Diagnosing Insanity: Women, Murder and Mental Health in 20th-century Ireland

Belfast Corporation and the regulation of midwives 1911-1918

Speaker Dr Phil Gorey (University College Dublin) Chair Dr Ciaran McCabe (Post Doctoral Research Fellow, University College Dublin) Title Municipal Gospel or necessity? Belfast Corporation and the regulation of midwives 1911-1918 Event UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 31 January 2019 Summary In 1911, Belfast Corporation sought and was granted powers to establish a midwives roll for the County Borough. The Belfast Corporation Act, 1911, provided for the certification and enrolment of midwives practicing in the city of Belfast. It exercised supervision over midwives and their practice and prohibited, where possible, uncertified midwives from attending births in the city. This initiative was timely. The city had witnessed a period of unprecedented growth which saw the population increase from 71,000 in 1841 to 380,000 in 1911. The Corporation was compelled to deal with the consequences of this exceptional growth and in the spirit of ‘municipal gospel’, which held that elected authorities were obliged to work for the social and moral well-being of its citizens, councillors, at the instigation of the local Health Association, in 1910, proceeded with important public health and sanitary regulations which included provisions for the control and regulation of midwives. The Midwives Act, 1902, had not been extended to Ireland. Attempts to amend the legislation to include Ireland failed in 1906 and again in 1910, so Ireland was without a regulatory body similar to the British Central Midwives Board. This presentation examines the success of the scheme to train, register, and regulate the practice of midwives in Belfast until the Midwives (Ireland) Act was passed in 1918. Phil Gorey Dr Phil Gorey’s research interests include the advancement of male medical practitioners in midwifery in Ireland in the eighteenth century, the development of maternal welfare in Irish dispensaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the early education of midwives and nurses in Ireland, the role of the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland in the registration of Irish midwives 1891-1918, and puerperal fever. Phil is currently working on her monograph entitled Managing Midwives in Ireland. A History of the Regulation of Irish Midwives, 1615-1918. She has previously published on history of childhood opthalmia, midwifery in Dublin in the 18th century and puerperal fever.

Diagnosing Insanity: Women, Murder and Mental Health in 20th-century Ireland

Speaker Dr Lynsey Black (Maynooth University) Chair Associate Professor Catherine Cox (University College Dublin) Title Diagnosing Insanity: Women, Murder and Mental Health in 20th-century Ireland Event UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 20 September 2018 Summary Mad, bad, sad – the familiar tropes deployed to explain women who kill. This paper explores the cases of three women who were convicted of murder in post-independence Ireland and who were understood through discourses of pathology. Taking these three cases, we can begin to see the ways in which ‘madness’ was applied at the individual level. The archival files demonstrate how diagnoses were contingent and inseparable from prevailing conceptions of gender, morality and class. The cases reveal the behaviours categorised as ‘sane’ and ‘insane’, routes to redemption, and the work of respectable femininity as a protective factor. Lynsey Black Lynsey Black is a Lecturer in Criminology in the Department of Law at Maynooth University. She received her PhD from Trinity College Dublin, this work examined the cases of women sentenced to death in post-independence Ireland. She was an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin from 2016 to 2018. She researches gender and crime, historical criminology, and the death penalty.

Irish Nurses and the Great War 1914-1918

Speaker Dr Fionnuala Walsh (University College Dublin) Chair Associate Professor Catherine Cox (University College Dublin) Title ‘You will feel that that you are being of some use’: Irish nurses and the Great War 1914-1918 Event UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 19 April 2018 Summary The First World War resulted in the mobilisation of thousands of Irish women on the home front in a variety of roles. As in other combatant countries the nursing profession was profoundly affected by the war. This paper examines the contribution of Irish voluntary and professional nurses to the war effort, both in Ireland and overseas. It explores motivations for joining the war effort, war experiences and the impact of the war on the nursing profession in Ireland. Fionnuala Walsh Dr Fionnuala Walsh completed her PhD at Trinity College Dublin in 2015, under the supervision of Professor David Fitzpatrick. Her thesis examined the impact of the Great War on women in Ireland, 1914-1919. It was funded by the Irish Research Council. From 2015-2016 she held the research studentship in the National Library of Ireland where I catalogued the papers of Field Marshall Hugh Gough. In 2016 she returned to Trinity College Dublin to take up a twelve month Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship with the primary purpose of producing publications from my PhD thesis. In September 2017 she took up a teaching fellowship in University College Dublin where she currently lecture in medical history and social history in the School of History. Her publications include ‘Every human life is of national importance: The impact of the First World War on attitudes to maternal and infant health’, in David Durnin and Ian Miller (eds). Medicine, health and Irish experiences of conflict 1914-1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017) and ‘We work with shells all day and night: Irish female munitions workers during the First World War’. Saothar, 42 (2017), 19-30.    

Health on the High Street

Speaker Dr Jane Hand (Department of History, University of Warwick) Chair Associate Professor Catherine Cox (Director, UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland & School of History, University College Dublin Title Health on the High Street: Consumerism, the NHS and Low-Fat Diets in Britain since the 1970s Event UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 8 February 2018 Summary Since the postwar period food choice and diet have become increasingly intertwined with wider health and food policies focused on disease prevention, public health and medical service provision. As epidemiological research into chronic disease causation identified high intake of particular nutrients or minerals as harmful to health, retailers recognised the potential of products that reduced or removed these components in order to encourage consumers to make healthy choices. The National Health Service (NHS) was an important educator in this respect, urging at-risk patients to engage in new health behaviours and make better lifestyle choices by changing diet and exercising more. It promoted the idea that individualised health risks could be overcome (at least in part) by complying with a myriad of health advice that included specific recommendations about food consumption. The resulting emergence of public anxiety around the role of unhealthy foods in disease causation enabled food producers, manufacturers and retailers to co-opt the health education message to create new health food markets that championed various foods as potentially disease-preventing. This podcast charts the development of food choice as an important health behavior promulgated through both public health and primary and secondary care. It will emphasise the role food and health consumerism played in communicating scientific evidence about the impact of healthy eating on disease prevention to the public. To do so, it will examine the development of low-fat products by certain supermarkets, focusing in particular on the creation of market segmentation around low-fat milk. It uses this case study to emphasise the interconnectedness of the NHS and the retail sector in attempting to reduce chronic disease mortality rates. Jane Hand Dr Jane Hand is a Research Fellow for the Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award ‘The Cultural History of the NHS’ in the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick. She completed her PhD in 2015, which analysed the role and function of visual images in constructing knowledge about healthy eating and disease prevention in postwar Britain. She researches public health and health education in Britain with a focus on the visual components of health campaigning, chronicity and the place of prevention.

Patrick Browne (c. 1720 – 1790)

Speaker Associate Professor Marc Caball (School of History, University College Dublin) Chair Associate Professor Catherine Cox (Director, UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland & School of History, University College Title Patrick Browne (c. 1720 – 1790), an Irish botanist and physician in the West Indies Event UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 28 September 2017 Summary Patrick Browne was a significant figure among scholars of botany and tropical medicine in the eighteenth century. Born in county Mayo around the year 1720, Browne’s publication in 1756 of The civil and natural history of Jamaica was important contemporaneously in terms of the development of botanical nomenclature and the discovery of plants previously unknown to European experts.  Although his original contribution to the science of botany was recognised by his better known peer, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, Browne has been described recently as a ‘bit of an enigma and is scarcely celebrated in his native land’. In fact, Browne was the first English-speaking botanist to deploy Linnaeus’ binary system of plant classification in a published study. Moreover, Browne discovered many plants which he could not accommodate within the Linnaean system of classification and described them in terms of new genera. It is proposed to review the career of Browne with particular reference to his writings on the botany of the West Indies. It is also argued that Browne is culturally significant not just because of his Caribbean research. On his return to Ireland in 1770, Browne began work on a study of plants in Galway and Mayo listing their names in Latin, English and Irish. Browne’s experience provides a fascinating case study of a medical doctor raised within an Irish-speaking environment, educated on the continent and working as a physician and botanist in the West Indies. If Browne succeeded in incorporating knowledge of Gaelic botanical terminology within a contemporary global template of such expertise, his achievement is singular in the context of contemporary Gaelic scholarship which was largely characterised by an insular focus and manuscript dissemination. It is suggested that Browne’s incorporation of Irish terminology within a comparative context illustrates a broader epistemological weakness within Gaelic intellectual life in the eighteenth century. Marc Cable Marc Caball is an historian and senior lecturer in UCD School of History. He is the lead investigator on the Irish Research Council funded project Mapping readers and readership in Dublin, 1826-1926: a new cultural geography. His research centres on the cultural history of early modern Ireland in an Atlantic context. He has extensive experience of research policy and funding at national and European levels.  He was chairman of the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Domain Committee for Individuals, Cultures, Societies and Health from 2008 to 2014. He is a council member of the Irish Texts Society and a board member of the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM). He is on the management committee of COST Action 15137 (European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities) He served as director of the UCD Humanities Institute during the period 2005-2011 and the UCD Graduate School of Arts and Celtic Studies between 2006 and 2011. He was the director of the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) between 200...