War work on the home front: the Central Sphagnum Depot for Ireland at the Royal College of Science for Ireland, 1915–19

Immediately after war was declared with Germany, emergency classes in first aid and ambulance work were organised in the Royal College of Science for Ireland (RCScI) in Dublin. By 1915 the College had two Voluntary Aid Detachments Red Cross groups who met hospital ships from the Western Front bringing casualties to Dublin hospitals. They were also provided aid to casualties of the Easter Rising. The women’s VAD also organised and managed the Central Sphagnum Depot for Ireland. Sphagnum moss had been found to have medicinal and absorbent properties and was known as a safe, reliable surgical dressing, making it a perfect replacement for increasingly scarce cotton wool in hospitals and dressing-stations during the First World War. As war casualties mounted, demands for this moss as a field-dressing increased. Between 1915 and 1919, over 900,000 dressings were dispatched to various theatres of war. This chapter assesses the work of the women who voluntarily involved themselves with the central depot by organising moss collection, sterilisation, packaging and dispatching. It also pits this Irish contribution to the war effort against Ireland’s increasingly turbulent political backdrop.

Food, the Emergency and the lower-class Irish body, c.1939–45

The ending of the Anglo-Irish Economic War (1932-8) is often represented as a watershed in British-Irish relations. However, it was soon followed by renewed trade hostility. Between 1940 and 1945, Winston Churchill subjected Ireland to an economic squeeze: the price of Irish neutrality in the Second World War. While the length of this trade war has generally been overlooked by historians, the effect of this ‘long’ Economic War on Irish public health has been similarly disregarded. This contribution argues that the Anglo-Irish economic war resulted in the mass slaughter of Irish herds due to the removal of the British export market. Market disruption had a significant knock-on effect on Irish public health, particularly in the countryside. Similarly, the British economic squeeze of the Second World War ensured that Ireland’s agricultural economy was denied fertilisers, feed, chemicals and tractors; modern productive aids that are essential to food production. The Irish government infamously introduced the ‘black loaf’ as wheat production wheat stalled, causing fears of a second Famine. Aggravated by a belatedly introduced rationing system, public health suffered.

Introduction

Modern wars characteristically disrupt and affect individual life. Civilians are called upon to fight; technologies of war (such as planes and submarines) bring conflict to the domestic front; sophisticated, often lethal, weapons maim and kill.1 Governments reorganise medical personnel at both sites of conflict and home. In turn, doctors find themselves treating an array of conditions that they would not normally encounter in peacetime. Moreover, war has been known to encourage the spread of disease and illness, as exemplified by the global spread of influenza towards the end of the First World War....

Imperial continuities: Irish doctors and the British armed forces, 1922–45

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Irish doctors led successful careers in the British Empire’s military medical services. Surprisingly, Irish medical connections with the British military were not simply severed once the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom in 1921, as might be expected. Rather, they rapidly grew in the 1920s and 1930s. This chapter asks why British military service continued to prove so popular among Irish doctors, making extensive use of a database of 262 Irish medical officers who served in the British forces between 1922 and 1945. The chapter reveals striking patterns in the social profile of officers, their motives, career success and the peaks and troughs of recruitment. It seems that many Irish medical officers complained that appointments in Irish hospitals were controlled by nepotism and that limited jobs were available. Several Irish publications which dispensed career advice to medical students during the 1930s not merely acknowledged, but actually recommended, opportunities in the British military services in preference to the Irish Army Medical Service - castigated for its poor pay, promotion prospects and pension entitlements. The result was an outflow of Irish medical practitioners beyond the attaining of Irish independence.

The ‘report of a nightmare’: hallucinating conflict in the political and personal frontiers of Ulster during the IRA border campaign of 1920–22

The influence of the ‘new psychology’ was less notable in early-twentieth-century Ireland than elsewhere. Nonetheless, the personal narratives of patients can be used to unravel the meaning of warfare and conflict. This chapter exploits a 1940 article published by the former medical superintendent of the Downpatrick District Asylum, Michael J. Nolan, of a ‘case of acute systematized hallucinosis’. His article provided a detailed journal account of an extended period of hallucination authored by a patient in the immediate aftermath of his disturbance during the War of Independence. Nolan’s article was also distinguishable by its focus on the actual substance of hallucinatory experience. The patient recounted a hallucinatory episode in which a battle took place in his sickbed between an army of cockroaches and an army of hairs. These phantasmagorical battalions clearly functioned as proxies for the participants of the ‘real’ conflict raging beyond the doors of the asylum. His hallucinations were also deeply coloured by his personal relations with, and violent impulses towards, two women, one Protestant and the other Catholic. This chapter critically analyses in an ethnographic frame this account of a hallucinatory episode and the psychiatric discourse which enfolded and structured it.

Migrants, medics, matrons: exploring the spectrum of Irish immigrants in the wartime British health sector

Irish medical migrants had a visible presence in twentieth-century British hospitals, particularly during the Second World War. This chapter outlines the profile of migrants returning from Britain to Ireland during the Second World War by using demographic information gleaned from travel permit application forms. The chapter asks: how were medical migrants regulated as ‘legally landed aliens’ from a neutral country whilst living and working in a belligerent one? How did this regulation compare with workers in other fields? Was their personal profile similar or different to other applicants? What do the sources under scrutiny reveal about geographical patterns of settlement for migrants in the medical field? Finally, what can individual cases illuminate about conditions for Irish immigrants in wartime Britain? The chapter demonstrates that that this migrant group was highly distinctive from the larger majority of unskilled Irish workers in Britain, known as ‘Ireland’s medical diaspora’. It also explores the vital role of Irish women in the British medical service by highlighting their diversity, agency and the ways in which their profile disrupts stereotypical narratives of immigrant women occupying marginal sectors of the British economy.

From front to home and back again: geographical networks of auxiliary medical care in the First World War

Throughout the First World War, a set of complex geographical networks were developed across the British Empire, which led the wounded soldier from the Front back through a series of therapeutic nodal points, to rehabilitation and treatment in a range of established and auxiliary hospitals. This chapter outlines two aspects of these relational geographies. Firstly, it maps the physical networks to show the ways in which a nodal structure of relational spaces of treatment, often ephemeral and temporary, was developed and constructed from the Front to across the British Isles. Typically, such sites were drawn from pre-war hydros, hotels, schools and private homes. Secondly, a number of examples of Auxiliary Hospital spaces at sites such as Blarney, Bray, Dublin and Glengariff are described. In addition, Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute in Scotland was managed by an Irishwoman and provides an especially well-documented example of how the Auxiliary Hospital functioned both as an ephemeral space of care but also as part of a wider set of therapeutic pathways from the Front to home and back again. Finally, the levels of civilian medical knowledge were enhanced and enlarged in such settings.

Alone among neutrals: Ireland’s unique experience of tuberculosis during the Second World War

This chapter examines how and why Ireland’s tuberculosis problem exacerbated during the Emergency. It demonstrates that 1942 saw 4,300 tubercular deaths across the country, an incidence rate not seen since the late 1920s. After the war, Marc Daniels of the British Medical Research Council compiled a comparative study of deaths from tuberculosis across Europe comparing pre- and post-war death rates. Daniels pinpointed England, Wales, Belgium, France and Ireland as countries which experienced a rise is tubercular deaths in the first years of the war. Importantly, he noted that Ireland was the only neutral European country to suffer from rising incidence rates. This chapter investigates the key reasons for Ireland’s singular experience of tuberculosis during the Emergency, suggesting that the Irish experience was unique within the British Isles. The author also explores the country’s relatively limited anti-tuberculosis infrastructure, the absence of an effective anti-tuberculosis vaccination strategy and the new exigencies brought about by global conflict including shortages of food and pharmaceutical supplies. Other neutral countries such as Sweden fared better than Ireland during the conflict. At the heart of this study lies the important question of how efficiently Irish voluntary and government initiatives responded to the increased visibility of tuberculosis.

The war and influenza: the impact of the First World War on the 1918–19 influenza pandemic in Ulster

The closing months of the First World War coincided with one of the most virulent pandemics of the twentieth century. In Ireland, at least 23,000 people died from influenza between 1918 and 1919. This chapter suggests that Ireland suffered to a similar degree to other regions of the British Isles. It investigates popular beliefs that war itself was directly accountable for the influenza pandemic and its subsequent spread across Ireland. Moreover, international conflict suppressed contemporary reportage of the disease in Ireland, contributing to a subsequent amnesia with respect to influenza across the country. Making effective use of case studies from Ulster, the chapter details how war impacted on medical and welfare responses to influenza as the pandemic struck amidst ongoing shortages in medical personnel and supplies. In addition, the chapter suggests that an absence of effective state recommendations on preventative measures (a consequence of prioritising the war effort) had detrimental consequences for the Irish population.

On the brink of universalism: the Emergency Hospital Services in Second World War Northern Ireland

This chapter examines the medical responses to the outbreak of the Second World War in Northern Ireland with an emphasis on Belfast. It focuses on the emergence of the Emergency Medical Service (EMS), established throughout the United Kingdom in response to the anticipation of likely air-raid casualties. Pre- Second World War hospital services in Belfast were piecemeal, lacking integration and provided by varying independent bodies including voluntary, municipal and poor law authorities. This chapter argues that the EMS brought a degree of integration previously unknown in Northern Irish health organisation and administration. This new found integration of war time medical services greatly influenced the ‘post war reconstruction’ and ‘planning’ of health. The chapter examines Northern Irish contexts and suggests that Irish and Northern Irish health care systems began to dramatically diverge during wartime. It also examines the relationship between Belfast and London’s Ministry of Health, and the challenges of devolved healthcare. In addition, the chapter examines the public health responses to the 1941 Belfast Blitz, and the overall effectiveness of wartime health services.