Ireland and medicine in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Fiona Clark, James Kelly

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...