An Tobar: a Two-day Workshop on Sacred Springs and Holy Wells

Waterford Museum of Treasures, 26-27th June 2017

For further details please see: Holy Wells and Sacred Springs

This two-day workshop brings together scholars from across the world and from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines, all working on aspects of holy wells and sacred water. Most commonly a spring (but sometimes a pond, an entire lake, or even a hollow in a rock or tree where dew and rain collects), a holy well can possess miraculous healing qualities and is associated with supernatural beings, for example, being dedicated to a saint in Europe, associated with fertility goddesses in Africa, or the abode of boon-granting dragons in China. Water is sacred around the globe because water is life, and our critical need for water means hallowed wells and springs are found cross-culturally. 

The social significance of sacred water bodies and their associated traditions is now an emerging subject of study. One area where Irish scholars in particular are making great advances is the medical and curative dimension to these sites. These papers represent exciting new research taking place across Ireland into the various ways holy wells and their landscapes have played and continue to play a role in approaches to health and wellbeing. 

Healing Waters and Therapeutic Landscapes 

North Leinster Holy Wells: A Medical Geography – Ronan Foley, Maynooth University 

One of the primary reputations of holy wells is their function as curative sites. Medical/health geographers are equally interested in the idea of therapeutic landscapes, places or spaces with established reputations for health and healing. With increased access to spatial information on the location of holy wells, and a parallel development in the mapping of folklore sources about specific cures, it has become possible for the first time to create a medical geography of holy wells in Ireland. Sources vary from traveller’s accounts and local historical sources to material from the Schools Collection and more recent surveys and ethnographic site visits. This paper describes the spatial distributions of specific cures in North Leinster as a representative location and considers the extent to which some wells had quite specific named curative powers, while others were panaceal. In addition, the location of the different cures across time and space will complement ongoing work at Trinity College Dublin on scientific testing of the waters to see if local geographical conditions can in part explain their distribution. Finally, the use of GIS and other geo-spatial mapping approaches identify the ongoing ways in which holy wells databases can be developed to promote the preservation of their narrative histories and ongoing curative performances. 

Dr Ronan Foley is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Geography at Maynooth University, Ireland. He has written extensively in the broad area of therapeutic landscapes, including Healing Waters: Therapeutic Landscapes in Historic and Contemporary Ireland (2010). He is currently the PI on an Irish Environmental Protection Agency project on Green/Blue Spaces and Health & an advisory partner on an ESRC project at the University of Exeter on Sensing Nature. 

Tobair beannaithe agus ‘an leigheas’: Holy Wells and ‘the cure’ in 20th Century Ireland – Carol Barron, Dublin City University 

The Schools Manuscript Collection of 1937-38, housed in the Folklore Department in UCD is believed to be the largest single medical folklore collection in Europe, and offers us a unique insight into the believes, practices and rituals surrounding ‘the cure’ and Holy wells in 20th Century Ireland. This paper examines a subsection of over 7,500 ‘cures’ sampled from the Schools Manuscript Collection from each barony of each of the 26 counties of Ireland, of which over 250 ‘cures’ are specific to Holy wells. This shared socio-cultural phenomenon is critically examined from a folkloristic/anthropological perspective, focusing on the specific disease states and their cultural importance to the health of Irish society at the time of recording and through history. 

Dr Carol Barron is a lecturer in the Department of Nursing and Human Sciences at Dublin City University. She received her PhD in Anthropology from NUI Maynooth and her research focusses on child health. In particular, she has conducted extensive investigation into the use of Irish folk cures.

Well-being: Holy Wells as Emergent Therapeutic Spaces – Richard Scriven, University College Cork

Applying the concept of therapeutic landscapes to holy wells, this paper examines these sites as spaces of wellbeing that are forged through the interactions of people and place. Holy wells can be appreciated as sources of health offering spiritual and emotional support to individuals and communities. These experiences are generated in the meeting of bodies and practices, location and materials, and beliefs and emotions. Within these processes, well-being emerges with the site rather than being taking from it: there is a ‘taking place’ of health and wellbeing. Drawing on my fieldwork at holy wells across Munster, I explore the practices and meanings that contribute to the creation of these spaces of wellbeing and offer speculations on further engagements with this arena. 

Dr Richard Scriven is an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography, UCC. His research examines pilgrimage in contemporary Ireland as a socio-cultural phenomenon. 

Holy Wells: The Evidence from Ulster – Finbar McCormick, Queen’s University 

The experience of attending holy wells was composed of two main components, health and penance. While the curative nature of the wells is generally emphasised, the great majority of those who attended sites were not suffering for sickness or disability, - “every face beaming with the glow of health” as one observer noted. The main aim was to ensure the maintenance of good health for the coming year. This aspect of the ritual often involved washing or bathing in the well’s waters something that has for the most part disappeared in modern holy well rituals. The earliest place-name evidence for holy wells in Ulster and elsewhere, dating to the early Medieval period, indicates their association with health. It is likely that the penitential aspect of the wells is a later development. This paper considers a chronology for understanding the layered meanings of holy well rituals in Ulster. 

Dr Finbar McCormick teaches Archaeology at Queen’s University Belfast and has recently been researching and excavating Struell wells in County Sown. Struell contains the most extensive set of buildings associated with a holy well in Ireland and can be documented back to the early Medieval period.

Further Details

Please see: Holy Wells and Sacred Springs

Alcohol, Medicine and Irish Society, c.1890-1970 by Alice Mauger

Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Fellowship

A Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship has been awarded to Dr. Alice Mauger. Her three-year project on ‘Alcohol, Medicine and Irish Society, c.1890-1970’ is being hosted by the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland (CHOMI). It is mentored by Dr. Lindsey Earner-Byrne, Deputy Head of the School of History, UCD and sponsored by Associate Professor Catherine Cox, Director of UCD CHOMI.

The project explores the evolution of medicine’s role in framing and treating alcoholism in Ireland. It assesses the period from the 1890s, when acceptance of inebriety as a disease led to the creation of the short-lived inebriate reformatories, to the 1970s, when dedicated rehabilitation facilities were formed in response to the rising number of psychiatric patients diagnosed with alcohol-related illnesses.

Until now, the history of medicine has offered little reflection on the relationship between medicine and alcoholism in Ireland. While the ubiquitous “drunken Irish” stereotype, still prevalent today, has been evaluated from several viewpoints, we have yet to discover how international and Irish medical communities interpreted, informed and absorbed this label. By investigating care in asylums and inebriate reformatories, along with medical debates and shifting government policies, the project questions how the exchange of medical, government and lay ideas came to shape understandings and experiences of alcoholism in Irish society.

Still image from the television show, 'Home Truths', featuring a segment
on alcoholism,  RTÉ, 7 December 1966. Image courtesy of the RTÉ Stills Department.

Context

Despite the popularity of temperance and pioneer movements in Ireland since the mid-nineteenth century and high levels of abstinence reported into the 1950s, the Irish have traditionally been viewed as being especially prone to alcoholism. Irish emigrants were persistently portrayed as heavy drinkers, while the emergent Irish nationalist movement sought to associate abstinence with patriotism – some prominent members even claiming that the British encouraged Irish drinking to demoralise the population. In these ways, alcoholism was inextricably linked to theories or fears of Irish degeneration.

This project questions the extent to which enduring stereotypes of the Irish as violent and drunken permeated contemporary medical conceptions of alcoholism, and whether this in turn influenced political and lay interpretations.

Internationally, several works have focussed on shifting medical concepts of addiction. This project situates Irish therapeutic and diagnostic trends alongside those in other western countries, including Britain, America and Australia. It also seeks to inform the extensive literature on the history of psychiatry, particularly degeneracy and ethnicity, and related discourses in Irish social history covering themes such as poverty, violence and the family.

Aims

The project aims to make a significant contribution to the medical humanities, exploring historical sources to better understand and contextualise Irish society’s relationship with alcohol. In doing so, it hopes to inform present-day social and cultural concerns.

Keys findings from the project will be presented in a monograph, journal article and a series of posts on the CHOMI blog, as well as papers given at relevant forums.

In 2019, Alice will organise an interdisciplinary workshop on ‘Alcohol, Medicine and Society’ at CHOMI, inviting policy makers and academics from Ireland and overseas. A call for papers for this event will feature on this blog.

Alice has also planned a one-month knowledge exchange to the Centre for History in Public Health in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to engage with prominent experts on addiction history including Professor Virginia Berridge and Dr. Alex Mold.

Biography

Dr Alice Mauger

Dr Alice Mauger is a postdoctoral fellow at the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, University College Dublin. She was awarded a PhD by UCD in 2014 for her thesis which examined public, voluntary and private asylum care in nineteenth-century Ireland. Prior to this she completed the MA programme on the Social and Cultural History of Medicine at the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, UCD. Both her MA and PhD were funded by the Wellcome Trust. Dr Mauger has published on the history of psychiatry in Ireland and is currently finalising her first monograph: The Cost of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Public, Voluntary and Private Asylum Care.

Parochial Officers of Health in pre-Famine Dublin by Ciarán McCabe

In this month's blog Dr Ciaran McCabe, an Irish Research Council funded postdoctoral fellow  (NUI Galway), considers the oft-neglected figure of the parochial health officer and his role in the prevention of contagion and fighting fever epidemics in early nineteenth-century Ireland. In 2011, Dr McCabe successfully completed a MA thesis at the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, UCD, on the impact of the 1817-19 and 1826-27 fever epidemics on the Cork Street Fever Hospital, Dublin. 

Preventing the Danger of Contagion and Other Evils

The Fever Act of 1819 empowered parish 

vestries to elect unpaid officers of health

From the middle of the seventeenth century, civil parish vestries in Ireland carried out functions which we would today associate with local government services: fire-fighting, tree planting, public lighting, and the repair of roads. Parishes also undertook to provide some assistance to local parishioners in distress and this relief included the support of local 'foundlings', the purchase of coffins for local paupers, payments of cash to widows and the maintenance of an alms-house, typically inhabited by local widows. Parish vestries were of such importance as units of local government that it was upon them that powers were bestowed for the prevention of contagion in response to the 1817-19 fever epidemic. The 1819 Fever Act empowered parish vestries to elect unpaid officers of health, who had the authority to direct that tenements, lanes and streets be cleaned, and that nuisances be removed from the streets. These officers also had the power to apprehend and dismiss from the parish 'all idle poor Persons, Men, Women, or Children, and all Persons who may be found begging or seeking Relief' in the interest of 'preventing the Danger of Contagion and other Evils'.¹

Officers of Health: Respectable Parishioners

The positions of officers of health were filled by respectable parishioners, who also typically served as churchwardens, sidesmen and overseers. To these men (and they were invariably men), such voluntary service gave them an opportunity to display their civil responsibilities, as well as asserting their prominence within the community. Toby Barnard has argued that 'as in England, so in Protestant Ireland, a willingness regularly to assume the burdens of parochial office may have helped the middling sort to define and so distinguish themselves from the lower ranks'.² Among the officers of health in St Michan's parish in the 1830s were Mark Flower of Old Church Street and merchant William Hill of 47 Pill Lane, who also served together as sidesmen and overseers of licenced houses.³ In some instances, parishioners who were qualified medical practitioners  were elected to serve as officers of health, such as David Brereton MD in St Michan's in 1831.⁴ In St Thomas's parish in 1828, four of the ten elected officers of health were medical practitioners.⁵

The Fever Act (1819)

A notice issued by the officers of
health in St Werburgh parish,
November 1831

The Fever Act was passed in June 1819, by which point the nationwide fever epidemic had petered out. With the emergency over, parishes were slow to fill the positions of officers of health, which, while not encompassing any salary, required the levying of a parish cess to cover expenses. Shortly after the legislation was passed, the Head of Police wrote to each of the Dublin parishes, reminding them of of their duties to elect officers under the new Fever Act.⁶ In St Catherine's the first officers of health were appointed two months after the legislation was passed while it took nine months for the first officers to be appointed in St Werburgh's parish.⁷ Such delays could be criticised, yet on the other hand, given that the worst of the epidemic had passed, parishes were understandably reluctant to assume additional expenditure on unnecessary undertakings.

Cholera Epidemic

Freeman’s Journal, 17 November 1831. The parish vestry 

of St Anne’s in Dublin city appointed officers of health in 

late-1831, following reports that cholera had reached

 England and was believed likely to spread to Ireland

For the first decade after the enactment of the 1819 fever legislation, many parishes avoided filling these positions. Parish expenditure had to be raised through the taxation of local parishioners, who, in some cases in Dublin city, paid up to sixteen different taxes to various local authorities.⁸ The significance of the 1819 Fever Act, empowering parish vestries to spearhead the local responses to epidemic disease, was not realised until more than a decade after its enactment, when cholera made its first appearance in western Europe. In late-1831, when reports reached Ireland that cholera had been identified in England, parish vestries throughout the country held emergency meetings, drawing on their powers under the 1819 act and rapidly appointing officers of health as a measure to prevent – albeit unsuccessfully – the introduction and propagation of cholera.

To Guard Against Contagion

In St Andrew's parish in December 1831, a cess was levied on parishioners to enable the work of the officers of health by means of 'cleansing & whitewashing the dwellings of the poor in order to guard against contagion'.⁹ Two weeks earlier in St Catherine's parish, the sum of £50 was levied on parishioners following reports 'that a pestilential has raged in several parts of Europe form sometime under the name of Cholera Morbus, which it is feared may shortly extend its ravages to this Kingdom'.¹⁰ Cholera eventually reached Ireland in the spring of 1832 and throughout the epidemic, parochial officers of health carried out measures to mitigate the impact of the contagion. A question which remains unanswered is how the parochial officers of health interacted with other authorities, such as the state-run Board of Health. The rejection in October 1832 by officers of St James's parish of the Board of Health's right to interfere in parochial matters suggests the existence of inherent tensions between these parties, yet the extent to which this single instance is representative of a wider trend is as of yet unclear.¹¹

A dead cholera victim in Sunderland, 1832. Following the outbreak of cholera in north-east
England, Irish parish vestries rushed to appoint officers of health. Wellcome Images

The Decline of the Parochial Officer of Health

Some parishes continued to appoint officers of health throughout the 1830s but the practice declined by the 1840s; yet there are some instances of officers being appointed by parishes in Ulster into the 1850s.¹² The power of parish vestries to appoint officers of health was repealed by the 1866 Sanitary Act,¹³ which extended earlier legislation for England to Ireland and was passed at the height of yet another cholera epidemic. Responsibility for sanitary regulations was transferred to a new Public Health Committee, which operated under the auspices of Dublin Corporation.¹⁴ As well as reflecting wider developments in public health reform in this period, the decline of the parochial officer of health was also a symptom of the gradual removal of civil functions from Irish parish vestries. Although constituting relatively short-lived positions with limited powers, and whose efficacy in mitigating the impact of contagion is difficult to gauge, parochial officers of health remain an interesting and neglected part of the social and medical landscape of nineteenth-century Ireland.

Dr Ciarán McCabe

Dr Ciarán McCabe is an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland postdoctoral fellow at the Moore Institute, NUI Galway. In 2015 he was awarded a PhD by Maynooth University for his thesis which examined begging and alms-giving in pre-Famine Ireland. He is currently writing a monograph arising from his doctoral research. Dr McCabe holds a Masters in the Social and Cultural History of Medicine from the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland (CHOMI), UCD and also serves as compiler for Irish History Online.

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1 An act to establish Regulations for preventing Contagious Diseases in Ireland', 59 Geo. III, c. 41 (14 June 1819).^↩
2 Toby Barnard, A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants, 1649-1770 (New Haven and London), 2003), p. 242.^↩
3 St Michan's parish, Dublin, vestry minute book, 7 April 1828 (Representative Church Body Library (RCBL), St Michan's parish, Dublin, vestry minute books, P 276.05.5; ibid., 23 December 1828; ibid., 9 April 1832; 20 April 1835. Hill also served as churchwarden: ibid., 4 April 1836.^↩
4 St Michan's parish, Dublin, vestry minute book, 23 November 1831.^↩
5 St Thomas parish, Dublin, vestry minute book, 7 April 1828 (RCBL, St Thomas's parish, Dublin, vestry minute books, P 80.5.2).^↩
6 Saunder's Newsletter, 19 August 1819.^↩
7 St Catherine's parish, Dublin, vestry minutes, 24 August 1819 (RCBL, St Catherine's parish, Dublin, vestry minute books, P 117.05.7); St Werburgh's parish, Dublin, vestry minutes, 25 March 1820 (RCBL, St Werburgh's parish, Dublin, vestry minute books, P 326.05.2).^↩
8 Jacinta Prunty, Dublin Slums, 1800-1925: A Study in Urban Geography (Dublin, 1998), p. 67.^↩
9 St Andrew's parish, Dublin, vestry minutes, 12 December 1831 (RCBL, St Andrew's parish, Dublin vestry minute books, P 059.05.2).^↩
10 St Catherine's parish, Dublin, vestry minutes, 28 November 1831.^↩
11 The Pilot, 12 October 1832.^↩
12 Belfast Newsletter, 28 August 1851, 14 April 1852, 3 May 1854.^↩
13 'An act to amend the Law relating to Public Health', 29 & 30 Vict., c. 90, s. 69 (7 August 1866).^↩
14 Prunty, Dublin Slums, pp 70-71.^↩