Growing Pains: Childhood Illness in Ireland 1750-1950

Description

Despite the immense interest sparked by recent child abuse and orphan vaccination trials, the history of childhood illness in Ireland has remained largely hidden.

Spanning two centuries, Growing Pains is the first history of Ireland’s unique social, cultural and political responses to safeguarding childhood health and treating physically, psychologically and socially vulnerable children.

It also investigates medical management in the home, hospitals, reformatories, industrial schools and workhouses – places where treatments ranged from the unorthodox to the experimental. Growing Pains provides an account of infectious and non-infectious diseases such as rickets, smallpox, tuberculosis, Spanish flu, epilepsy and opthalmia, and explores community and institutional responses to these illnesses across the centuries, as well as describing the medical pioneers who fought for better treatment and condition for Ireland’s children

Table of Contents

1. Children’s smallpox and inoculation procedures in eighteenth-century Ireland – Dr Gaye Ashford, St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra
2. Causes, cures and care: children and the falling sickness, Ireland, 1850-70 – Dr June Cooper, independent scholar (NUI Maynooth graduate)
3. Rickets in Ireland: Dr Ella Webb and the Children’s Sunshine Home, 1924-1944 – Dr Laura Kelly, NUI Galway
4. ‘And so to bed’. Bone and joint tuberculosis in children in Ireland, 1920-1950 – Dr Susan Kelly, University of Ulster
5. ‘The Penny Test’. Tuberculin testing and paediatric practice in Ireland, 1900-1960 – Dr Anne Mac Lellan, University College Dublin
6. Through the eyes of a child: ‘Spanish’ influenza remembered by survivors – Dr Ida Milne, Trinity College Dublin
7. Treatment of children at the Westmoreland Lock Hospital, Dublin 1792-1900 – Dr Jean Walker, NUI Maynooth
8. Childhood ophthalmia in Irish workhouses 1849-1861 – Philomena Gorey, doctoral student, University College Dublin
9. Constructing moral hospitals: childhood health in Irish reformatories and industrial schools, 1851-1890 – Dr Ian Miller, University College Dublin
10. Children’s hospital services in Victorian Dublin: the role of the Institution for the Disease of Children (1822-1886) – Professor Conor Ward, Professor Emeritus Paediatrics, University College Dublin

About the Editors

Dr Anne Mac Lellan is Director of Research at the Rotunda Hospital, Dublin. She is the winner of the 2012 Royal College of Physicians of Ireland History of Medicine Research Award. She completed a Wellcome Trust funded PhD in the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland in University College Dublin’s School of History and Archives.

Alice Mauger is completing her Wellcome Trust funded PhD in the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, University College Dublin, where she was also awarded a Wellcome Trust funded Master’s degree. In 2012, she was a prize-winner at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland St Luke’s Symposium. She has published on the history of psychiatry in nineteenth-century Ireland.