Workshops 2010-11
Workshops 2010-11
Health, Illness and Ethnicity’: Migration, Discrimination and Social Dislocation
Humanities Institute of Ireland, University College Dublin,
10-11 June 2011
This two-day workshop focused on the relationship between illness, migration, discrimination and social dislocation primarily during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It explored the relationship between historical concerns surrounding health and ethnicity, and current health practices and policy. The workshop contributes to debates on the susceptibility of specific groups to medical interventions, as well as interpretations of the relationship between health and illness, migration and ethnicity. We considerd how the medical management of specific ethnic groups intersected with broader health and welfare strategies. By migration, we refer to migration between countries and internal movements of populations, for example between regions or from rural to urban areas. The workshop explored the experiences of particular groups, be these ‘foreigners’, migratory peoples, patients of varied religious denominations and those suffering from particular disorders or diseases.
It was the second event associated with the ongoing Wellcome Trust project ‘Madness, Migration and the Irish in Lancashire, c.1850-1921’.
Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Conference
University Of Ulster (Belfast Campus),
26-27 May 2011
This two day conference brought scholars together to discuss various topics and themes related to the history of medicine.
Cares, Cures and Charms’: Health Provision in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland
University College Dublin,
9 April 2011
This symposium was jointly organised by the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland and the UCD Micheál Ó Cleirigh Institute. The aim of the one day event was to examine texts and recent scholarship on how communities in medieval and early modern Ireland cared for the sick, their various approaches to medicine and regimes of care that developed in Ireland from the early medieval to early modern period.
Paediatric Diseases Throughout the Ages: New Perspectives
University College Dublin
10 December 2010
This one-day workshop focused on paediatric illness including responses to infectious and non-infectious illnesses. The gaze of the patient as well as the paediatrician was represented. Infant mortality rates are often used as an indication of the strength or weakness of a country’s health strategy. These rates are intrinsically linked with public health issues such as vaccination, sanitation, nutrition, housing and sewerage in addition to available treatments. Historically, many children were members of the workforce. Some were parents by the age of 15 while others spent their lives in a state of chronic ill health. Premature death came to many via now-vanished or almost-vanquished diseases such as diphtheria or smallpox. Children throughout the ages have been afflicted with diseases of the mind as well as the body. Care was provided in institutional and community settings as well as the home. Focusing on diseases of childhood provides a wide field for analysis and discussion of issues from neonatal interventions to infectious diseases to mental health strategies and occupational diseases, this workshop acted as a platform to discuss and critically engage with these themes.
Arising from this workshop, a number of the contributors - Jean Walker, Ida Milne Philomena Gorey and Anne Mac Lellan - participated in a panel entitled ‘Childhood illness on the European Periphery: Ireland’ at the European Economic and Social History conference in Glasgow in April 2012.
A volume entitled Growing Pains: Childhood Illness in Ireland 1750-1950 containing an expanded version of selected papers presented at the conference in University College Dublin, along with some commissioned chapters, edited by Dr Anne Mac Lellan and Alice Mauger will be published by Irish Academic Press in Spring 2013.
Migration, Mental Illness and the Management of Asylum Populations
University of Warwick
24 September 2010
This workshop focused on the relationship between migration, mental illness and the management of asylum populations. By migration, we referred to both migration between countries and internal movements of populations, for example between regions or from rural to urban areas. Our focus was the nineteenth and early twentieth-century asylum, and we were interested in how, once admitted, patients were treated and managed. The workshop contributed to debates on admission and discharge processes, but focused on the complexities of asylum management, in a period of considerable expansion of the asylum system when growing pressure was placed on these institutions. The workshop explored the management and experiences of particular groups, be these ‘foreigners’, male and female patients, patients of varied religious denominations, the elderly, those deemed suicidal or dangerous, or patients diagnosed with particular disorders, such as insanity related to intemperance or GPI. The workshop provided the organisers with an opportunity to present on their new project on ‘Madness, Migration and the Irish in Lancashire, c.1850-1921’ (funded by the Wellcome Trust). The final purpose of the workshop was to reinstitute what used to be an active series of workshops on the history of psychiatry.
Cox, Catherine, Marland, Hilary, and York, Sarah. ‘Emaciated, Exhausted and Excited: The Bodies and Minds of the Irish in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire Asylums.’ Journal of Social History 46: 2 (Winter, 2012).