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CEDAR seminar with Professor Oonagh Walsh

Thu
25
May
Time Thursday 25 May, 2023 at 13:00 - 14:00
Place Fatmomakke NBET floor 4 / Zoom

Welcome to a CEDAR seminar with Professor Oonagh Walsh.

The seminar will take place in the conference room at CEDAR and via zoom. Link will be sent out within CEDAR, other interested should contact Mojgan Padyab.

 

Myths of Madness?: Irish starvation and insanity in the later nineteenth-century

In the talk I will discuss the development of the District Asylum system in nineteenth-century Ireland, looking in particular at patterns of admission in the decades following the Great Famine (1845-51). Despite a sharp drop in the general population from 8.2 million in 1845 to 4.2 million in 1901, Ireland’s asylum population increased dramatically and exponentially to a point that each District Asylum was grossly overcrowded, and rates of mental illness per capita appeared to be the highest in the western world. Were the Irish more prone to mental ill-health than other nationalities? Did the mental and physical trauma of the Famine manifest itself in an increased susceptibility to illness, or in epigenetic change that drove successive generations to the asylum? Or does the unusual post-Famine profile merely reflect a learned system of dependence on institutional care, and a faith in hierarchical systems of authority in this period that included the Catholic Church as well as State systems of medical care?

Event type: Seminar

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Speaker

Professor Oonagh Walsh

Dept of Social Science, Glasgow Caledonian University

Contact
Mojgan Padyab
Read about Mojgan Padyab