Current Seminar Series
Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland (CHOMI) Seminar Programme
2024/2025
Our hybrid seminars will run between 4 and 5pm Dublin time. The in-person presentations will take place in the UCD Humanities Institute HI Seminar Room (H204 / Top Floor) and be live-streamed via zoom (registration links below).
Spring Trimester
6 February 2025
Who Cares for the Chronically Sick and Dying Poor?: The Role of the Dublin Workhouse as a ‘proto-hospice’ 1872-1920
Dr. Shelby Zimmerman (Independent Researcher)
Abstract: By the end of the nineteenth century, the medicalisation of death brought dying into the medical domain as physicians sought to alleviate the pain associated with dying. At the same time, voluntary hospitals sought to cultivate the reputation of being a curative institution and thus depriving the chronically sick and dying from admission. With hospital administrators perceiving death as a failure, chronically ill and dying patients were transferred to or directly admitted to the workhouse for end-of-life care. This paper will contextualise the medical and spiritual attitudes towards dying to ascertain how these attitudes shaped deathbed provision and who became responsible for caring for the dying. Using 1913 as a focus year, this paper will examine the 862 individuals who died in the South Dublin Union workhouse during the year with an emphasis on the factors that influenced workhouse admission. It will conduct a spatial analysis into where death occurred in the workhouse to ascertain the management of dying in the institution. This presentation will also examine the experience of dying in a workhouse to determine if death was depersonalised in an institutional setting.
(opens in a new window)Join us on Zoom
27 February 2025
CANCELLED - Crossing borders: British activists in the international HIV/AIDS movement
Dr. George Severs (Geneva Graduate Institute)
Abstract: HIV/AIDS has always been a global health problem. As such, activist responses to it necessarily crossed borders. In this paper, I explore the transnational networks which emerged between activists responding to HIV/AIDS, using the understudied English HIV/AIDS activist movement as its point of departure. ACT UP’s presence in England, for example, makes more sense when we account for the transatlantic network of queer activists which was in place as the epidemic took hold. Many HIV/AIDS activist organisations collaborated on campaigns, and these collaborations were often facilitated by meetings of the International AIDS Conference. I will reconstruct some of the campaigning efforts which took place between international activists at such conferences, before exploring the most consciously international HIV/AIDS activist network, the International Community of Women Living with HIV and AIDS (ICW). Headquartered in London for much of the period, the ICW allows us to explore England’s part within a global and growing activist community.
(opens in a new window)Join us on Zoom
6th March 2025
‘Never in asylum before’: Mental Disorder and Childbirth in Colney Hatch Asylum, London, 1890s-1920s
Prof. Hilary Marland (University of Warwick)
Abstract: In April 1901, on a visit to his wife, Fanny G., in Colney Hatch Asylum, her husband explained how she ‘became bad in mind about 10 days after her confinement. Never in asylum before’. This paper explores the admission of women during pregnancy and following childbirth into one of London’s major asylums, which in some cases involved ‘confinement under confinement’, as a small number of babies were delivered and cared for in the asylum until the discharge of their mothers, partly to guard against harm or infanticide. The interventions and remarks of family members visiting the asylum, often acting as ‘translators’ of women unable to speak English or experiencing extreme mental distress, were added to the institutional record, describing how difficult ‘obstetric careers’, overlong breastfeeding, miscarriage, the loss of children or painful deliveries, alongside poverty, difficult domestic circumstances and the impact of migration, had caused mental breakdown.
Fanny was one of the many Jewish women admitted to Colney Hatch, and insanity following childbirth was claimed to be particularly prevalent amongst Jewish mothers, many of whom were recent migrants from Eastern Europe. Colney Hatch’s medical officers asserted that mental breakdown in pregnancy and childbirth prompted twice as many admissions among ‘Hebrew’ compared with non-Jewish patients. This paper explores how assumptions about early marriage, sexual excess within marriage, and the tendency to have large families reinforced the ethnic and racial stereotyping of Jewish women. It also explores families’ framing of mental breakdown around childbirth, which might diverge from or coincide and reinforce that of the asylum doctors.
(opens in a new window)Join us on Zoom
10 April 2025
Soporific Recipes and Early Modern Ecological Thinking
Dr Abigail Greenall and Professor Sasha Handley (University of Manchester)
Abstract: This paper uncovers the environmental knowledge and adaptability that early modern communities used to manage their sleep in Britain c.1500-1750. Influenced by the ‘airs, waters and places’ tradition established by Greek physician Hippocrates, early modern people drew a critical link between place-based ecologies, health, and medical therapeutics. This paper examines an extensive dataset of manuscript and printed recipe books, which were vital repositories of domestic medical expertise and practice, to argue that local climates and ecological interactions were powerful influences on the composition and perceived efficacy of sleep therapies. We will present evidence from sleep related recipes that have been entered into an innovative database that traces the origin, habitat and distribution of key botanical ingredients. The database also allows for plant species to be classified according to their elemental qualities and therapeutic properties, which in turn correlate to the material conditions of their growing environment. Blackberry, comfrey, colts-foot, dandelion, marshmallow, moss, nettles, ribwort, scurvy-grass, watercress, water-lily, and willow were useful soporifics that grew along ditches, field edges, hedgerows, riverbanks and peat bogs. Though these are some of the most easily encountered wildlife habitats in England today, they were sites and areas of contestation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By subjecting key ingredients in sleep related recipes to a deep spatial analysis the database allows us to consider the affordances of particular landscapes on plant efficacy as well as the embeddedness of the enclosure and drainage movements in early modern foraging practices and the history of sleep care.
(opens in a new window)Join us on Zoom
Autumn Term 2024
26 September 2024
Stigma Politics and Political Resistance: Addiction and Methadone Maintenance, 1950-1975
Assoc. Prof. Samuel Kelton Roberts (Columbia University)
Abstract: In the United States, stigma against medically assisted treatment (MAT) for addiction, especially against methadone maintenance, has a long history which continues to impede the successful recovery and social acceptance of patients even today. The stigma is found generally: outside of circles promoting MAT or harm reduction, it is common even today to find Individuals and institutions engaged in stigmatizing practices ranging from unspecific vocalized disdain to structural discrimination. In most cases, the belief is that methadone patients are still “addicts,” and cannot claim to be in recovery. In short, an individual who exchanges heroin for methadone is no different than an alcoholic who substitutes vodka for whisky.
In this paper, Samuel Kelton Roberts argues that the stigma found in Black American communities, however, also has a political component owing to the political history of racial formation and substance use politics, a history which goes back to the 19th century. Black claims to equal rights and citizenship always have had to ground themselves in worthiness, measured in the historical context of emerging-to-late capitalist society, as ability to defer gratification, abjure hedonist enjoyment, and commit oneself to industrial discipline. Well before the emergence of methadone maintenance in the 1960s, this was the case with 19th-century alcohol politics and early 20th-century cocaine politics. By the late 1960s, added to this context was one of recognition of an equally long history of medical disrespect and abuse of Black Americans, and a use of the more recent (postwar) concept of genocide to describe structurally violent aspects of public policy (government sterilization programs, surveillance of the poor, political neutralization through law enforcement). That Black resistance to methadone as an agent of social control and even genocide emerged from a political and not necessarily therapeutic context is illustrated by the general legitimacy in the 1950s Black public sphere of at least a debate regarding narcotics maintenance – using methadone, dilaudid, morphine, and even heroin itself. More Black Americans appeared to have had an open-minded or supportive attitude toward medical maintenance in 1953 than they had in 1970. The question, therefore, is how to explain the rapid change.
(opens in a new window)Join us on Zoom
17 October 2024
The drunken Irish? Problem Drinking in London and New York Post-World War II
Dr. Steven J. Taylor (University College Dublin)
Abstract: The Irish have shaped New York’s drinking culture since the 1820s. In the century that followed over 4.5 million Irish immigrants arrived in the city, equating to a quarter of the total population. In the post-World War II decades New York City, alongside London, was the most common destination for Irish migrants. The legacy of this past has resulted in there being more than 120 Irish pubs in New York City today, St Patrick’s Day being the city’s biggest drinking day after New Year’s Eve, and a ubiquity of advertisements for Irish whiskey. Yet, unlike London in the post-war years, Irish drinking in New York City was rarely defined as problematic. Using a comparative approach to concerns about alcohol in the second half of the twentieth century, this paper explores the ‘drunken Irish’ trope and its relative absence from the archival record in New York. Writing in 1976 the sociologist Richard Stivers argued that the Irish in America “cured themselves of their stereotype as drunkard by accepting it” and subsequently fulfilling the role of the happy drunk. Whereas in London, English prejudice towards the Irish stressed the negative aspects of Irish drinking such as violence, lewd behaviour, and crime. While elements of Stiver’s argument are compelling, detailed historical investigation reveals a parallel in concerns about drinking in London and New York City in the second half of the twentieth century. The former blaming the Irish for increased drunkenness and the latter overlooking them, despite the culture of Irish drinking across the city. This paper addresses the commonalities and disparities across the two cities and aims to develop and challenge Stiver’s ideas to present a nuanced understanding of Irish drinking in the second half of the twentieth century.