Abstract
The history of medicine in Ireland has been complicated by political and religious tensions. Medical institutions sought to make their religious affiliation overt, and often exclusive, while medical appointments were regularly subject to political or religious interference and manipulation.3 This became more explicit following the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922, when many Roman Catholic members of the medical profession regarded this political development as an opportunity to ensure that medicine in Ireland become a Catholic stronghold against the perceived machinations of masonry.4 A solid and successful alliance was cultivated between members of the medical profession and members of the Irish Catholic hierarchy. An important part of this medico-religious alliance was the safe-guarding of an agreed moral stance on certain potential health issues such as birth control and maternal education. The strategies devised to control and regulate these issues according to a Roman Catholic moral view point were crucial in a wider more serious campaign to exclude ‘a non-Catholic’ influence on the development of medicine in Ireland.5
the Catholic influence is urgent because medicine is being made more and more a vehicle of attack on the Church e.g. Birth control, Sterilisation of Unfit, Therapeutic Abortion, Psychoanalysis etc.2
Sections of this article are taken from L. Earner-Byrne, Mother and Child: Maternity and Child Welfare in Dublin, 1922–60 (Manchester, 2007), pp. 39–47.
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Notes
Guild of St Luke, SS Damian and Cosmas, ‘Memorandum: The proposed reorganisation of Irish hospitals’, ca. 1935
Archbishop Byrne papers, Hospital Commission Box, DDA. Cited in K. Morrissey, ‘An examination of the relationship between the Catholic Church and the medical profession in Ireland in the period 1922–1992, with particular reference to the impact of this relationship on the field of reproductive medicine’ (unpublished PhD thesis: University College Dublin, 2004), p. 91.
Laurence Geary, Medicine and Charity in Ireland, 1718–1851 (Dublin, 2004), pp. 157, 159–61
MÔhÔgartaigh, ‘A medical appointment in county Meath’, Ríocht na Midhe: Records of the Meath Archaeological and Historical Society, 17 (2006), pp. 266–70
G. Jones, ‘Captain of all these Men of Death’: The History of Tuberculosis in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Ireland (New York, 2001), p. 134.
Noel Browne claimed that medical appointments in voluntary hospitals were often made on religious grounds, with Protestant-dominated hospitals operating through the Masonic Order and Catholic-dominated ones operating through the Reverend Mother or the Knights of Saint Columbanus. N. Browne, Against the Tide (Dublin, 1986), p. 146.
J. White, Minority Report: The Protestant Community in the Irish Republic (Dublin 1975), p. 167.
Medical research either emanating from Ireland or current in Irish medical circles indicated that the following conditions posed problems to women’s health during pregnancy: tuberculosis, heart disease, nephritis, malnutrition. See, for example, Memo Department of Local Government and Public Health, c. 1932, National Archives of Ireland [hereafter NAI], Dept. Health, B130/59; Bethel Solomons, ‘The prevention of maternal mortality and morbidity’, Irish Journal of Medical Science, 88 (April 1933), p. 175.
R.S. Devane, ‘The unmarried mother: Some legal remedies’, Irish Ecclesiastical Review, 23 (January –July 1924), p. 58.
Founded in Belfast in 1915 and in Dublin in 1922, the Knights of Columbanus was a secretive organisation that sought to advance the temporal interests of Catholics in Ireland particularly in relation to professional appointments. It was involved in certain Catholic ‘take-overs’ of medical initiatives and in one instance of a hospital board. See E. Bolster, The Knights of Saint Columbanus (Dublin, 1979).
Dr Stafford Johnson wrote to Archbishop Byrne in 1931, to inform him of the establishment of this Roman Catholic organisation of doctors to ensure ‘the application of Christian virtue in the practice of their profession and life’. DDA, Byrne papers box one: lay organisations, Stafford Johnson to Archbishop Byrne, 31 November 1931. See also, the inaugural address delivered before the Guild of SS Luke, Cosmas and Damian, Dublin, 21 April 1932, ‘The true idea and outlook of a Catholic medical guild’ by Stafford Johnson. Reprinted from the Catholic Medical Guardian (July 1932).
See for example, Rev. E. Cahill, The Catholic Social Movement (Dublin, 1931).
E. Dunne, ‘Action and reaction: Catholic lay organisations in Dublin in the 1920s and 1930s’, Archivium Hibernicum, 48 (1994), pp. 107–18.
For a detailed discussion of this, see J. H. Whyte, Church and State in Modern Ireland, 1923–1970 (Dublin, 1974), pp. 24–61.
The dispensary system was the principal health service available to the poor in Ireland. It has a complex history dealt with in some detail in this collection by Catherine Cox. It had a reputation for corruption and cronyism particularly in relation to appointments, which were sought for their relative security and entitlements and, after independence, there was a concerted effort to ‘clean up’ the system. The Local Authorities Officers and Employers Act, 1926, sought to secure a national system run on ‘merit alone’, which went some way to ending political favouritism and nepotism. However, the dispensary system suffered neglect and virtual breakdown in certain areas throughout the 1930s. See R. Barrington, Health, Medicine and Politics in Ireland 1900–1970 (Dublin, 1987), pp. 101, 134.
Excerpt from Irish Guild of Catholic Nurses annual triduum given by Rev. J.E. Canavan, 14 September 1928’, Irish Nursing News, 7: 2 (November 1928), p. 28.
Excerpt from the Irish Guild of Catholic Nurses’ monthly day of recollection given by the Very Rev. J. Kearney’, Irish Nursing News, 7: 5 (February 1929), p. 76.
Excerpt from ‘The nurse in the twentieth century’: The sixth annual conference held under the auspices of the Irish Guild of Catholic Nurses’, Irish Nursing News, 8:6 (March 1930), p. 86.
Kathleen Lynn founded St Ultan’s Children’s Hospital. See M. ÔhÔgartaigh, Kathleen Lynn: Irishwoman, Patriot, Doctor (Dublin, 2006).
Catriona Clear, ‘Women in de Valera’s Ireland 1932–48’, in G. Doherty and D. Keogh (eds), De Valera’s Irelands (Cork, 2003), p. 113; Ô hÔgartaigh, Kathleen Lynn, pp. 96–106.
For a survey of the mounting pressure regarding evil literature (often code for information relating to birth control) see Rev. R.S. Devane, S.J., ‘Indecent literature: Some legal remedies’, Irish Ecclesiastical Review, 25 (January –June 1925), pp. 182–204.
Franco’s Spain also introduced a prohibition on birth control and information relating to contraception as did Italy’s Mussolini. For a full discussion of the background to each country see, E. Ketting, Contraception in Western Europe: A Current Appraisal (London, 1990).
L. Hollen Lees, ‘Safety in numbers: Social welfare legislation and fertility decline in Western Europe’, in J.R. Gillis, L.A. Tilly and D. Levine (eds), The European Experience of Declining Fertility, 1850–1970: The Quiet Revolution (Oxford, 1992), pp. 310–25. The spectre of ‘race suicide’ and the case of France was repeatedly brought up in the official debates regarding the ban on literature that advocated birth control. See, for example, Dáil Éireann Debates, vol. 26, col. 687 (19 October 1928).
C. Hug, The Politics of Sexual Morality in Ireland (New York, 1999), p. 79.
Memorandum 153/MCW cited in L. Hoggart, ‘The campaign for birth control in Britain in the 1920s’, in Anne Digby and John Stewart (eds), Gender, Health and Welfare (London, 1996), p. 144
R.A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Durham, NC, 1995), pp. 182–8
W.J. O’Donovan, ‘Medical opinion and its influence on population’, in Sixth International Congress of Catholic Doctors (Dublin, 1954), pp. 86–94.
P. Walsh, The Curious Case of the Mayo Librarian (Cork, 2009), p. 16.
Casti Connubii, quoted in A. Fremantle, The Papal Encyclicals in their Historical Context (New York, 1956), p. 239.
Sandra McAvoy, ‘Regulation of sexuality in the Irish Free State’, in E. Malcolm and G. Jones (eds), Medicine, Disease and the State in Ireland, 1650–1940 (Cork, 1999), p. 257.
Cormac ÓGrâda, Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780–1939 (Oxford, 1994), p. 219.
Bethel Solomons, One Doctor in his Time (Dublin, 1952).
Mary Anne (Mamie) Cadden served prison sentences for child abandonment and abortion in 1939 and 1945 respectively. In 1957 she was found guilty of the murder of Helen O’Reilly, who died following an abortion administered by Cadden. See S. McAvoy, ‘Before Cadden: Abortion in mid twentieth-century Ireland’, in D. Keogh, F. O’Shea, and C. Quinlan (eds), The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s (Cork, 2004), pp. 147–63
E.L. Deale, Beyond Responsible Doubt? A Book of Irish Murder Trials (Dublin, 1990); NAI, Dept. Taoiseach, S16116, ‘Mary Anne Cadden: Death sentence, 1956–7’.
McAvoy, ‘Before Cadden’; P. Conroy, ‘Maternity confined–the struggle for fertility control’, in P. Kennedy (ed.), Motherhood in Ireland: Creation in Context (Cork, 2004), p. 131
F. Kennedy, Cottage to Crèche: Family Change in Ireland (Dublin, 2001), p. 39.
P.J. Dempsey, ‘Geoghegan, James’, in J. McGuire and J. Quinn (eds), The Dictionary of Irish Biography, 4 (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 50–1.
Cited in M. Finnane, ‘The Carrigan Committee of 1930–1 and the “moral condition of the Saorstât”’, Irish Historical Studies, 33: 128 (November 2001), p. 529.
See Finnola Kennedy, ‘The suppression of the Carrigan report: A historical perspective on child abuse’, Studies, 89, 356 (Winter 2000), pp. 354–63.
R. Geary, ‘The future population of Saorstât Éireann and some observations on population statistics’, Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, 15 (1935–6), pp. 15–35, p. 20
M.E. Daly, The Slow Failure: Population Decline and Independent Ireland, 1920–1973 (Wisconsin, 2006), pp. 3–20, 75–137
M.E. Daly, ‘Marriage, fertility and women’s lives in twentieth-century Ireland (c. 1900–c. 1970)’, Women’s History Review, 15:4 (September 2006), pp. 571–85. See also, Jones, ‘Captain of all these Men of Death’.
Solomons, One Doctor in His Time, pp. 91–2; Bethel’s son claimed his father gave contraceptive advice when asked by patients. M. Solomons, Pro Life? The Irish Question (Dublin, 1992), p. 16.
B. Solomons, ‘The dangerous multipara’, The Lancet, 2 (7 July 1934), pp. 8–11.
Barrington, Health, Medicine and Politics in Ireland, p. 188; T. Farmar, Patients, Potions and Physicians: A Social History of Medicine in Ireland (Dublin, 2004), pp. 170–4.
James McPolin, ‘Some aspects of the sociology of the medical profession’, Journal of the Medical Association of Éire (hereafter JMAÉ) 19:110 (August 1946), pp. 118–22, 135–44
James McPolin, ‘Doctors and professional secrecy’, JMAÉ, 23: 107 (September 1948), pp. 39–41.
According to David Sheehy, Stafford Johnson was a close personal friend of John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin (1941–1972), frequently dining with him at his private residence in Killiney, county Dublin. D. Sheehy, ‘Archbishop McQuaid: The Diocesan Administrator’, Doctrine and Life, 54: 3 (March 2003), p. 168.
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Earner-Byrne, L. (2010). Moral Prescription: The Irish Medical Profession, the Roman Catholic Church and the Prohibition of Birth Control in Twentieth-century Ireland. In: Cox, C., Luddy, M. (eds) Cultures of Care in Irish Medical History, 1750–1970. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230304628_11
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