Exhibition Celebrating 300 Years of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin

Posted on: 29 April 2011

‘The Best Doctors in the World are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman’ (Jonathan Swift)

Trinity College Dublin’s School of Medicine is celebrating 300 years this year (1711-2011). To mark this milestone the Library is holding an exhibition titled ‘The Best Doctors in the World are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman: 300 Years of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin’.

Trinity’s School of Medicine, together with the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland with which it was long associated, have played a pivotal role in developing Irish medicine and medical practice internationally. The Trinity School of Medicine pioneered medical education in Ireland and was joined in the course of the nineteenth century by medical schools in the newer Irish universities. Together they produced generations of skilled practitioners who gained distinction around the English-speaking world. 

Notable Trinity figures who played significant roles in the development of medicine internationally include William and Adrian Stokes, Robert Graves, Abraham Colles, Sir William Wilde and Denis Burkitt.

The 19th century was considered the Golden Age of Irish Medicine.  Dublin, through its teaching hospitals became a place where knowledge was pursued with vigour, where new concepts in medicine were debated and where new diseases were described and published in international literature.  The textbooks that students used in North America were written here in Dublin and the names of conditions that trip off the tongue of today’s medical students were ascribed, for example Grave’s Disease, Stokes Adams attacks, Colles fracture and Smith’s fracture.  Dublin became one of the names on the medical map of the world as its graduates spread around the world to Australia, India, the US spreading the scientific basis of knowledge and the power of learning by observation.

There has always been a public service ethos in the spirit of Trinity’s School of Medicine. Sir Patrick Dun endowed the first Chair of Physic and Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital and the hospitals that served the people of Dublin were largely founded on charitable and philanthropic donations. These hospitals, Sir Patrick Dun’s, Adelaide, Meath, Mercers,  Dr Steevens’ hospitals, Royal City of Dublin Hospital, St James’s Hospital, the  Rotunda and Coombe  hospitals served the people of Dublin irrespective of class and continue to serve in their amalgamated forms today.

‘The Best Doctors in the World are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman’ which takes its title from Swift’s ‘Polite Conversation’  and is currated by Jane Maxwell, has a range of exhibits reflecting the history of medicine in Trinity and Ireland.  

Beginning with a 16th century Irish-language medical manuscript, and touching on  the apothecaries, the barber-surgeons and domestic remedies, the exhibition  seeks to place institution-based medical education and practice into a broad context. The exhibition  also draws attention to the role of individuals who, whether through the invention or first application of scientific methods and tools, or by their benevolence in founding the great Dublin hospitals, brought international attention to the Irish school of medicine.

Among the exhibits is a first edition of Vesalius’ revolutionary work on the fabric of the human body, published in 1543; the first medical book published in Dublin by Dermot O’Meara in 1619; the envelope in which Dorothy Price imported the first BCG vaccine for the treatment of TB in Ireland; the death mask of Jonathan Swift and one or two gruesome little teaching aids from the extensive historical archives of the medical school.

Examples of Exhibits:

• The 16th century Irish-language medical manuscript contains a unique diagram of the eye.  (Trinity owns a large portion of the surviving Irish-language medical manuscripts.)
• Minute book of the Guild of Barber Surgeons 1703-1757
• Michael Kearney’s signature as Master of the Guild. He has been identified as an ancestor of Barack Obama.
• Skeleton of the 18th century great Irish giant Cornelius Magrath  (1736-1760), due to his condition ‘gigantism’ or acromegaly) whose corpse had been ‘snatched’ by Trinity medicine students.  Borrowed from Trinity’s Anatomy School, highlighting the founding of the Anatomy House in 1711.
• Earliest book on dentistry published in Ireland by Charles Allen, The operator for the teeth (1686).
• Exhibits relating to the development of the system of voluntary hospitals in Dublin in the 18th century – Mercers, Steevens’ Rotunda, Royal Hospital and much more.The exhibition has been supported by the School of Medicine.