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Reviewed by:
  • Irish Medical Education and Student Culture, c. 1850–1950 by Laura Kelly
  • Elizabeth Malcolm
Laura Kelly. Irish Medical Education and Student Culture, c. 1850–1950. Reappraisals in Irish History 8. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. xiv + 276 pp. Ill. $75.00 (978-1-78694-059-9).

Laura Kelly has produced an impressive and valuable study of Irish medical students and their education between about 1850 and 1950. The book ranges widely. As might be expected, it examines the instructors, curricula, and teaching methods at the various medical schools, colleges, and hospitals located in Dublin, Cork, Galway, and Belfast. But the book also devotes much attention to the personal lives of medical students and to what Kelly calls their "culture." [End Page 382]

By analyzing samples of university-educated medical students between 1850 and 1914, Kelly shows that most came from middle-class professional or commercial backgrounds, but religious affiliations varied markedly between different institutions. The university colleges in Cork and Galway taught mainly Catholic students, and the Belfast college catered largely to Presbyterians, whilst those attending Trinity College Dublin were mostly Anglicans. Catholics were entering medicine in increasing numbers after 1850, yet calculations based on Kelly's samples suggest that during 1873–1913 only around 35 percent of university medical students were Catholic. Kelly emphasizes that sectarianism was institutionalized not just in medical education, but throughout the medical profession in Ireland. Thus, clinical training often occurred in either Catholic or Protestant teaching hospitals, where many graduates later secured employment: the overwhelming majority of those appointed to these prestigious hospital positions being men.

In addition to sectarianism, Kelly is also interested in gender. She published a well-received book in 2012 on the history of Irish women in medicine. That book dealt with medical careers as well as education. In this book, she devotes a chapter to women students, but she also pays close attention to male students and to the relations between the sexes—or, perhaps more accurately, the lack of relations. By the late nineteenth century, male students had developed a very masculine culture centered on sport, drinking, pranks, and rags, which Kelly suggests became even more macho in the face of the arrival of female students. Student magazines produced by men portrayed women as "better behaved, more studious and harder working" students. Yet, at the same time, to the male eye these women often appeared "aloof," "cold," and even "de-sexed" (pp. 178–79).

In order to manage their new female students, Irish medical schools resorted to segregation. Women had to sit in the front row in lecture theatres; dissections were gender segregated up until the late 1930s; separate rooms were provided to encourage women to socialize among themselves; and women were not invited to join student medical societies, which long continued largely the preserve of men. From the 1880s onward, female students were not made welcome in Irish medical schools, but were instead marginalized. As a result, their numbers remained relatively small. Kelly shows that even as late as the 1940s, student debates were still being held in Irish universities devoted to the question of whether women were really suited to careers in medicine. The book makes good use of interviews Kelly conducted with Irish doctors trained in the 1940s and 1950s to demonstrate that gender segregation continued to be a significant feature of Irish medical education into the mid twentieth century.

Ireland produced substantial numbers of medical graduates: larger numbers than England during the late nineteenth century, although not nearly as many as Scotland. Supply exceeded demand in Ireland, and thus the majority were obliged to seek employment in England or overseas, usually in parts of the British Empire. Kelly does not follow newly graduated doctors abroad as her focus is on education in Ireland, but she does cite Greta Jones's valuable articles on this topic. In addition, she notes that from the 1940s onward a "significant proportion" of women medical students were nuns training for work as Catholic missionaries overseas [End Page 383] (p. 199). It would be good to see Kelly follow this book with another charting the careers of some of her Irish medical graduates outside Ireland.

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