2 - ‘Entering upon an Honourable and Important Profession’: Irish Medical Student Image and Representation in the Age of Medical Reform, c.1850–1900

Summary

Arriving at the Catholic University Medical School at Cecilia Street in 1905, a first-year medical student gave the following account of his registration:

On the opening day of the winter term I first presented myself and standing in the draughty hall, allowed myself to be patronised by some of the men, all the time essaying to show an acquaintance with the place which I was far from feeling. My first awakening was rude and sudden, occasioning much laughter to such of the men as were congregated in the porch at the time, and leaving your humble servant utterly crushed and abashed.

This description was typical for many students on the first day at university and highlights the anxiety that this student felt at his new surroundings while also drawing attention to the male-dominated sphere of medical school life. Other students recalled the difficulties in finding digs, or accommodation for their time at university. Leaving their home place and moving to study medicine was for many an important turning point in their lives. James Little, a student at the Royal College of Surgeons in the 1850s, remarked that being ‘a country lad, and a country lad who had been kept by himself and in seclusion’, he felt ‘rather afraid’ at his digs and among the medical students initially, worrying that he did ‘awkward things without being aware of it’. Upon arrival and registration at a medical school in the nineteenth century, students attended introductory lectures given by their professors in which they were first initiated in the doctrines of the ‘honourable and important profession’ that they had now entered.

There has, as yet, been little work done on the image that Irish doctors were trying to promote in the late nineteenth century and beyond. In recent years, historians of the United States and Britain have paid more attention to the different ways that doctors constructed, ‘performed’ and articulated their professional identity. Michael Sappol has shown effectively how American doctors in the first half of the nineteenth century embraced narratives concerning anatomy in order to forge a sense of collective identity. Delia Gavrus has also explored how neurosurgeons in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century articulated their professional identity through the use of narrative, paying close attention to the arguments, the language and the stories employed by neurologists and neurosurgeons.