Courtney McGrailThe medical profession and the exercise of power in early nineteenth century Cork
Ian D’Alton
The Maynooth Studies in Local History has now published 116 titles. The series editor, Professor Raymond Gillespie, suggests that these studies, mainly the fruits of postgraduate research, represent some of the most innovative and exciting work being undertaken in Irish history today. These studies may be compact, but they are researched, written and edited to the highest standards.
Neil Cronin’s work is no exception. Cronin, a Cork medical doctor, has stuck to his last, but has used a spat between surgeons in early 19th Century Cork city to illustrate larger themes of sectarian privilege, economic advantage and social status in the late Georgian era when Catholic disadvantage was beginning to crumble.
Irish Protestant ascendancy, based on the control of the local corporation and its offshoots, was at this time under increasing threat from an economically, as well as a politically, resurgent Catholicism.
Medicine was a socially prestigious discipline, as well as a lucrative one – it, and the law, were the only professions that could be practised by Catholics under the Penal Laws. Thus, it is not surprising to find the Catholic aspirant middle classes taking to medicine; it offered a route into money and society.
All this is usefully demonstrated through the medium of what appeared, on the surface, to be a professional dispute between two Cork surgeons, Drs William Bullen and John Woodroffe. Bullen, a Catholic, took issue with the quality and outcome of operations for bladder stones (lithotomy) carried out by Woodroffe, an Anglican, on certain young patients.
The author gives us lay persons perhaps a little too much medical information for comfort, but he does set the scene admirably.
Bullen brought a formal complaint against Woodroffe to the South Charitable Infirmary, of which he was a governor.
The complaint was dismissed, but precipitated a pamphlet war between the two medics, in which they called upon the great and good of the medical world for respective support. Cronin imaginatively examines the dispute from various angles – as a clinical issue, one of personalities, as concerned with medical economics and as a political and religious issue. Cronin especially places Woodroffe’s swift rise in the Cork medical world within a context of the corrupt nature of Cork local politics.
The corporation was controlled by a shadowy ‘Friendly Club’, of which Woodroffe was a member. The Club was entirely Protestant, and there is little doubt that the sort of Freemasonry that it engendered spilled over into ‘jobs for the boys’ in other areas, notably the Cork hospitals. Bullen and his ilk were excluded.
Thus, Cronin’s contention is that the real cause of the dispute between Bullen and Woodroffe was Bullen’s resentment at that exclusion based, as Cronin asserts, on sectarian considerations. This was doubtless the case but, by the 1820s, the redoubts of Protestant privilege were already under siege.
Bullen’s forwardness might thus be seen as a mark of a new, confident Catholicism – and, incidentally, of a desire to participate in the economic benefits of an elite system, not necessarily to destroy it.