Caoimhghin S Breathnach

University College Dublin | UCD

Franciscus Cornelis Donders was educated at Duizel and Boxmeer before entering the Military Medical School and the medical faculty at Utrecht University in 1835. In 1840, he received his MD from Leiden and spent 2 years in practice at Vlissingen before returning to Utrecht, where he was appointed as an extraordinary professor to lecture on forensic...

Robert Whytt was born and educated in Edinburgh and served the City in the Royal Infirmary. A prolific author, his major work is usually said to be his Essay on the Vital and other Involuntary Movements of Animals (1751), based on his belief that a 'sentient principle' was not limited to the nervous system but was distributed throughout the body, a...

Born in San Francisco in 1874 into the family of German immigrants in which he was the only one to proceed beyond elementary education, Joseph Erlanger graduated from the University of California (Berkeley) in 1894. He was about to enter the local Cooper Medical School when he was told that the new medical school in Johns Hopkins University (Baltim...

It was in Saint-Julien near Villefranche that Claude Bernard was born on 12 July 1813. About 20 years later he moved to Paris to become a dramatist but was directed into the study of medicine, the service at the Hôtel Dieu of Magendie that led him to the Collège de France. He entered Magendie's laboratory as a voluntary assistant and within a year...

John MacDonnell (1796-1892) was born in Belfast and trained in surgery in Dublin, Edinburgh, London and Paris. In 1829 he became a demonstrator in anatomy at the Richmond Medical School where he was appointed visiting surgeon in 1836, and from 1847 to 1851 he held the professorship of descriptive anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland....

The Swedish ophthalmologist and self-taught mathematician Allvar Gullstrand (1862-1930) invented the slit lamp to illuminate the anterior of the eye. With its rectangular beam of very bright light, he studied the structure of the cornea and the function of the lens. His dioptric investigations showed that, as well as the extracapsular mechanism des...

John Alexander Lindsay was born at Fintona, county Tyrone in 1856, and at the age of 23 he graduated in medicine at the Royal University of Ireland. After two years in London and Europe he returned to Belfast to join the staff at the Royal Victoria Hospital and in 1899 he was appointed to the professorship of medicine. He was valued by the students...

Although women were welcomed into medical practice in increasing numbers by the close of the nineteenth century, it was not until the second quarter of the twentieth century that they were recognised as valuable collaborators and contributors in the nascent field of neuroendocrinology, wherein they soon made advances that have stood the test of tim...

When in his Annual Report for 1905 the Registrar General for Ireland pointed out to the lately arrived Lord Lieutenant, The Earl of Aberdeen, that annually in every 100 deaths in Ireland 16 were victims of tuberculosis, Lady Aberdeen took notice. In March 1907 she founded the WNHA with the clear duty of taking part in the fight against the appallin...

After graduation at Trinity College Dublin in 1814 Archibald Billing, who was born in County Dublin, settled in London. His Dublin MD (1818) was incorporated at Oxford and he taught at the London Hospital where, when appointed Senior Physician in 1822, he introduced teaching at the patients' bedsides. He ceased to lecture in 1836 when he was invite...

Absence of documentary or bony evidence before the seventeenth century in Ireland is not conclusive evidence of freedom from tuberculosis. Clear records begin with Bills of Mortality kept in Dublin, the city at the centre of English administration of Ireland, and they show that the basis for an epidemic was firmly established therein before 1700. I...

In 1833 an accomplished 26-year-old linguist suffered a non-paralytic stroke. After he recovered, though he could utter a variety of syllables with ease, he spoke an unintelligible jargon that caused him to be mistaken as a foreigner. He was examined repeatedly over the course of a year by Jonathan Osborne (1794-1864), a Dublin physician and profes...

Douglas Argyll Robertson's (1837-1909) experimental work with physostigmine in 1863 sharpened his knowledge of the innervation of the internal muscles of the eye. So he was ideally prepared in 1869 to analyse the conundrum when he saw patients with spinal cord disease who had lost the response to light even though accommodation to near objects was...

William Saunders Hallaran (c.1765-1825) was physician superintendent at the County and City of Cork Lunatic Asylum for 40 years, where he distinguished between mental insanity and organic (systemic) delirium. In treatment he used emetics and purgatives, digitalis and opium, the shower bath and exercise, and argued that patients should be saved from...

Walter Gaskell's demonstration in 1882 that it was possible to block the passage of contraction from auricle to ventricle in the frog heart by means of a clamp spurred Joseph Erlanger (1906) to prevent, by similar means, impulse conduction through the bundle of (Wilhelm) His jun. (1893) in the mammalian heart. With a miniaturized polygraph to recor...

Jonathan Osborne was born in Dublin and educated in Trinity College Dublin, where he became Professor of Materia Medica. As physician to Sir Patrick Dun's and Mercer Hospitals he reported extensively on those patients who came under his care. In his native city he is remembered for the instruments he devised, for his studies on dropsies (particular...

Among the problems facing Northern Ireland after its foundation in 1920, one of the most daunting was the prevalence of tuberculosis, a chronic communicable disease with highest mortality among young women and men in the prime of life. Over a quarter of a century, legislative changes tardily responded, and in spite of, or because of its magnitude,...

On a cold December day in 1650, 22-year-old Anne Greene was hanged in Oxford. When taken down after half an hour, she was found to show signs of life and over the next few days William Petty (1623-87), Thomas Willis (1621-75), Ralph Bathurst (1620-74) and Henry Clerke (1622-87) ministered to her full recovery. She was later pardoned of the charge o...

Thomas Wrigley Grimshaw was born in Whitehouse, County Antrim, in 1839, and learned his medicine at the Dublin School of Medicine when its reputation was at its highest. If his teachers strayed from the art of bedside medicine into science it was into meteorology that had been revived by Thomas Sydenham, the 'English Hippocrates' in the seventeenth...

When the attention of Robert Dyer Lyons was drawn to the medical value of the microscope in 1850, he trained himself in its use, and after annually reviewing its recent discoveries he was despatched as chief pathologist to the Army of the East in April 1855. His Report (1856) was a feather in his cap when he returned from the Crimea to Dublin and t...

Francis Thompson was born in 1859 in Preston and grew to manhood in Ashton-under-Lyne in Lancashire. After six years registered as a medical student at Owens College, Manchester, he set off for London to retrace the footsteps of Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859). His early experience in London followed closely that of the earlier English Opium Eater un...

In 1906, at a late evening tea party in Sir Almroth Wright's laboratory when the pathologist was working on his opsonic index as a guide to the therapeutic use of tuberculin, Bernard Shaw instigated a discussion on patient selection in the face of limited resources. In converting the various responses into a play Shaw turned the choice between a ro...

William Brouncker was the grandson of Sir Henry Brouncker, President of Munster during the Elizabethan Plantation of Ireland in the 16th century. William's date and place of birth are uncertain; he was born about 1620, most probably at Castlelyons, County Cork, and educated at Oxford where he shone in mathematics and languages. Until his death in 1...

It was in Matteucci's rheoscopic frog in Pisa that evidence was first found for the electrical activity of the heart in 1844, and his results were confirmed and expanded 12 years later at Würzburg. The capillary electrometer gave a continuous record that could be photographed, and was used initially by Einthoven who, to obviate the onerous mathemat...

A method is described for the introduction of plastic catheters into the umbilical vessels of fetal goats and lambs whereby samples of blood may be obtained over a period of days and weeks in conditions in which the mother is free from obvious stress. The results of the analyses of samples so obtained, indicate that (1) the oxygen capacity of the f...

Summary London born James Henry Pullen (1836-1915) was admitted to Essex Hall in Colchester, an institution catering for learning disability, at the age of 13. Here his artistic talent was spotted before he moved two years later to Earlswood Asylum for Idiots, where he was apprenticed to woodworking. Such was his manual skill he was eventually empl...

Maud Gonne MacBride was an English debutante who became an Irish rebel and muse to William Butler Yeats. Wealth did not protect her or her family from tuberculosis but, in spite of frequent relapses and three pregnancies, she invariably recovered to lead an active, fruitful life until her death in 1953 at the age of 86. She refused treatment with t...

It is now almost 100 years since Hugh Campbell Ross began his experiments on white blood cells and cancer. By suspending peripheral blood cells in a solution of agar gel, he was able to observe changes in them provoked by various natural and artificial substances, which he named auxetics, kinetics, or augmentors, depending on the effects they produ...

One hundred years ago Charles Scott Sherrington (1857–1952), Holt professor of physiology in the University of Liverpool, chose as his subject for the Silliman Lectures for 1904 at Yale University ‘The Integrative Action of the Nervous System’; two years elapsed before they were published.1 The yearly series honoured a professional chemist, Benjami...

James Dillon never tired of pressing for improvements in the tuberculosis service. Obviously primed by Theo in 1942 in line with the Academy Report, he continued to encapsulate in a nutshell the government’s torpid langour in the face of the wartime resurgence in tuberculosis (Table 1, after Deeny27). Early in 1948, two years after Theo’s untimely...

Conclusion By the time that Geary quit the subject it seemed that phthisis, ‘the white plague’, was about to be mastered; in Ireland its eradication had replaced its control,21 which had been the concern of physicians at a Royal Academy of Medicine symposium in 1899.22 From its high place in mortality tables as one of the leading causes of death, t...

Two hundred years ago, Cork Street Fever Hospital was built by charitable subscription. Seven years after becoming a public-private partnership in 1937, its administration was subjected to a Sworn Inquiry. Why the Inquiry was held and why the Inspector's Report was never published are the questions addressed in this paper.

Rudolf Virchow gave clinical significance to Schwann's cell theory and thereby changed the course of pathology. Although he intended to found a science of pathological physiology based on omnis cellula e cellula, advances in microscopy facilitated and promoted, even dictated, the development of histopathology. As well as Die Cellularpathologie and...

Joseph Black (1728-1799) is remembered for his discovery of carbon dioxide and his characterisation of latent heat and specific heat. He was a chemist by chance, a physicist by inclination, and a physician by necessity. His discovery of carbon dioxide was as important for biology as it was for chemistry, and his work on heat laid a sound foundation...

Trends in the male proportion of live births in Ireland were examined by extracting the numbers of male and female live births from Registrar General's Reports (1864–1952) and Department of Health Annual Reviews (1953–1996), and subjecting them to statistical analysis. Except for 10 years (1947–1956) the proportion of male births has risen, signifi...

It is customary to attribute the introduction of gloves into surgical practice to William Stewart Halsted [1852-1922] of Johns Hopkins Hospital, but it was his assistant, Joseph Colt Bloodgood [1867-1935] who, from February 1897 onwards, was the first to equip the whole theatre staff with rubber gloves. In Ireland, as elsewhere, the introduction of...

Objective : To examine hand preference, hand skill and hand strength in university undergraduates in order to determine the most reliable index of handedness. Method : The Edinburgh Inventory, a group test of handedness by marking dots in circles, and a standard dynamometer were used with 248 (148 female, 100 male) subjects. Results : No statisti...

On Wednesday, May 17th, 1939 Corneille Heymans delivered the ninth Purser Lecture in Dublin (Heymans, 1939). John Mallet Purser (1839–1929) was Professor of the Institute of Medicine (1879–1901) and sixteen years after retirement from the chair in which he established histology and physiology within the medical curriculum he was invited to take on...

The importance of chemical stimuli in the regulation of pulmonary ventilation was well established by 1925, and the direct influence of carbon dioxide, oxygen and hydrogen ion concentration, alone or in combination, upon Flourens’ noeud vital (1842) was the widely accepted interpretation of the cross-circulation experiments reported by Leon Frederi...

Arteriovenous shunts, or glomera, are a common feature in the vasculature of the skin, particularly in the corium of the fingertips, the nailbeds, around the limb joints, and over the scapula and coccyx.

Summary George Gabriel Stokes (1819–1903) was born in Skreen, County Sligo, and educated at home, in Dublin and in Bristol before going on to a lifelong career in Cambridge, brilliant even side by side with his friends Clerk Maxwell and Kelvin. His most important discovery was that of the true nature of fluorescence; but it is fitting also to remem...

For cases of pulmonary tuberculosis with cavitation — cavity exceeding 2 cm. in diameter — the technique of continuous immobilization to place the cavity in a dependent position in relation to its draining bronchus, as advocated by Dillwyn Thomas, is described.The results in 124 cases so treated at Rialto Hospital are tabulated, analysed in conjunc...