Posted: 10 May 2006
UCD receives Wellcome Trust award to explore the history of medicine in Ireland
The Wellcome Trust has awarded UCD and the University of Ulster a joint Strategic Enhancement Award to explore the Social History of Medicine in Ireland. The award which is valued at €400,000 will be used to fund PhD Scholars, Research Assistants and Conferences to further develop the discipline in Ireland. The research project will focus on three central themes: the relationship between conventional and non-conventional medicine, maternal and child medicine, and a comparison between Northern and Southern Ireland. The UCD project leaders are Professor Mary E. Daly, Principal, UCD College of Arts and Celtic Studies, and Dr. Catherine Cox, UCD School of History and Archives.
Commenting on the award, Professor Daly said: ‘The Social History of Medicine in Ireland had not been receiving the sustained and comprehensive scholarly interest which it truly deserves. But now, with the help of the Wellcome Trust Award and working with our partners in the University of Ulster, we can make use of the many source materials which are available in Ireland to establish a centre of expertise on the subject. The centre will have its home base in the UCD School of History and Archives.’
Professor Mary E. Daly, Principal,
UCD College of Arts and Celtic Studies
‘This project will put Ireland and UCD on the international map in terms of the study of the Social History of Medicine. The scholarly work completed will be integrated into what is currently a dynamic field of scholarship around the world. It will also mean that the Social History of Medicine can stake its claim in the Irish national arena’ continued Professor Daly.
The Wellcome Trust Awards (Strategic and Enhancement) support groups of historians of medicine within UK and Irish universities. All institutions with a demonstrable commitment to the area can avail of the open competition offered by the schemes. Only one strategic enhancement award per category is awarded by the Trust each year.
Established in 1936, the Wellcome Trust is an independent charity founded on the death of Sir Henry Wellcome. Sir Henry vested the entire share capital of the drug company ‘The Wellcome Foundation Limited’ in the trust. In keeping with his wishes, as laid out in his will, its mission is to foster and promote research with the aim of improving human and animal health. With an endowment of around £11 billion, it is the UK's largest non-governmental source of funds for biomedical research. The Trust seeks to improve the understanding of the ways science and medicine have developed, and how research affects people and society today.
* The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute sequenced one-third of the human genome as part of a worldwide partnership, the Human Genome Project. And funding from the Wellcome Trust ensured that human genome sequence information was kept in the public domain. This huge achievement will greatly enhance our ability to study the diseases that afflict people and animals.
* The Wellcome Trust also funded scientists in South-east Asia who developed and tested the drug Artemisinin in the 1990’s which is used to treat malaria in Vietnam and Thailand with huge success. Every year Malaria kills over 2.5 million people worldwide – most of them children under the age of five.