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In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Irish doctors led successful careers in the British Empire’s military medical services. Surprisingly, Irish medical connections with the British military were not simply severed once the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom in 1921, as might be expected. Rather, they rapidly grew in the 1920s and 1930s. This chapter asks why British military service continued to prove so popular among Irish doctors, making extensive use of a database of 262 Irish medical officers who served in the British forces between 1922 and 1945. The chapter reveals striking patterns in the social profile of officers, their motives, career success and the peaks and troughs of recruitment. It seems that many Irish medical officers complained that appointments in Irish hospitals were controlled by nepotism and that limited jobs were available. Several Irish publications which dispensed career advice to medical students during the 1930s not merely acknowledged, but actually recommended, opportunities in the British military services in preference to the Irish Army Medical Service - castigated for its poor pay, promotion prospects and pension entitlements. The result was an outflow of Irish medical practitioners beyond the attaining of Irish independence.
This chapter examines the role of Ireland’s British Army doctors in treating the wounded in the three primary conflicts in Ireland from 1916 to 1923: the Easter Rising (April 1916), Irish War of Independence (January 1919 to July 1921) and Irish Civil War (June 1922 to May 1923). As part of their wartime duties within the British Army, a contingent of Irish doctors tended to those wounded in the Easter Rising, including separatist Irish nationalists. Ex-Royal Army Medical Corps officers from Ireland also became professionally immersed in the War of Independence and the Civil War. As these wars transpired, many of the Irish doctors enlisted in the RAMC on temporary commissions for the duration of the First World War demobilised and returned to Ireland. Subsequently, some of these men provided health care to wounded IRA members and, later, to the Irish National Army.
Medicine, Health and Irish Experiences of Conflict, 1914-45 is the first exploration of Irish medical and health experiences during the First and Second World Wars, as well as during the Irish revolutionary period. It examines the physical, mental and emotional impact of conflict on Irish political and social life and medical, scientific and official interventions in Irish health matters. The volume asks: What made Irish medical and health experiences unique? Did the financial exigencies of war impact detrimentally on Irish health care provision? How were psychological and emotional responses to war managed in Ireland? Did Ireland witness unique disease trends? And how did Irish medical communities and volunteers partake in international war efforts? The authors suggest that twentieth-century warfare and political unrest profoundly shaped Irish experiences of medicine and health and that Irish political, social and economic contexts added unique contours to those experiences not evident in other countries. In pursuing these themes, Medicine, Health and Irish Experiences of Conflict, 1914-45 offers an original and focused intervention into a central, but so far unexplored, theme in Irish medical history.
Irish medical migrants had a visible presence in twentieth-century British hospitals, particularly during the Second World War. This chapter outlines the profile of migrants returning from Britain to Ireland during the Second World War by using demographic information gleaned from travel permit application forms. The chapter asks: how were medical migrants regulated as ‘legally landed aliens’ from a neutral country whilst living and working in a belligerent one? How did this regulation compare with workers in other fields? Was their personal profile similar or different to other applicants? What do the sources under scrutiny reveal about geographical patterns of settlement for migrants in the medical field? Finally, what can individual cases illuminate about conditions for Irish immigrants in wartime Britain?
The chapter demonstrates that that this migrant group was highly distinctive from the larger majority of unskilled Irish workers in Britain, known as ‘Ireland’s medical diaspora’. It also explores the vital role of Irish women in the British medical service by highlighting their diversity, agency and the ways in which their profile disrupts stereotypical narratives of immigrant women occupying marginal sectors of the British economy.
This chapter examines the medical responses to the outbreak of the Second World War in Northern Ireland with an emphasis on Belfast. It focuses on the emergence of the Emergency Medical Service (EMS), established throughout the United Kingdom in response to the anticipation of likely air-raid casualties. Pre- Second World War hospital services in Belfast were piecemeal, lacking integration and provided by varying independent bodies including voluntary, municipal and poor law authorities. This chapter argues that the EMS brought a degree of integration previously unknown in Northern Irish health organisation and administration. This new found integration of war time medical services greatly influenced the ‘post war reconstruction’ and ‘planning’ of health. The chapter examines Northern Irish contexts and suggests that Irish and Northern Irish health care systems began to dramatically diverge during wartime. It also examines the relationship between Belfast and London’s Ministry of Health, and the challenges of devolved healthcare. In addition, the chapter examines the public health responses to the 1941 Belfast Blitz, and the overall effectiveness of wartime health services.
The influence of the ‘new psychology’ was less notable in early-twentieth-century Ireland than elsewhere. Nonetheless, the personal narratives of patients can be used to unravel the meaning of warfare and conflict. This chapter exploits a 1940 article published by the former medical superintendent of the Downpatrick District Asylum, Michael J. Nolan, of a ‘case of acute systematized hallucinosis’. His article provided a detailed journal account of an extended period of hallucination authored by a patient in the immediate aftermath of his disturbance during the War of Independence. Nolan’s article was also distinguishable by its focus on the actual substance of hallucinatory experience. The patient recounted a hallucinatory episode in which a battle took place in his sickbed between an army of cockroaches and an army of hairs. These phantasmagorical battalions clearly functioned as proxies for the participants of the ‘real’ conflict raging beyond the doors of the asylum. His hallucinations were also deeply coloured by his personal relations with, and violent impulses towards, two women, one Protestant and the other Catholic. This chapter critically analyses in an ethnographic frame this account of a hallucinatory episode and the psychiatric discourse which enfolded and structured it.
The closing months of the First World War coincided with one of the most virulent pandemics of the twentieth century. In Ireland, at least 23,000 people died from influenza between 1918 and 1919. This chapter suggests that Ireland suffered to a similar degree to other regions of the British Isles. It investigates popular beliefs that war itself was directly accountable for the influenza pandemic and its subsequent spread across Ireland. Moreover, international conflict suppressed contemporary reportage of the disease in Ireland, contributing to a subsequent amnesia with respect to influenza across the country. Making effective use of case studies from Ulster, the chapter details how war impacted on medical and welfare responses to influenza as the pandemic struck amidst ongoing shortages in medical personnel and supplies. In addition, the chapter suggests that an absence of effective state recommendations on preventative measures (a consequence of prioritising the war effort) had detrimental consequences for the Irish population.
This chapter examines how the First World War and Easter Rising impacted on the practical, medical and administrative running of Temple Street Hospital. It might be assumed that the events of Easter Week 1916 would have overwhelmed a financially-weakened paediatric hospital like Temple Street. However, contemporary records show that this was not the case. Undoubtedly, the rebellion presented challenges, but the picture that emerges from this chapter study is one of competency in the face of adversity. The Sisters of Charity who governed the institution established a makeshift mortuary and, with help from the nearby Jesuits of Belvedere College, administered last rites to the dying. Their efforts to treat the wounded were compounded by the dirt and grime of the Dublin slums but such problems were not new. Temple Street Hospital had always been part of a network of charities, established to assist those who lived in some of Europe’s worst slums. That, more than any other factor helped it to meet the challenges posed by the Easter Rising. More specifically, this chapter focuses on the experiences of children who were shot and injured during the Rising.
Immediately after war was declared with Germany, emergency classes in first aid and ambulance work were organised in the Royal College of Science for Ireland (RCScI) in Dublin. By 1915 the College had two Voluntary Aid Detachments Red Cross groups who met hospital ships from the Western Front bringing casualties to Dublin hospitals. They were also provided aid to casualties of the Easter Rising. The women’s VAD also organised and managed the Central Sphagnum Depot for Ireland. Sphagnum moss had been found to have medicinal and absorbent properties and was known as a safe, reliable surgical dressing, making it a perfect replacement for increasingly scarce cotton wool in hospitals and dressing-stations during the First World War. As war casualties mounted, demands for this moss as a field-dressing increased. Between 1915 and 1919, over 900,000 dressings were dispatched to various theatres of war. This chapter assesses the work of the women who voluntarily involved themselves with the central depot by organising moss collection, sterilisation, packaging and dispatching. It also pits this Irish contribution to the war effort against Ireland’s increasingly turbulent political backdrop.