Speaker

Dr James McGeachie (Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, University of Ulster)

Chair

Dr Fiachra Byrne (UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland)

Title

A Network of Enterprises and a Centre of Calculation: Becoming Sir William Wilde

Event

UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series, 6 October 2016

Summary

This paper looks at the foundational years of William Wilde’s career and explores what they can tell us about how you became a leading member of the Dublin medical elite between the 1830s and the 1850s. Drawing on approaches and methodologies developed by historians and sociologists of medicine and science, Dr McGeachie argues that being the savant and public intellectual that Wilde became should not be seen as a manifestation of him as an individual Hibernian virtuoso in a cluster of other virtuosos in the Dublin of that time. Rather it was a crucial part of how you fashioned yourself as an elite medical man in these islands during the nineteenth century and right through to the early twentieth century.

James McGeachie (May 2016) ‘Wilde’s worlds: Sir William Wilde in Victorian Ireland‘, Irish Journal of Medical Science 185(2): 303–307.

James McGeachie

Dr James McGeachie is an Associated Staff Member at the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, University of Ulster. He is a leading expert on the medical elite and public intellectuals in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland. He has published extensively on figures such as William Wilde and George Sigerson and is contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Dictionary of Medical Biography. His current research is on Sir William Wilde and nineteenth-century medical biography and on the Victorian exhibition impressario John Connellan Deane.

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