Irish prison doctors--men in the middle, 1865-90.

IN 1839, Dr. Henry Maunsell addressed the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland on what he termed "political medicine". He chided "the leading medical men of the day [for] having abandoned the higher and more honourable walks of their professions to pursue, exclusively, the less exacted, though more profitable trade of the empirical curing of disease".1 If governmental attempts to provide clean water, cure the sick, help the insane, and reform the criminal were to succeed, Maunsell felt that the best of Ireland's doctors had to be employed in government service. But government service in nineteenth-century Ireland frequently meant involvement in political issues to the detriment of professional reputations. Nowhere was this more true than in Ireland's prison service. Continuing protests for land reform, religious equality, franchise extension, and self-government dominated Ireland's history. To Nationalists, each governmental department bore witness to English injustice, the failure to meet these demands. The Irish prison system was no exception. Indeed, prison administrators had custody of many critics of governmental policy whose protests exceeded legal limits. These critics, deeming their offences political, not criminal, argued for a special status as prisoners. Prison doctors became entangled in the controversies which surrounded these Irish political prisoners, because the doctors could mitigate ordinary regimen or special punishments for reasons of health. Convinced that a prison doctor had been unfair or even cruel towards political prisoners by allowing them to undergo ordinary regimen, Irish leaders and their followers undercut the doctor's reputation and his practice. For the other side, when the Government saw a doctor exempting political prisoners from regulations, it could arrange for his removal and deny him other posts. Irish prison doctors were truly men in the middle. Before centralization in 1877/78, Irish prisons were not organized into a system.2