (p.5). Notably, Coakley excludes famous Irish women doctors from his study. And,
more recently: Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh, Kathleen Lynn: Irishwoman, patriot, doctor, (Dublin:
Irish Academic Press, 2006).
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