Abstract
In the course of the last five years or more, historians of medicine have engaged in a timely assessment of past and future intellectual developments within the history of medicine. In part, this has been prompted by the twentieth anniversary of the Society for the Social History of Medicine, one of the main societies devoted to the field of medical history. The Society’s journal, Social History of Medicine, dedicated its 2007 edition to a serious reflection on the current state of the history of medicine and its future.2 This debate on the future of the history of medicine has also been inspired by the new intellectual directions evident within the field of history as a whole over the last two decades and by evolving political, economic and cultural contexts. A consensus has currently emerged among a group of scholars that the history of medicine is lacking ‘fresh theoretical engagement and analysis’.3 The ‘taking-stock’ of the history of medicine is not confined to the Anglo-American sphere. For example, Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner’s edited collection Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings attempts to bring a European dimension to the discussion.4 That volume includes essays on some of the ‘historiographical and ideological issues’ that have preoccupied medical historians in France and Germany, including the ‘fall’ of medical history in Germany and the importance of positivist medical history in France.5 A stated aim of the collection was to ‘ruthless [ly] look at the practise of medical history in the present, recognizing diversity in historians’ backgrounds, approaches, aspirations, and audiences’ and some of the essays are successful in this endeavour.6
‘How societies organise health care, how individuals or states relate to sickness, how we understand our identity and agency as sufferers or healers — [these questions] are simply too important for the practices of medical history not to be persistently subjected to vigorous reflection and re-examination.’1
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Notes
Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner, ‘Medical histories’, in idem. (eds), Locating Medical History: The Stories and their Meanings (Baltimore and London, 2004), p. 3.
The articles of particular note are Roger Cooter, “‘After Death/After-Life”: The social history of medicine in post-postmodernity’, Social History of Medicine, 20: 3 (2007), pp. 441–64
Flurin Condrau, ‘The patient’s view meets the clinical gaze’, Social History of Medicine, 20: 3 (2007), pp. 525–40
Ilana Löwy, ‘The social history of medicine: beyond the local’, Social History of Medicine, 20: 3 (2007), pp. 465–81
Waltraud Ernst, ‘Beyond east and west. From the history of colonial medicine to a social history of medicine(s) in South Asia’, Social History of Medicine, 20: 3 (2007), pp. 505–24.
Bill Luckin, ‘Review of Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner (eds), Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings (Baltimore and London, 2004)’, Medical History, 50: 1 (2006), p. 139.
Ed Morman, ‘Review of Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner (eds), Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings (Baltimore and London, 2004)’, Journal of The History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 62: 1 (2007), pp. 115–17.
Gilllie Bolton, ‘Boundaries of humanities: Writing medical humanities’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 7: 2 (2008), pp. 131–48.
Greta Jones and Elizabeth Malcolm (eds), Medicine, Disease and the State in Ireland, 1650–1940 (Cork, 1999).
For example see Greta Jones, ‘Captain of all these Men of Death’: The History of Tuberculosis in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Ireland (Amsterdam, 2001)
L.A. Clarkson and E. Margaret Crawford, A History of Food and Nutrition in Ireland 1500–1920 (Oxford, 2001)
Tony Farmar, Patients, Potions and Physicians: Social History of Medicine in Ireland (Dublin, 2004)
Gary A. Boyd, Dublin, 1745–1922: Hospitals, Spectacle and Vice: The Making of Dublin City (Dublin, 2006)
Lindsey Earner-Byrne, Mother and Child: Maternity and Child Welfare in Ireland, 1920s–1960s (Manchester, 2007)
Susannah Riordan, ‘Venereal disease in the Irish Free State: The politics of public health’, Irish Historical Studies, 35 (2007).
For some examples see Brendan D. Kelly, ‘Poverty, crime and mental illness: Female forensic psychiatric committal in Ireland, 1910–1948’, Social History of Medicine, 20: 3 (2008), pp. 311–28
Leanne McCormick, ‘“The scarlet woman in person”: The establishment of a Family Planning Service in Northern Ireland, 1950–1974’, Social History of Medicine, 20: 3 (2008), pp. 345–60
Lindsey Earner-Byrne, ‘Managing motherhood: Negotiating a maternity service for Catholic mothers in Dublin, 1930–1954’, Social History of Medicine, 19: 2 (2006), pp. 261–77
Greta Jones, ‘“Strike out boldly for the prizes that are available to you”, medical emigration from Ireland 1860–1905’, Medical History, 54: 1 (2010), pp. 55–74.
See for example Ann Daly, ‘The Dublin Medical Press and medical authority in Ireland 1850–1890’ (NUI Maynooth: unpublished PhD thesis, 2008)
Caitriona Foley, ‘The great flu epidemic in Ireland, 1918–19’ (University College Dublin: unpublished PhD thesis, 2009).
James Kelly and Fiona Clark (eds), Ireland and Medicine in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Farnham, Surrey, 2010).
For a comparative study see Mel Cousins, ‘Poor relief and families in nineteenth-century Ireland and Italy’, History of the Family, 13: 4 (2008), pp. 340–9.
Deborah Brunton, The Politics of Vaccination: Practice and Policy in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland (Rochester, New York, 2008)
Laurence M. Geary, Medicine and Charity in Ireland, 1718–1851 (Dublin, 2004).
Catherine Cox, ‘The medical marketplace and medical tradition in nineteenth-century Ireland’, in Stuart McClean and Ronnie Moore (eds), Folk Healing and Health Care Practices in Britain and Ireland: Stethoscopes, Wands and Crystals (Oxford, 2010), pp. 55–79
James Kelly, ‘Health for sale: Mountebanks, doctors, printers and the supply of medication in eighteenth-century Ireland’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 108C (2008), pp. 75–113
Daly, ‘The Dublin Medical Press and medical authority’; Foley, ‘The great flu epidemic’; Susan Kelly, ‘Suffer the little children: History of childhood tuberculosis in the north of Ireland, c. 1865 to 1965’ (University of Ulster: unpublished PhD thesis, 2008); Elizabeth Lake, ‘The history of medical communication’ (University of Ulster, current doctoral candidate).
Some work has been completed on the history of Irish nursing and midwifery during the last decade. For example see Gerard M. Fealy, Care to Remember: The Story of Nursing and Midwifery in Ireland (Dublin, 2005)
Gerard M. Fealy, A History of Apprenticeship Nurse Training in Ireland (London, 2005)
Margaret ÔhÔgartaigh, ‘Flower power and “mental grooviness”: Nurses and midwives in Ireland in the early twentieth century’, in Bernadette Whelan (ed.), Women and Paid Work in Ireland, 1500–1930 (Dublin, 2000), pp. 133–47; Phil Gorey, ‘A history of midwifery in Ireland’ (University College Dublin, current doctoral candidate).
Leanne McCormick, ‘“One Yank and They’re Off”: Interaction between U.S. troops and Northern Irish women, 1942–1945’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 15: 2 (2006), pp. 228–257
Philip Howell, ‘Venereal disease and the politics of prostitution in the Irish Free State’, Irish Historical Studies, 33, 121 (May 2003), pp. 320–41
Riordan, ‘Venereal Disease in the Irish Free State’. For work on the eighteenth and nineteenth century see Boyd, Hospitals, Spectacle and Vice; Geary, Medicine and Charity in Ireland; and Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800–1940 (Cambridge, 2007).
See Brendan D. Kelly, ‘Poverty, crime and mental illness: Female forensic psychiatric committal in Ireland, 1910–1948’, Social History of Medicine, 21: 2 (2008), pp. 311–28
E. Malcolm, ‘“Ireland’s crowded madhouses”: The institutional confinement of the insane in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland’, in Roy Porter and David Wright (eds), The Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800–1965 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 315–33
E. Malcolm, ‘“A most miserable looking object”. The Irish in English asylums, 1851–1901: Migration, poverty and prejudice’, in John Belchem and Klaus Tenfelde (eds), Irish and Polish Migration in Comparative Perspective (Essen, 2003), pp. 115–26
Oonagh Walsh, Land, Power and Politics: The Connaught District Lunatic Asylum and Irish Psychiatry, 1833–1910 (Syracuse, forthcoming 2010)
Oonagh Walsh, ‘Gender and insanity in nineteenth-century Ireland’, in J. Andrews and A. Digby (eds), Sex and Seclusion, Class and Custody: Perspectives on Gender and Class in the History of British and Irish Psychiatry (Amsterdam, 2004)
Oonagh Walsh, ‘“The designs of providence”: Race, religion and Irish insanity’, in J. Melling and B. Forsyth (eds), Insanity and Society: The Asylum in its Social Context (London, 1999)
Catherine Cox, Managing Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, 1832–1900 (Manchester, forthcoming 2010)
Pauline Prior, Madness and Murder: Gender, Crime and Mental Disorder in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2008).
For an exception see Mark Finanne, Insanity and the Insane in Post-Famine Ireland (London, 1981, 2nd edn, 2008).
For example see Terrence McDonough, Was Ireland a Colony?: Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2005)
David Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and empire’, in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999)
Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford, 2000).
Keir Waddington, The Bovine Scourge: Meat, Tuberculosis and Public Health, 1850–1914 (Woodbridge, 2006).
See Ronald D. Cassell, Medical Charities, Medical Politics: The Irish Dispensary System and the Poor Law, 1836–1872 (Woodbridge, 1997).
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© 2010 Catherine Cox Maria Luddy
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Cox, C., Luddy, M. (2010). Introduction. In: Cox, C., Luddy, M. (eds) Cultures of Care in Irish Medical History, 1750–1970. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230304628_1
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