In this illuminating social history of medicine and charity in Ireland
over almost 150 years from 1718 until just after the Great Famine,
Laurence M. Geary shows how illness and poverty reacted upon each other.
The poverty resulting from great population growth that continued until
the arrival of potato blight in 1845 had a severe effect on the health
of the country's population, and the Famine itself caused around one
million deaths from starvation and disease. This was a period of great
change in medical and charitable services. In the eighteenth century the
sick had come to be regarded as the deserving poor, therefore having a
better claim to public assistance than those whose poverty was the
result of their own dissipation, idleness or vice. A network of
charities evolved in Ireland to provide free medical aid to the sick
poor. The first voluntary hospital in Dublin opened in 1718 and Geary
traces the establishment and development of voluntary hospitals and
county infirmaries throughout the country.These had a strong Anglican
ethos and bias, but after Catholic emancipation in 1829 the nepotism,
sectarianism and divisive politics that were rife in these organisations
came under increasing scrutiny. Medical practitioners saw considerable
progress in the development of a regulated profession. Geary describes
developments in policy making and legislation, culminating in the 1851
Medical Charities Act, which he describes as part of a process that
characterised the century and more under review in this book: the
unrelenting pressure on philanthropy and private medical charity and the
inexorable shift from voluntarism to an embryonic system of state
medicine.
