7 - Medical Education and Student Culture North and South of the Border, c.1920–1950 200

Summary

Writing in Mistura, the magazine of the Royal College of Surgeons, in 1954, a student explained that it was during the university years that

the various attributes are formed, just as irrevocably as the adaptation of shortcomings may occur. We must envisage this undergraduate period as an era delicate in temperament, pliable in direction and pregnant with influences which will direct us ultimately either into the channel of success and accomplishment, based on the quality of our work and our attributes in general, or into an abyss of failure, not only to ourselves, but to others who depended so much on us – our fathers, our mothers and our patients.

As in previous decades, the experiences of student days were thought to be fundamental in helping to shape the futures of newly qualified Irish doctors in the 1950s. After Irish independence in 1922, Irish medical education continued to be influenced by British ideas and continued to be monitored by the General Medical Council. In addition, problems with the quality of education were still prevalent and these were addressed by both the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s and the American Medical Association in the 1950s.

This chapter will draw on sources such as student magazines, memoirs, contemporary newspapers and medical journals in order to build a picture of what life was like for students studying at Irish medical schools from the 1920s to the 1950s. Additionally, in order to provide an added insight into the experiences of Irish medical students who graduated in the 1940s and 1950s, I will draw primarily on oral history interviews which were conducted between 2013 and 2014 with graduates from Irish medical schools. These interviews provide a revealing insight into the experiences of medical students who graduated in the post-war era. Oral historians have long emphasised the value of oral history as a source and the special value which oral testimony has ‘as subjective, spoken testimony’. As Lynn Abrams has argued, oral history ‘is a creative, interactive methodology that forces us to get to grips with many layers of meaning and interpretation contained within peopleapos;s memories’. Surprisingly, oral history has not been utilised by historians in trying to uncover what it was like to be a medical student in the past.