Patients, Potions and Physicians: A social History of Medicine in Ireland.
Author: FARMAR, Tony.
Dublin: Farmar, 2004. x, 254 pages. Illustrated. Hardback.
Patients, Potions and Physicians is a social history of the ways in which the Irish have experienced disease, sickness and treatment from the seventeenth century right up to the present. The author explores in fascinating detail how every generation has had different beliefs about health and ill health, what causes sickness and how it might be prevented.
The story begins in Cromwell’s day, when disease was customarily thought of as a punishment from God. The Georgians of the eighteenth century preferred to blame neglect of the so-called ‘non-naturals’ (good diet, sleep, exercise, mental calm etc.). In the nineteenth century people worried mostly about climate and miasmata. The twentieth witnessed the great antibiotic breakthrough against infectious diseases, and quite rapidly the death of a child ceased to be a sad but commonplace event, and became an unimaginable shock.
There have always been many alternatives to official medicine–from pharmacists, alternative practitioners, wise women, village bleeders, and fairy doctors and their pishrogues, to outright quacks touting wonder cures. And if these failed, extra-terrestrial aid might be sought, from a healer, or a visit to Knock or Lourdes.
We all get sick, and today we access more medicine than ever before. Patients, Potions and Physicians, with its wealth of contemporary illustrations, puts that experience entertainingly into historical context, and provides an essential background to the modern medical experience.
Patients, Potions and Physicians is published to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the formation of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland.
ISBN: 1899047999
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