Medical autobiographies in modern Britain and Ireland
‘Henry Trentham Butlin: Surgery, Politics and Markets in Late Victorian Britain’
Beyond celebratory accounts of the progress of surgical treatment, the history of surgery remains a vastly unexplored area of the history of medicine. This paper focuses on the varied career of one St Bartholomew’s Hospital surgeon, Henry Trentham Butlin (1845-1912), to highlight the complex and vital contributions of surgeons to the development of medical theory, practice and professionalism during the late nineteenth century. The paper will analyse Butlin’s career in three main areas. First, it will trace his clinical career, from a practitioner of radical surgery on a variety of cancers to his promotion of radium treatment for breast cancer decades before it became the norm. Secondly, it will trace his professional career, from his success in private practice to his ascendancy to president of the British Medical Association, Royal College of Surgeons and to baronet, during a period marked by major disputes about the future of the medical discipline and attempts by parliaments to transform how medicine was financed. Finally, this paper will challenge the assumption that his success was built on clinical merits alone, by examining his involvement in marketing the designs of his own surgical tools to other members of the profession and his contributions to ethnological studies of chimney sweeps across Britain and Europe, which were not readily associated with the laboratory revolution of surgery. This paper therefore examines the full range of Butlin’s clinical and non-clinical activities and compares him to other surgeons, in order to better understand the role of surgery in medicine in late Victorian Britain, as well as its place in commercial markets and policy formation of the time.
Claire Jones, Univ. of Warwick, Centre for the History of Medicine
Niels van Manen, Univ. of Manchester, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine
Three Gaelic Medical Families in Seventeenth Century Ulster: Exclusion or Assimilation?
This paper presents a short account of the fortunes of three Ulster medical families, the Ó Caiside, Ó Siadhail and Mac Dhuinnshléibhe, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. These three families represent the survival of the Gaelic medical tradition in the north of Ireland in the traumatic period following the Flight of the Earls (1607) and the subsequent Plantation of Ulster (1609). These families had been patronised by the most powerful Gaelic dynasties of Ulster, including the Maguires of Fermanagh, the MacMahons of Oriel and the O’Donnells of Tírconnell, amongst others. When these lords were defeated and dispossessed in the early seventeenth century, these Gaelic medical families were obliged to seek patronage from the New English and Scottish planters.
To survive in the new colonial society developing in Ulster, the Gaelic medical families utilised their reputation as skilled and knowledgeable physicians, to acquire favourable terms under the plantation scheme. The stature of the Gaelic physicians was founded upon the belief that they held a secret knowledge of local cures and treatments for illnesses. The medical manuscripts produced by the Ó Siadhails and Mac Dhuinnshléibhes show that they had an understanding of European medical philosophy. Together, the synthesis of native knowledge and European learning provided these families with the tools to survive. With this paper, I will trace the impact the massive social changes of the seventeenth century had on the lives of these three families. I will discuss how these families, using their medical skills and social connections, attempted to negotiate a ‘new deal’ with the incoming English and Scottish settler communities.
Máire Áine Sheehan,
PhD Candidate,
School of History,
University College Cork.