Cultures of Care in Irish Medical History, 1750-1970

This book examines medical care in Ireland from 1750-1950, through the prisms of state provision, professionalisation and the experiences of health and illness. It includes analyses and discussions of quacks and cures, contraception, the history of suicide, the role of the coroners' courts, and the treatment of criminal lunatics.

Catherine Cox is the Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, School of History and Archives, University College Dublin. She has published on nineteenth-century social and medical history. Maria Luddy is Professor of Modern Irish History at the University of Warwick, UK. She has published extensively on Irish social and women's history.

Introduction; C.Cox & M.Luddy * ‘Bleeding, vomiting and purging’: Ill-health and the Medical Professions in Late Early Modern Ireland; J.Kelly * Practice and self-presentation in the Dublin clinical school 1820-80; J.McGeachie * Dispensary practitioners in the community in post-famine Ireland; C.Cox * Medical profession and the delivery of contraception in independent Ireland; L.Earner-Byrne * Medicine, disease and female mortality in independent Ireland; M.E.Daly * Suicide and mental illness in late Victorian Ireland; G.Laraghy * General practise and coroners’ practise: medico-legal work and the Irish medical profession, c1830-1880; M.Clark * Forensic Psychiatry and Women who Killed Children, 1850-1900; P.Prior * ‘Cure or Custody?’: therapeutic philosophy at the Connaught District Lunatic Asylum; O.Walsh * Post-War Pestilence: The ‘Spanish ‘Flu’ in Ireland, 1918-1920; M.Luddy * ‘Half mad at the time’: Unmarried mothers and infanticide in Ireland, 1922-1949; C.Rattigan * ‘These Lepers should be deported’: the treatment and prevention of VD in Northern Ireland in the Inter-War period; L.McCormick