Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston
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‘Dear Dr Kirkpatrick’
Recovering Irish experiences of VD, 1924–47
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This chapter discusses a rare exception to the archival silence surrounding the experiences of VD sufferers in the interwar period: the personal correspondence of Dr T.P.C. Kirkpatrick, one of twentieth-century Ireland’s foremost VD specialists. Written by current and former patients, their loved ones and other health professionals between 1924 and 1947, the 120 letters which comprise the Kirkpatrick collection offer an unparalleled insight into the medical, social and emotional experiences of VD sufferers and those who supported them during a formative period in British and Irish state welfare provision. By close-reading these letters through a regional and four-nations history perspective, this chapter contradicts a range of common assumptions about the knowledge, agency and self-understanding of VD sufferers. It charts how, amid the mixed welfare economies of interwar Ireland and Britain, current and former patients sought to leverage the recently established state-funded VD Service to achieve their desired social and healthcare outcomes. It reveals how, in their engagement with medical professionals, sufferers and their loved ones strategically performed their gender, age and class identities to solicit aid and advice. It also explores the transformative effect that treatment for VD had on individuals’ capacity to understand and describe their body in a period in which a cultivated ignorance of sexual matters was the norm. In doing so, it offers a rare and unusually direct view into the intimate lives of Irish people and their attitudes towards sex, sexual health and medical authority during a period of significant social and political upheaval.

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