‘Boys to Men’: Rites of Passage, Sport, Masculinity and Medical Student Culture, c.1880–1930

This chapter explores the lives of medical students outside the lecture theatre, hospital and dissecting room, as well as representations of medical students, through the use of student magazines, cartoons, doctors’ memoirs and contemporary Irish literature. Although the medical curriculum was intense in the period, evidence suggests that students still had time for extra-curricular activities. The chapter argues that male medical students in this period tended to engage in typically ‘masculine’ activities such as rugby, football, pranks and drinking. Students were also encouraged to partake in these activities by their professors, who occasionally joined in themselves, thus reinforcing this behaviour. Such activities also helped to bond students together, resulting in a distinctive medical student culture built around an ethos of manliness which was set apart from the rest of the student body. The cultivation of the image of the medical student as a predominantly male individual became an important force in segregating men and women students and helped to preserve Irish medicine as a largely masculine sphere.