-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Lindsey Earner-Byrne, Gender and Medicine in Ireland, 1700–1950
Irish Women in Medicine c. 1880s–1920s: Origins, Education and Careers, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 70, Issue 2, April 2015, Pages 315–318, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jru022Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
The last few decades have witnessed a growing amount of scholarship on gender history (often actually women's history) and medical history in Ireland. There is a considerable overlap in both fields with many gender historians considering aspects of health and, conversely, many medical historians exploring the gendered aspects of medicine. However, Margaret H. Preston and Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh's edited volume Gender and Medicine in Ireland is one of the first collections to have the intersections of gender and medicine as its organizing theme. The editors have assembled many very strong essays, and the volume is eminently readable from cover to cover. There are erudite and densely researched contributions from very well-established scholars, such as James Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda. Kelly's essay on dental practice in eighteenth-century Ireland evokes vividly the color and complexity of the Irish, medical marketplace in the eighteenth century. Ó Gráda's examination of infant and child mortality in Dublin in 1900 investigates the relative roles played by socioeconomic, cultural (religious), and environmental factors in the incidence of infant death, ultimately concluding that economic factors were the single most important determinant in child life expectancy. While both these essays are fine examples of scholarship in medical history, they have little to say about women or gender. The absence of a gendered analysis or a focus on women, however, is particular to these two chapters.
