Twenty Years A-Growing: An International Conference on the History of Irish Childhood from the Medieval to the Modern Age

This conference on the History of Irish Childhood will take place  at St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, Dublin, 9-10 June 2014.

Dr. Anne MacLellan, Director of Stair will be giving a paper on The Penny Test: Tuberculin Testing and Paediatric Practice in Ireland, 1900-1960:

The historiography of tuberculosis in Ireland has paid considerably more attention to the adult form of the disease than to childhood forms of tuberculosis. In adults the disease primarily affected the lungs; in children, tuberculosis commonly infected other parts of the body including bones and joints, the abdomen and the membranes surrounding the brain as well as being disseminated throughout the body in millet-seed-sized nodules in a form of the disease known as ‘miliary’ tuberculosis. In 1922, the year the independent Irish state was founded, the deaths of 611 children under the age of 15 years were attributed to tuberculosis.

Diagnosis was not always straightforward: this paper will discuss the use and neglect of tuberculin testing for the diagnosis of tuberculosis in Irish children. It will address the consequences of the relative neglect of this test by the Irish medical profession in the first half of the twentieth century. Children who were wrongly diagnosed as tubercular had to endure prolonged periods of bedrest, often in institutional settings, while children whose tuberculosis went undiagnosed were denied rest and treatment.

The increased focus on tuberculosis in children rendered paediatricians and their work visible. This paper will argue that the validity provided by addressing the needs of tubercular children contributed significantly to the development of paediatrics as a separate clinical specialism in Ireland. In particular, the paediatricians Robert Collis and Dorothy Price were active in highlighting the problem of childhood tuberculosis and in promoting the use of the tuberculin test. They were also founding members of the Irish Paediatric Club, the forerunner of the Irish Paediatric Association. Price’s chairmanship of the Consultative Council on Tuberculosis and the National BCG Committee ensured paediatrics and childhood tuberculosis were visible in Ireland at national level.

FOR MORE INFO SEE: http://irishchildhood.wordpress.com/