Ireland and medicine in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

This book derives from a colloquium on Ireland and medicine in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that convened at the Queen's University of Belfast in April 2008. A number of themes resurface in different essays in the volume, among them the education and professional training of Irish medical practitioners in the early modern period; the role played by continental university medical faculties in this process; the diversity of the medical market; the acknowledgment by all social classes that formally trained or licensed medical practitioners did not have a monopoly of diagnostic and therapeutic expertise; the variety of treatments that were available to the sick, or at any rate to those who could afford to pay for medicine and advice; domestic medicine; and the nexus between religion and medicine in Ireland. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries medicine was the only profession from which Catholics were not formally excluded under the Penal Laws, a situation that had implications for the social and financial standing of the individuals concerned, for the practice of medicine in Ireland, and for the country's medical structures and establishments. (From Project Muse muse.jhu.edu)