Catholic unionism and heterodoxy in Irish Victorian Medicine: A biography of Thomas More Madden (1838-1902).

It is not easy to précis the life of gynaecologist and obstetrician Thomas More Madden. Aside from his prolific penmanship and championing of societal issues, a study of his life serves to demonstrate the crossroads at which orthodox medicine stood during the late nineteenth century - a period of transition between 'heroic' and modern health care. Reflecting this state of flux, Madden wrote several books about childbirth but he was also interested in heterodox subjects including heliotherapy and hydrotherapy. His political beliefs were no less eclectic. On one hand he was a Catholic 'Unionist', in favour of maintaining Ireland's place in the UK, but his writing was also imbued with the spirit of the Gaelic literary revival. Through his work he tried to make a case, not just for Ireland's place in the western health care tradition but also for its contribution to contemporary medicine.

Adams Andrew McConnell (1884-1972): Pioneer of Irish neurosurgery.

Adams Andrew McConnell (1884-1972) is widely credited as the first neurosurgeon in Ireland. He was largely self-taught but also learned his craft by observing the work of other early neurosurgeons like Harvey Williams Cushing and Walter Dandy in the United States or Sir Geoffrey Jefferson and Sir Hugh Cairns in the Great Britain. He introduced the technique of ventriculography to Europe, having learned it from Dandy. He was a founder member of the Society of British Neurological Surgeons in 1926 and served as its president from 1936 to 1938. He was also president of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) and was made an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He published papers on a wide variety of topics, including one of the first descriptions of suboccipital decompression for Chiari malformation in 1938. He contributed to surgical education in Ireland as Professor of Surgery at RCSI and later at his alma mater, Trinity College Dublin, and by training a large number of assistants who went on to become important Irish surgeons in the twentieth century. As a doctor, Adams Andrew McConnell was a pioneering figure. For many years, he was the only neurosurgeon in Ireland and his legacy still lives on at the National Neurosurgical Centre at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin where one of the neurosurgical wards bears his name. This article recounts his life and numerous achievements.