Through a Glass Darkly: The Archive and the Imperfect Portrait of a Man

In this blog post, Hannah Kempel, a student on UCD's MA in History of Welfare & Medicine in Society, reflects on her personal responses to archival material relating to Dr Neil John Blayney (1874-1919) donated to the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland's Heritage Centre.

There’s a certain intimacy to archival documents, one that I’m not sure that I fully grasped before taking up this project. I had never really interacted with archival documents as part of a collection before. What little experience I had was in individual documents, either provided to me by professors or in database searches. The experience of interacting with a single archival collection is markedly different: deeper, more intimate, and more emotional.

We don’t always consider the emotional element of interacting with archives, but that has been my strongest response to this collection. Emotion in historical practice is controversial but useful. While some academics may believe it to be unnecessary or improper for historians, it can help us to move past our gut reactions and preconceived notions and draw out new understandings.[1] Beyond its use to the historian, empathy can also provide a way for us to engage more ethically with our sources.[2] We can treat our subjects as people with their own voices, not objects.[3]

This particular collection, the Neil John Blayney Collection at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI) Heritage Centre archives, only concerns one man: the eponymous Neil John Blayney. Far from being the calm and objective historian, I had many different feelings while sifting through Blayney’s documents: humour, annoyance, admiration. I was quite surprised by the depth of what I felt. My strong emotional response inspired me to dig deeper into Blayney’s experiences and motivations and provided me with a richer and wider experience.

Background 

Dr Blayney, date unknown. Used
with permission from the RCPI Heritage Centre.

Dr Neil John Blayney was born in 1874 to a merchant family, the sixth of seven children.[4] He studied Greek, Latin, and English at the Royal University of Ireland, medicine at the Catholic University, and began practising as a doctor in 1897.[5] He would serve in a variety of roles as a surgeon during his life: from ship’s surgeon on a cargo and passenger ship [6] to resident surgeon at the Queen’s County Infirmary [7] to Medical Officer to the Maryborough Barracks during the First World War.[8] He married Eily Meehan in 1916 and had a daughter named Mary ten months later.[9] His son Andrew was born in 1918.[10] Blayney died in 1919.[11]

These are the barest of facts of Blayney’s life. They read more as a resumé than a biography and tell you little to nothing about what kind of man Blayney actually was. There is so much more to Blayney’s life, as there is for any person’s life, than the bare facts. Neil J. Brennan, Blayney’s grandson, took Blayney’s documents and pulled a much more colourful portrait of the man in his book Opening Dusty Boxes: The Life of a County Surgeon in Edwardian Ireland. His Blayney is an individualist who involved himself in politics and enjoyed playing football. He learned about these aspects and more from photographs, news articles, letters, and the inferences that he could make from what documents survived.[12]

Constructing Dr Blayney

How do you pull the person from the papers? There are almost one hundred items of Blayney’s in the Neil John Blayney Collection at the RCPI Heritage Centre. This collection consists of five categories of documents: those relating to his medical career, his personal life, his service in the First World War, medical records, and supplementary material collected by Neil J. Brennan.[13] At first glance this may seem rather comprehensive, but can one hundred items really encapsulate a person’s life? Twenty-six of those items are professional references.[14] Over a quarter of Blayney’s documents are written about him in a very specific professional context. What does that have to say, if anything, about who Blayney was?

In the book An Eye for Eternity Mark McKenna tells the story of Manning Clark, a famous Australian historian, and his wife Dymphna. Beyond telling the story of an influential man and his oft-overlooked wife, McKenna also digs deep into Clark’s self-conscious shaping of his own legacy through meticulous editing and choosing of his own documents. The sheer amount of records and the meticulous detail with which he documented and deliberately chose them indicate a great deal of effort was involved in Clark’s creation of his archival legacy.[15]

The question of what makes it into an archive and what does not can be quite fascinating. This can be a matter of policy, of concrete guidelines that lead to documents’ inclusion or exclusion from archives. For example, the RCPI Heritage Centre has a specific collection policy that is used to determine whether or not it will accept a donation, restricting its content to materials related to the history of medicine in Ireland.[16] The National Archives of Ireland goes one step further. Its policy is based on the National Archives Act of 1986.[17] What can or cannot be included in that archive is a matter of law.

Personal collections are somewhat different. An archive may choose to acquire them or not, but their creation is much more intimate and subjective than a collection created due to policy or law. Personal collections reflect the decisions and motivations of their creators. Manning Clark created his archival collection through a great deal of effort and time. He involved his family, especially his wife, in its creation.[18] Mark McKenna sees this management, which is interwoven into Clark’s biography, as Clark’s way of creating a second life for himself.[19]

Self-management and Self-reflection

The case of Manning Clark is in many ways an extreme example of managing one’s legacy. Clark was a historian who made his life’s work out of digging through papers in archives. He would have had a much wider understanding of the ways that personal documents can change and shape a legacy than Neil John Blayney, a county surgeon, might have had. This doesn’t mean that Blayney did not have a hand in creating his own archival collection.

Blayney’s collection has had a very different life than that of Manning Clark’s. By the time Clark created his collection and sent his documents to the Australian National Archive he was already a celebrity in Australia. He seems to have very explicitly desired to be written about in the future. He even left notes to future biographers in his diary.[20] Clark was desperate to be remembered. The Blayney collection’s path has been more circuitous. It was kept in the Blayney family’s possession, not as an archival collection used for research but as a set of “very dusty boxes” passed down to Dr Neil J. Brennan who donated it to the RCPI Heritage Centre.[21]

It doesn’t seem that Blayney ever planned for his documents to form a legacy for himself- at least not in the way Clark envisioned. Given that he died of a stroke at the age of 44 he likely didn’t foresee the end of his life any time soon, not like Clark’s anticipation in his old age.[22] This is not a collection borne out of a lifetime of study and management. We can then look at Blayney’s papers as a reflection of the documents he wanted to keep for himself, not for posterity.

What, then, did Blayney choose to keep for himself? Personal correspondence, handwritten notes, class notes, bills, letters of reference. Perfectly ordinary documents, the kind that anyone might have, that nevertheless reveal a life. Blayney’s papers reveal some of the twists and turns of his life and grant an insight into the practicalities of life as a doctor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In diving into these documents one can reveal not just an example of the life of a middle-class county surgeon but the life of Neil John Blayney. 

“Regarding Our Last Correspondence” 

The Irish Automobile Club premises, present day. Source: The
National Inventory of Architectural Heritage.

One particularly interesting chapter of Blayney’s life concerns a series of correspondences between him and the Irish Automobile Club over the course of 1915.[23] A patriot, Blayney loaned his car to the Club for use in the transfer of wounded soldiers.[24] Unfortunately for both him and the Club, the car would soon break down and a dispute would ensue over the cost of the repairs. It’s a fascinating look into a personal dispute and proof of the old saying “no good deed goes unpunished”.

Blayney’s collection only contains the responses from the Club and a mechanic. He does not seem to have kept drafts of his letters in this case despite keeping other drafts.[25] As such we can only read the responses to whatever he wrote. The Club’s responses, mostly written by H.J. Clayton, appear more and more exasperated with whatever Blayney wrote them. The relationship between Blayney and the Club does not seem to have ended very amicably.

I bring up this case because it offers such an interesting glimpse into Blayney’s personality, yet Blayney’s own words are lost to us. The set of letters tell a particular narrative. The first letter profusely thanks Blayney for his contribution.[26] The next few letters give some details on the car’s breakdown within a month of the previous donation and discuss the Club’s inability to pay for repairs.[27] This begins a year-long dispute over who should pay for the car repairs.

This is a compelling sub-series for me. The letters, one-sided as they may be, tell a story of frustration on both ends. Blayney as viewed through Clayton’s letters seems frustrated with the Club for damaging his car, asking him to pay for repairs, and taking a long time in fixing the car. The Club, on the other hand, appears frustrated with Blayney for not paying and then leaving his car in their garage for a long time while the dispute was going on. There’s a certain sense of mundaneness in the letters, of a fairly common sort of argument over who should pay for something, even occurring as they did in the middle of a large international conflict. It’s such a human moment.

I had a very personal reaction to these letters when I first read them. James Lowry discusses this “affective response”, which he argues that users of archival material can employ in order to better “bear witness” to the people and events they are studying.[28] As I bore witness to this episode of Blayney’s life, I didn’t like what I saw. The letters in my experience of them do not paint Blayney in a very positive light. I found myself getting annoyed with him as I read the responses from the Automobile Club. Without Blayney’s own words to speak for himself, I could only view him through the words of an organization that he was in conflict with.

There is an archival concept called imagined records.[29] These are records that may have, could have, or we want to exist, but that we can’t find. We ascribe a lot of significance to these imagined records and we feel their loss. Imagined records can be incredibly personal for the person imagining them – creating their own affective response.[30] I’ve seen examples ranging from the medical records of a stillborn child to the records of colonised nations that were lost during decolonisation.[31] Compared to such painful events, some missing letters about car repairs may seem rather trite. Why compare them to much more important cases? Small instances can be used to conceptualise the wider problem – that archives can very rarely tell the whole story.

I can imagine the letters that Blayney sent. There are drafts of other letters and notes that he wrote in the collection.[32] From these I can piece out his writing style, his handwriting. I can guess some of the things that he wrote to the Club from Clayton’s responses. For example, Blayney seems to have wanted to know the details of exactly what parts of his car were worked on. There are several letters responding to his questions.[33]

I can’t know exactly what he said, however, and herein lies the trap. When I read the letters I felt annoyed at his imagined slights against the writers. Did that annoyance make me imagine his letters as more aggressive, more petulant than they might have been? Did I project my own experiences with similar disputes onto Blayney? This too I can’t know because I can’t read his letters. I can only imagine what might have been.

Mrs Blayney’s Medical Reports

Another item in the collection that fascinates me is Item 44. It’s a set of nurses’ reports from the first of November, 1918 to the thirtieth of the same month.[34] Mrs Blayney became sick and was admitted to the hospital late in her second pregnancy. A month later she gave birth prematurely to her son.[35] Blayney kept the nurses’ reports on his wife’s health in his personal records.

A nurse’s reports from the collection. Used with
permission from the RCPI Heritage Centre.

The reports detail Eily’s diet, her temperature, her medications, and even her urine. The majority of each page is bare, with only a few markings indicating what the nurses did. The last few pages are even blank but for some reason Blayney kept them anyway.[36] What does this say about Blayney, that he kept these records?

As a doctor, these records would make more sense to Blayney than to a layperson. These records could have had more value to him than someone who is not a doctor. But being able to read and understand a set of records is not the whole story. If Blayney had kept every set of medical records that he could get his hands on, the collection would be much larger than it is.

Blayney was not a meticulous record-keeper like Manning Clark. This means that there are fewer of Blayney’s documents that we can study, but conversely that also lends more weight to the documents that he chose to keep. If Clark’s collection is intentional and vast, Blayney’s is serendipitous and specific. His records seem to be confined to important documentation like income tax returns, professional papers, and items of personal interest. In which category would Blayney place the nurses’ records?

What were these thirty-three pages to Blayney? Important documentation relating to a family medical emergency? Perhaps, but likely not thought of in the way that he viewed an income tax return or furniture invoice. Something related to his profession as a doctor? Another document is a register of examination notes, so it’s not out of the realm of possibilities that he could have had a similar interest in keeping his wife’s nursing records.[37] However, Eily went to a different hospital than Queen’s County Infirmary, where he worked at the time.[38] These nurses’ reports would have had no direct bearing on his career. Blayney’s medical speciality also seem to have been tuberculosis, not what seems to have been pneumonia or influenza.[39] Or were these simply papers describing a difficult time in his wife’s life, made worse by the premature birth of his son shortly after her release?[40]

We can’t know for sure but we can guess. Perhaps we can see this as another very human moment. Blayney kept the details of Eily’s treatment in what was likely a very difficult time in both of their lives. Blayney seems to have cared about his wife, enough to push past his mother’s disapproval for their union.[41] It would make sense for him to be invested in her wellbeing. His exact motivations are not clear, but with this document we can approach a sense of the care that he felt for his wife and son.

This document is compelling for the questions that it raises. The archive can provide us with tantalising clues but rarely a smoking gun. Handed the concrete evidence of one man’s life I can only feel the weight of what is missing from Blayney’s records. Julia Laite wrote that “friendship… is so often missing from the historical record.”[42] Interpersonal relationships are often hard to pin down in the records we leave behind. We may be given clues but concrete proof eludes us.

   

Conclusion

While I’ve spent a good deal of words on what is missing from this collection, I’d like to spend a few more on what can be found. This collection is full of insights into the life of an average doctor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Blayney’s papers were kept within his family’s hands for almost one hundred years before they were donated to the RCPI.[43] A lot can happen in one hundred years to a box of papers. Neil J. Brennan attributes the wealth of material still available to his mother and grandmother being “inveterate hoarders” and a great deal of thanks should be given to them for maintaining these documents.[44] I’ve spent a lot of time attributing quirks in the collection to Blayney’s choices, but Eily and Mary, Dr Blayney’s wife and daughter, deserve credit for their roles as family archivists. It is through their efforts that we now can study Dr Blayney’s life.

This collection is fascinating for its serendipity, both in what documents Blayney chose to keep and in its journey to the RCPI archival collections. The documents were far more likely to be destroyed or lost than to make their way into a traditional archival collection. Through this collection and other collections like it, we can see as if through a glass darkly aspects of the ordinary past that are so often forgotten. 

Hannah Kempel 

Hannah Kempel is a student on UCD's MA in History of Welfare and Medicine in Society

 

1. Katie Barclay, ‘Falling in love with the dead’, Rethinking History 22, no. 4 (2018), pp. 459-473.

2. Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, ‘From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives’, Archivaria, 81 (2016), pp. 23-43.

3. Barclay, ‘Falling in love with the dead’.

4. Neil J. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes (Ireland, 2019), pp. 1.

5. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 4-5.

6. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 18.

7. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 28.

8. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 53.

9. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 61.

10. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 62.

11. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 62.

12. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. viii.

13. Caiomhe Rehill and Harriet Wheelock, ‘Neil John Blayney Papers’, RCPI Heritage Centre, pp. 1-30, accessed online, https://rcpi-live-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Neil-John-Blayney.pdf, 3 December 2021.

14. RCPI Blayney Collection, Items 61-73, 75, 76, 78-88.

15. Mark McKenna, An Eye For Eternity (Carlton, 2011), pp. 32-33.

16. https://www.rcpi.ie/heritage-centre/donations/, accessed 3 December 2021.

17. ‘Acquisition Policy 2018-2022’,  An Chartlann Náisiúnta | National Archives, pp. 1-16, accessed online, https://www.nationalarchives.ie/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Acquisition-Policy.pdf, 3 December 2021.

18. McKenna, An Eye For Eternity, pp. 32.

19. McKenna, An Eye For Eternity, pp. 553.

20. McKenna, An Eye For Eternity, pp. 32.

21. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. viii.

22. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 62; McKenna, An Eye For Eternity, pp. 553.

23. RCPI Blayney Collection, Items 45-57.

24. RCPI Blayney Collection, Item 45.

25. RCPI Blayney Collection, Items 13, 14, 90.

26. RCPI Blayney Collection, Item 45.

27. RCPI Blayney Collection, Items 46-47.

28. James Lowry, ‘Radical empathy, the imaginary and affect in (post)colonial records: how to break out of international stalemates on displaced archives’, Archival Science, 19 (2016), pp. 193.

29. Anne J. Gilliland and Michelle Caswell, ‘Records and their imaginaries: imagining the impossible, making possible the imagined’, Archival Science, 16 (2015), pp. 53-75.

30. Gilliland and Caswell, ‘Records and their imaginaries’; Lowry, ‘Radical empathy, the imaginary and affect in (post)colonial records’.

31. Gilliland and Caswell,  ‘Records and their imaginaries’; Lowry, ‘Radical empathy, the imaginary and affect in (post)colonial records’.

32. RCPI Blayney Collection, Items 13, 14, 90.

33. RCPI Blayney Collection, Items 56, 57.

34. RCPI Blayney Collection, Item 44.

35. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 62.

36. RCPI Blayney Collection, Item 44.

37. RCPI Blayney Collection, Item 97.

38. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 35.

39. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 36-7; Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 62.

40. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 62.

41. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. 60.

42. Julia Laite, ‘The Emmet’s Inch: Small History in a Digital Age’, Journal of Social History 53, no. 4 (2020), pp. 963-989.

43. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. ix.

44. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, pp. viii.

 

Through the Archives: Community Doctors of the Past

In this blog post, Simone Doyle, a student on UCD's MA in History of Welfare & Medicine in Society, explores the career of Dr Neil John Blayney (1874-1919) using archival material donated to the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland's Heritage Centre.

Doctors in Obscurity

Several notable figures tend to dominate our discussions of doctors in the past – Hippocrates, Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur, John Snow. In Ireland, Francis Rynd (inventor of the hypodermic syringe), and fellow Wexford man, Arthur Leared (inventor of the binaural stethoscope), are arguably our most famous medical men. But what of the lives of the less prominent doctors who served their communities, counties, and country, upheld their Hippocratic oath and were respected members of the medical community? Thanks to material donated to the archives of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI), as well as the work of academics and students studying the history of medicine, and avid amateur historians, many formerly forgotten members of the medical profession are now being rescued from obscurity and having their stories told. This article will discuss one such doctor, Neil John Blayney (1874-1919), and his career in Maryborough County Infirmary, Queen’s County (now County Laois), made possible due largely to the archival material donated to the RCPI by his grandson, Neil Brennan.

The County Infirmary

Postcard image of Queen's County Infirmary 
(early 20th Century)

Maryborough County Infirmary was established in 1808.[1] By 1836 it housed 868 patients, well above its original capacity of fifty-five. Maryborough was something of an institutional town as it comprised not only the Queen’s County Infirmary and dispensary but a district lunatic asylum (now St. Fintan’s Hospital) and a county gaol (now Portlaoise Prison) that contained eight prison wards (six for men, two for women), nine solitary cells and a prison infirmary.[2]

Neil John Blayney (often referred to as “N J” in newspaper entries for the period) assumed the position of Surgeon and Physician in 1900, after working as the resident surgeon in the Mater Hospital in Dublin and the Mater Infirmorum, Belfast between 1897 and 1899. His appointment was complicated by a local conflict surrounding the previous Physician, a Dr David Jacob’s retirement and his replacement by his son, Dr W.G. Jacob. This appointment was challenged by the Infirmary management, and, after a lengthy campaign, W.G. Jacob was dismissed by the Queen’s County Board in October 1899 and replaced by Blayney.[3] W.G. Jacob challenged this decision in the courts, with Blayney named as co-defendant in the proceedings that ran until 20 February 1900, after which he was confirmed as the surgeon and physician for the Infirmary. Blayney in 1904 described this situation as ‘a period of exceptional difficulty and excitement’.[4]

References from his colleagues prior to his appointment in Maryborough are glowing: ‘he was remarkable for diligence, good conduct and ability’; ‘a highly qualified and competent surgeon…deserving of any position of public trust’; ‘he will, I am confident, be found eminently suitable and give entire satisfaction’.[5] Blayney seems to have lived up to the reputation that preceded him. Father Connolly, a member of the Infirmary Board claimed that ‘nobody could be more attentive or successful than Dr Blayney…in his treatment of them’.[6] At least one of his clients (Major J. Duffield) can be seen to concur, writing to personally thank Dr Blayney and his staff for their swiftness in dealing with ‘the child of a widow … in my charge … who contracted scarlatina … thus preventing the spread of the infection’. As a show of gratitude, Major Duffield donated funds towards the running of the Infirmary.[7]

“Body-snatching”, Suicide and Strychnine

Blayney’s position carried with it a slew of responsibilities, some similar to the work of a modern GP, along with additional duties more conventional for the time. Of the latter, there was his involvement in the training of Voluntary Aid Detachment Nurses during the First World War, giving classes for groups associated with the Irish Volunteers, Cumann na mBan and the Irish Red Cross, and his work on promoting information around the fight against tuberculosis (see below).[8]

His more traditional responsibilities included being attendant to the last moments of many locals and people in surrounding areas, as documented in reports of coroners’ inquests. He assisted a workhouse doctor, Dr McCann in Mountmellick in attempting to save a farmer who had attempted suicide by ‘slicing his own throat’ according to news reports.[9] He gave testimony in the case of Matthew Costigan, a man who died of apparent alcohol-related injuries whose body had been returned to the family by police without the Coroner’s permission, an action which could have resulted in imprisonment for the person blamed for wrongful removal.[10]

Perhaps the most curious of these reports is that on the death of twenty-one-year-old Mary McEvoy. Mary, who had been in apparently good health, died with such suddenness that Dr Blayney at first suspected she may have been poisoned and suggested that the Coroner order a post mortem. At the inquest, however, Blayney changed his opinion, deciding that ‘the only poison could have been strychnine, and since then I have concluded that it could not have been strychnine’. Nevertheless, a post mortem was ordered, performed by Blayney and Dr W.G. Jacob, his one-time opponent. In the end, a brain haemorrhage was cited as the cause of Mary’s death.[11]

Operating Theatre

Given Dr Blayney’s surgical background, it is no surprise that he was among those who advocated for the addition of a proper operating theatre to the infirmary. Management Committee reports reflect just how long and arduous this process was. The first request for funds from the public appear in 1905; by 1907, the probable cost of £200 had yet to be raised, and the theatre remained unsatisfactory (Blayney reportedly said he would ‘be ashamed to show the place to another surgeon’); and the final payment for the work on the theatre was made in April 1911.[12]

Welcome Home Sanatorium

The late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century saw a marked rise in tuberculosis cases. This epidemic had a higher mortality rate than that from other diseases at the time and was attributed to one in every 8.5 deaths in Ireland.[13] The establishment of sanatoria in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century for the treatment of tuberculosis signalled the beginning of a movement of specialised sanatoria building worldwide in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which had migrated to Ireland by the 1890s.[14]

Opening Ceremony of Queen's County Sanatorium
(Dr Blayney situation on balcony on furthest right)

By the time the Queen’s County Sanatorium opened in April 1911, Dr Blayney had already been very involved in providing the public with advice and information. In 1909, during a lecture he delivered at Maryborough, he impressed upon the attendees the dangers of spitting, how decaying teeth could leave people vulnerable to tuberculosis, and advised them to support new legislation around the inspection of dairies.[15] It appears that immediately following the Sanatorium’s opening, Dr Blayney provided his services free of charge. However, by 1912, developments under the provisions of the Prevention of Tuberculosis (Ireland) Act required a full-time Superintendent to be appointed. At a meeting in June 1912, concerns were raised by the Infirmary Committee that it could not afford to pay a full-time doctor dedicated to the sanatorium at the suggested salary of between £300 and £500 per annum. The discussion also raised the question of whether or not Dr Blayney could be allowed to hold both his current role and that of Sanatorium Superintendent; Dr W.G. Jacob had been removed and replaced by Dr Blayney for holding multiple positions, and so it was felt that Dr Blayney would have to give up his private practice in order to be eligible to fill the role at the Sanatorium. The discussion concluded without any decision reportedly being reached.[16] As shown in material in the RCPI Collection, Blayney continued his education in tuberculosis treatment throughout July of that year, attending multiple postgraduate lectures on the subject, including one organised by the Women’s National Health Association.[17] Just four months later, in November 1912, Dr Blayney was officially appointed as the Superintendent of Queen’s County Sanatorium, running unopposed and voted in unanimously, making his recent postgraduate activities particularly timely.[18] Unfortunately, his stewardship was cut short when the Sanatorium was destroyed by a fire later that month and never rebuilt.

Career Conflicts – Local to National

Dr N.J. Blayney outside
Maryborough Infirmary

Dr Blayney’s professional outlook seems to have been defined by two things – practical diligence and strong opinions. As a result, he was involved in his share of professional conflicts.

In 1908, a dispute was reported between Dr Blayney and other members of the Management Committee over the appointment of nurses. After the resignation of the two former infirmary nurses some months prior, an advertisement was published to fill the vacant positions. Dr Blayney had, without notifying the Board, changed the advertisement’s wording so that it required nurses to have ‘the necessary certificates, as directed by the Local Government Board’. When pressed on why this was necessary when many nurses in private institutions were able to practice without these certificates, Dr Blayney was reported to have said that ‘for the status and dignity of the institution, no nurse should be under the standard laid down by the local government boards’, and that if possible, he would prefer an even higher standard. The Committee Chairman in particular pushed back against this and argued that they should proceed to elect new nurses based on the previous, unaltered advertisement. Despite Dr Blayney’s protest, the election of new nurses was postponed, and the advertisement re-printed with his qualification clause removed.[19]

A larger conflict emerged between Dr Blayney and some other doctors in the area – including Dr T. F. Higgins, the county Coroner, who was a rival applicant for the Medical Advisership position Dr Blayney eventually took up (under the Insurance Act of 1911) in July 1913.[20] On 30 July, Higgins and ten other area doctors co-signed a letter expressing their dissatisfaction with Blayney taking up the post: ‘We express the strongest disapproval of … Dr. Blayney … accepting Medical Advisership … and we call on said doctor to resign, and failing to do so, we decline to have any medical consultations with these officials until they have resigned.’[21] This caused some severe issues for Dr Blayney – the doctors refused to send patients to the Infirmary, or to supply assistance to him on operations, leading to their cancellation. One patient, according to members of the Management Committee, was kept in hospital ‘and fasting’ for a week without being sent for operation because Dr Blayney could not get any of the doctors to assist him. The gravity of the matter was summed up by one of the Committee Members: ‘they have a grievance in legislation, and they want the poor, infirm and suffering people of the county to suffer by that’.[22]

The biggest conflict of Dr Blayney’s career came in November 1903, when he resigned from the Queen’s County Branch of the Irish Medical Association. In a letter to Dr Dunne of the Queen’s County Medical Association, printed in the Leinster Express and elsewhere, Dr Blayney affected his resignation by harshly criticising the Association’s motives for demanding £200 per year for all dispensary medical men and four guineas a week for locums, claiming it showed an ‘evident tendency … by … the association to try and drag the dispensary system into the control of the Civil Service’. He further criticised the Association’s election policy for dispensary doctors, citing a case in Ballyroan in which of the two candidates who presented, only one was qualified for the position. He seemingly insinuated that this candidate was prevented by the Association from presenting himself and warned that if this were allowed to happen elsewhere ‘we would have medical men, appointed by the guardians more or less against their will, who might not be suitable to fill their position, nor might their election be approved of by the majority of the people’. Dr Blayney finished by saying:

It does not resound to the credit of … the association … when we find them trying to prevent the representatives of the people from exercising the authority vested in them.[23]

The version published in the Leinster Leader was accompanied by commentary that suggests Dr Blayney’s letter was ‘bound to exercise a profound influence on the course of the medical controversy’.[24] This certainly seems to have been the case, considering the level of backlash towards Dr Blayney from his colleagues.

In the 14 November issue of the Leinster Express, Dr Higgins criticised Blayney’s worries about dispensaries being put in control of the Civil Service by directly referencing his ascension to the position in Maryborough: ‘Under the civil service system, the best man should be appointed … according to merit. Is that objectionable to Dr Blayney? If so, it means that gratitude to those, who, under a different system, placed him in the County Infirmary, has prejudiced his mind.’[25]

Blayney’s act of protest was dealt a further blow by a letter to the Irish Times from Secretary of the Irish Medical Association, Dr Thomas Gick (reprinted in the Express). The letter stated that despite Dr Higgins’ claim that he had been crucial in formulating the policies of the Queen’s County Branch, Dr Blayney had never actually been a member of the Irish Medical Association, and therefore ‘could not resign that which was not in his possession’.[26]

This piece of information served to make for even more cutting responses. Dr L.F. Rowan laid into Dr Blayney with particular vitriol, criticising his ‘mental attitude’, calling his resignation from a position he did not hold a ‘rare psychological phenomenon’ and suggesting his letter contained ‘a profound degree of mental torpor or hibernation that almost disarms criticism’.[27] Dr Rowan even went so far as to mock Blayney’s actions in quitting over policy for dispensary doctors: ‘It is a pity he is not a poor dispensary doctor, because he can never have opportunity of showing the faith that is in him by resigning himself.’[28]

That Dr Blayney’s career and relationship with his colleagues, particularly Dr Higgins, continued to operate successfully after these clashes suggests that the assessment of Blayney by his peers, infirmary colleagues and patients as an upstanding and consummate professional was almost certainly an accurate one.

Simone Doyle

Simone Doyle is a student on UCD's MA in History of Welfare & Medicine in Society.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people:

Dr Catherine Cox for her support, kindness, and guidance throughout my studies. To Dr Elizabeth Mullins for inviting me to lecture sessions and talks relevant to my research. Mr Neil Brennan for his insightful talk about his grandfather Dr Blayney and for lending his permission to use his photographs in this blog. To Ms Harriet Wheelock of the RCPI for supplying me with the archival material used. To Dr Alice Mauger for editing, notes and advice on the piece. And finally, to my partner and my mother for their constant support over the course of my studies.

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[1] Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (London, 1837), Accessed at: https://www.libraryireland.com/topog/M/Maryborough-East-Maryborough-Queens.php

[2] Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland.

[3] Neil J. Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes: The Life of a County Surgeon in Edwardian Ireland (Carrigtohill, 2019), 27-8.

[4] Nationalist and Leinster Times, 1 October 1904.

[5] M.A. Boyd to N.J. Blayney, 11 November 1898 (RCPI Blayney Collection, Item 63); Charles Coppinger to N. J. Blayney, 20 November 1898 (RCPI Blayney Collection, Item 64); Daniel McDonnell to N.J. Blayney, 30 November 1899 (RCPI Blayney Collection, Item 73).

[6] Nationalist and Leinster Times, 1 October 1904.

[7] Leinster Express, 30 March 1912.

[8] Leinster Express, 2 June 1917; Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, 52.

[9] Westmeath Independent, 25 Nov 1911.

[10] Leinster Express, 27 April 1912.

[11] Leinster Express, 22 March 1902.

[12] Nationalist and Leinster Times, 28 October 1905; Leinster Express, 1 December 1907; Nationalist and Leinster Times, 1 April 1911.

[13] Alan Francis Carthy, The Treatment of Tuberculosis in Ireland from the 1890s to the 1970s: A Case Study of Medical Care in Leinster (PhD Thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth, 2015), 1.

[14] Carthy, Treatment of Tuberculosis, 25, 49.

[15] Leinster Express, 2 February 1909.

[16] Leinster Express, 29 June 1912.

[17] RCPI Blayney Collection, Items 36, 95.

[18] Leinster Express, 9 November 1912.

[19] Leinster Express, 3 October 1908.

[20] Brennan, Opening Dusty Boxes, 44.

[21] Dr E.F. Hogan, Dr T.F. Higgins et al to N.J. Blayney, 30 July 1913 (RCPI Blayney Collection, Item 42).

[22] Leinster Express, 31 January 1914.

[23] Leinster Express 7 November 1903.

[24] Leinster Leader 7 November 1903.

[25] Leinster Express, 14 November, 1903.

[26] Leinster Express, 14 November 1903.

[27] Leinster Leader, 14 November 1903.

[28] Leinster Leader, 14 November 1903.

Now Enrolling for 2020/2021: MA in the History of Welfare and Medicine in Society, School of History, UCD

In this blog post, we introduce UCD’s MA in the History of Welfare and Medicine in Society and look back at the work and achievements of some former students.

MA in the History of Welfare and Medicine in Society

Academic Year 2020/2021

Graduate Taught (level 9 nfq, credits 90)

Medicine, illness and welfare occupy a central place in all our lives. The MA in the History of Welfare and Medicine in Society is designed to enable you to understand the place of medicine and welfare in society and history (c.1750-1980) and engage with critical debates through various media including film, literature, and art, amongst others.

The programme explores the main trends within welfare and medical history from social history, gender history, post-colonial history to individual experiences of poverty, and of illness throughout history. You will explore how medicine and welfare regimes and policies overlapped with culturally constructed conceptions of femininity and masculinity, race and ethnicity. 

The modules are taught through seminars and you will develop expertise in presenting, analytical thinking, effective communication, and writing with clarity and precision. You will also partake in a lively seminar series and benefit from a vibrant postgraduate research community.

The dissertation, at the core the MA, allows you to engage your own research-based interests. 

Your fellow students will be from diverse academic backgrounds and the MA is popular among healthcare professionals keen to understand the historical contexts that shaped current practices and systems.

The MA has a reputation for excellence and is taught be lecturers with international profiles in the field.  

Why do this MA?

Graduates have secured employment in the fields of media, education, politics and in private and public sector management and policy.

Graduates have also proceeded to PhD studies at Irish, British, and European institutions, securing prestigious external funding.  

Assoc Prof Catherine Cox, Director,
UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland

Further Details

Please see the course description for the MA in the History of Welfare and Medicine in Society at UCD Graduates Studies.

 

Former MA Students

In 2013 David Durnin contributed a post to this blog about Irish doctors in the first world war. A former MA student, David completed his PhD in history at the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland (2014) and received several grants and awards for his work including an Irish Research Council postgraduate scholarship and the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland History of Medicine Research Award. David has published the following books:

• David Durnin, The Irish Medical Profession and the First World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

• David Durnin and Ian Miller (eds), Medicine, Health and Irish Experiences of Conflict, 1914–45 (Manchester University Press, 2016). 

Another former MA student David Kilgannon published a post for us about AIDS and history in Ireland in 2015. David recently completed a Wellcome Trust funded PhD at the Department of History, NUI Galway, exploring changing responses to those with an intellectual disability in Ireland in the period 1947-84.

Our community of graduate scholars continues to grow. Posts by our most recent graduates, based on their MA research include:

• Annika Liger, ‘Who’s to Blame?: Inquests into Convict Deaths in Mountjoy, c.1868-1900’.

• Natalie Baldwin, ‘A Prescription for Change: Training a Doctor in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Ireland’. 

The Cost of Insanity by Alice Mauger

The Cost of Insanity: Public, Voluntary and Private Asylum Care in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

How did Irish medical practitioners and lay people interpret and define mental illness? What behaviours were considered so out of the ordinary that they warranted locking up, in some cases never to return to society? Did exhibiting behaviour that threatened land and property interests, the financial success of the family or even just that which caused embarrassment eclipse familial devotion and render some individuals 'unmanageable'? These questions are addressed in this month's post by Dr Alice Mauger. In 2014, Alice successfully completed her doctoral thesis at the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland on domestic and institutional provision for the non-pauper insane in Ireland during the nineteenth century.

The Evolution of Asylum Care

Paying patients in the Richmond District Asylum (1885-1900).
Pictures courtesy of the Grangegorman Community Museum

The nineteenth century saw the evolution of asylum care in Ireland. While Jonathan Swift famously left most of his fortune to found Ireland's first lunatic asylum in 1746, it would be 70 years before the government followed his lead. In 1817 it enacted legislation permitting districts throughout Ireland to form asylums and by 1900, twenty-two such hospitals accommodated almost 16,000 patients. Growing demand for care for other social groups prompted the decision, in 1870, to admit some fee-paying patients, charged between £6 and £24 per annum, depending on their means. Out of this 16,000 only around 3% actually paid for their care. Private asylums, meanwhile, charged extremely high fees that were out of reach for the majority of society (usually several hundred pounds per year) and by 1900, thirteen private asylums housed 300 patients. Occupying a sort of middle ground, voluntary asylums, established by philanthropists, offered less expensive accommodation to those who could not afford high private asylum fees (from around £24 to a few hundred pounds). By 1900, these four voluntary asylum had outstripped the thirteen private ones, providing for 400 patients.

The Road to Committal

Advertisement for Farnham House, Private Asylum and
Hospital for the Insane, Finglas Dublin.
Source: Medical Directory (London, 1899), p. 1616.

Families were usually responsible for determining when it was time to commit a patient, where to send them and how much they should pay for their care. Factors such as cost, spending power, standard of accommodation, a hospital's religious ethos and the sort of people confined there all coloured these decisions. Broadly speaking, certain social groups (of the same religion) chose certain asylums.

Once admitted, patients were assessed by the medical authorities who determined a cause for their illness along with a diagnosis. This process was based on the medical certificate obtained prior to committal; evidence supplied by the patient and family; and the medical practitioner's own views. The two primary nineteenth-century diagnoses – mania and melancholia – reveal relatively little about reasons for committal. The causes named, however, were far more colourful and wide-ranging and expose much about contemporary perceptions of the life events or circumstances that led to mental illness and therefore committal. Given causes encompassed a range of 'psychological' factors such as grief, bereavement, business or money anxieties and religion, and physical influences including accidents and injuries, physical illnesses, hereditary and alcohol. These later two were the most frequently employed, demonstrating widespread medical understandings of the physical nature of insanity. However, many patients, families and increasingly asylum doctors, reported that fears about financial stability, land interests and the state of the economy had caused the illness.¹ In reality, it was often these anxieties that resulted in committal, especially among those with a degree of resources, such as white-collar workers, shopkeepers and farmers.

The Case of John D

Entries in Casebook 2, c.1898.
Source: St John of God's Hospital,
Patient Records.

Land and property interests certainly featured in the case of John D. In 1891, at the age of 77, John was committed to the Enniscorthy lunatic asylum by this two sons. John's sons provided details of his personal history to the asylum authorities; details which were later transcribed by the asylum's Resident Medical Superintendent, Dr Thomas Drapes, into his case notes. Reportedly a 'healthy old man', the first symptom noticed by John's sons was that he wanted to marry his servant, a girl of twenty:

Says if he doesn't marry her his soul is lost and that he'll burn in hell ... he is very supple and has often tried to take away across the country to get to this girl ... Son says he won't allow bedclothes to be changed or bed made since the girl left, as he says no one can make it but her.²

While John was a patient in the asylum, this girl visited him disguised as his niece. Following this, John's sons told Drapes to prevent any further communication between the pair. They were very much against the proposed marriage, insisting that 'she and her family are a designing lot' and 'all encourage her to get him to marry her'. One son informed Drapes that in his opinion his father would have married '"anything in petticoats" for past two years or so'. Allegedly, the girls he proposed to were 'not at all suitable, and "strealish" in appearance and habits'.

Underlying this narrative were anxieties about John's property. A farmer and a shopkeeper, John was certainly not a pauper. His maintenance in the asylum was £18 per annum and while he was in the asylum, John presented Drapes with a further £16 'to keep for him'. The sons made clear their anxieties about the family business. On one visit they stated that lately, their father 'was not capable of properly doing business in his shop'.

The real motivation for committing John, however, became clear when the patient later informed Drapes that 'he gave his sons up his land, but wished to retain his shop for himself and get a wife to mind it for him'. John also gave what Drapes termed a 'rational explanation' for his romance with the servant girl, explaining that:

the girl had been so spoken of in connection with him that her character had suffered, and that if he did not make her the only reparation he could by marrying her, he would suffer in the next world.³

Just two months after his committal Drapes discharged John. In his notes he wrote that this was 'greatly against the wishes of his sons, but I have not been able to find any distinct evidence of his insanity'.⁴ By 1901, John, now aged 87, had married a woman of 27, possibly the servant girl. However, ten years later, it was his son who resided at this address with his own wife and six children suggesting that he had ultimately inherited the property.⁵ The most plausible explanation for this outcome was that John's young wife had not borne him any children, which would have prevented her from being entitled to property rights following his death.

Conclusions

The case of John D adheres comfortably both to contemporary public hysteria over the perceived vulnerability of private patients to wrongful confinement and commonly held representations of the rural Irish.⁶ Although some historians have emphasised the detrimental impact of issues such as the consolidation of landholdings, emigration, land hunger and Famine memories on emotional familial bonds, historians of psychiatry have identified the 'range of familial emotional contexts' which asylum patients came from.⁷ Families often sent letters querying treatment, offering advice and enclosing food and money for patients.⁸

Yet, in cases where property or business interests were at stake, these factors tended to eclipse those of familial devotion. In fact, the high numbers of fee-paying patients who were unable to control their business or function in their profession suggests this was a major reason for committal. While the extent to which John D actually struggled in his shop is difficult to ascertain, it is conceivable that a number of other relatives' claims regarding patients' incapacity to work were genuine.

The association between working life and mental illness speaks volumes about contemporary society's interpretation of insanity and what drove families to commit relatives to asylums. In relation to social status, those unable to maintain their position within their given occupation were defined in terms of this failure. Land disputes and an inability to manage one's affairs threatened to shatter emotional familial bonds. In these cases, families may have viewed committal as a last resort in order to protect their resources or livelihood. After all, in smaller rural towns, relatives would have little control over the actions or interactions of a mentally-ill person positioned behind the shop-counter or at a farmers' market.

Dr Alice Mauger

Dr Alice Mauger was awarded a PhD by University College Dublin in 2014 for her thesis which examined institutions for the non-pauper insane 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 writing a monograph stemming from her doctoral research.

Below you can listen to Alice's talk, entitled 'The Cost of Insanity', given on 4 February 2016 as part of the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland Seminar Series.

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1 Fears of poverty and unemployment among pauper asylum patients are discussed by: Akihito Suzuki, 'Lunacy and labouring men: narratives of male vulnerability in mid-Victorian London' in Roberta Bivins and John V. Pickstone (eds), Medicine, Madness and Social History: Essays in Honour of Roy Porter (Basingstoke, 2007), p. 118; and, Catherine Cox, Negotiating Insanity in the Southeast of Ireland, 1820-1900 (Manchester, 2012), pp 59, 121.^↩
2 Clinical Record Volume No. 3 (Wexford County Council, St Senan's Hospital, Enniscorthy, p. 264)^↩
3 Ibid.^↩
4 Ibid.^↩
5 Census of Ireland 1901.^↩
6 David Fitzpatrick, 'Marriage in post-Famine Ireland', in Art Cosgrave (ed.), Marriage in Ireland (Dublin, 1985), pp 116-31; Timothy Guinnane, The Vanishing Irish: Households, Migration, and the Rural Economy in Ireland, 1850-1914 (Princeton, 1997).^↩
7 Cox, Negotiating Insanity, pp 108-9; Guinnane, The Vanishing Irish, pp 142-43, 230-35.^↩
8 Oonagh Walsh, 'Lunatic and criminal alliances in nineteenth-century Ireland' in Peter Bartlett and David Wright (eds), Outside the Walls of the Asylum: The History of Care in the Community 1750-2000 (London and New Brunswick, 2001), p. 145.^↩