Prof Pierce Grace examines a project aimed at capturing all of the medical practitioners in England, Wales and Ireland between 1500 and 1750 in a new open access database, with as many medical biographies as possible.

History and medicine have been bedfellows for many years in Ireland. Until about 20 years ago most Irish medical history was written by doctors with an interest in historical matters. Many were biographies of great doctors or histories of the institutions of medicine in Ireland and most authors were positively disposed to their subjects.

In 1999, Elizabeth Malcolm and Greta Jones, both professional historians, edited a seminal book entitled ‘Medicine, Disease and the State in Ireland, 1650-1940’. In this book, medicine was placed in the context of the societies in which it existed and especially their fractious religious and political environments. The book also approached medicine from the patient’s point of view and looked at practitioners other than doctors, including nurses and popular healers.

The editors concluded their introduction by saying that they were ‘constantly struck by the limitations of their knowledge’ and that ‘many fascinating issues and questions have arisen on which little or no research has been carried out’.

Sixteen years on, some of those gaps have been filled in and a recent meeting of historians and health professionals in TCD looked at various aspects of Irish healing and care in the early modern period — that is 1500 to 1750. This conference was hosted by historian Dr John Cunningham of TCD, who is a member of a Wellcome Trust-funded project being led by the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter, entitled ‘The Medical World of Early Modern England, Wales and Ireland, c.1500-1715’.

This aim of this project is to develop an open access database with biographies of all the medical practitioners active in England, Wales and Ireland c. 1500–1715. This will give an overview of the nature and impact of medical practice across these islands during the time when medicine was in evolution from its Galenic roots to the beginnings of what we would recognise as modern medical practice.

Folk healers

By ‘medical practitioners’ the investigators do not mean only doctors. While physicians, surgeons and apothecaries will be high on their list of targets, they also hope to capture the input of nurse tenders, midwives and folk healers — referred to in an English context as ‘cunning folk’.

The truth is that during the period under consideration most of the inhabitants of these islands could not afford to be treated by a doctor and most relied on self-medication or advice from those perceived to be knowledgeable in medical matters, trained or untrained. The truth also is that, given what we now know, the practitioner one chose to attend probably made very little difference to the outcome.

The papers presented to the meeting were delivered by a mixture of historians and healthcare professionals. The topics covered included the world of Anglo-Irish medicine from the Cromwellian period onwards; the medical links with Britain and its fledgling colonies such as Jamaica; considerations of various aspects of obstetrics and the role of the midwife; an examination of the causes of mortality gleaned from parish registers; witchcraft and medicine in Ulster; early surgical training; a Spanish military hospital; and an examination of the surviving Gaelic medical manuscripts, of which there are more than 100.

An interesting contrast between the histories of Ireland and Wales versus England is the wealth of records available to the latter and the paucity of the same available to the former. For example, a detailed quantitative study of the probate records for Kent allowed Dr Justin Colson to accurately calculate the numbers of physicians practising there in the 17th century, but a similar exercise could not be performed for Ireland as the extant probate records for the whole country amount to a mere 20! However, the existence of many indexes of wills and transcripts allows at least some gaps to be filled in with a little digging.



Four Courts fire

A recurring theme of the meeting was the loss of Irish records in the fracas at the Four Courts on June 30, 1922, when Ireland’s public records went up in smoke. A suggestion was that the centenary of this event could be marked by a determined effort to promote an awareness of what was in the Record Office at that point, as well as the extent of what was lost.

This would in turn enable the contents of the various surviving records, indexes, transcripts and substitutes, scattered across numerous repositories, to be better understood in an archival context.

In passing, it should be acknowledged that the Irish Manuscripts Commission has been quietly publishing Irish historical documents as monographs and in its journal Analecta Hibernica since its foundation in 1928. One of its most recent publications is the correspondence in three volumes of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, covering the period between 1600 and 1656, a collection of 680 letters.

Strangely, Scotland has been left out of this project. This decision makes an understanding of the Gaelic medical world somewhat incomplete, as Gaelic Ireland and Gaelic Scotland were one cultural entity in the early modern period with free exchange of people, language, doctors and medical manuscripts across the North Channel. Similarly, the Protestant planters of Ulster were in constant communion with their cousins in Scotland during this period.

The historians undertaking the Early Modern project are keen to be made aware of any obscure or seemingly unlikely historical sources relating to early modern practitioners, and they are very willing to share the information they have already gathered. So if anyone knows of a 17th or 18th century medical ancestor or has come across references to medical people from the early modern period while researching some other topic, this project would love to hear from you. They can be contacted at http://practitioners.exeter.ac.uk.

Prof Pierce Grace,

Adjunct Professor of Surgical Science,

Graduate Entry Medical School,

University of Limerick.

Robert Boyle published Of the ‘Reconcileableness of Specifick Medicines to the Corpuscular Philosophy’ in 1685, in which he challenged the use of multiple ingredients in varying forms in medicinal cures. Pic: Getty Images