THE EDWARD WORTH LIBRARY LECTURES November 2009 - February 2010

ANTIGONES & HUXLEYS: BOOKS, MEDICAL HISTORY AND FREEDOM OF ENQUIRY

SEVEN LECTURES DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF WILLIAM ELLIOTT MACKEY (1924-1996) RESEARCH LIBRARIAN, TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN, co-ordinated by Bill Mc Cormack (for the Worth Library) and supported by The Long Room Hub (Trinity College, Dublin), the National Library of Ireland, University College Dublin, Irish Federation of University Teachers, and the Health Service Executive. All welcome.

About the Edward Worth Library

The book-collection assembled by Edward Worth (1678-1733), a notable Dublin physician, is one of the lesser-known treasures of the city’s cultural inheritance. It is housed in Dr Steevens’ Hospital, an institution of which Worth was a governor and major benefactor, and now the head office of the HSE.

Edward Worth was a physician whose taste in books radiated outwards from his professional concern with medicine. He collected as a man of science, a gentleman, and a connoisseur.    Beside medical books, ancient and modern (ie. 18th century), one finds important contributions to the study of related sciences, then philosophy, the classics, history etc. Worth was particularly interested in the book as object: the collection not only holds fine examples of sixteenth-century typography but is also considered to be the best collection of early modern bookbindings in Ireland.

Following Worth’s death in January 1733, his fellow governors moved promptly to protect the books bequeathed to them under his will. A room was specially designed and built to accommodate them on the first floor of an as-yet unfinished building. Though visiting scholars over the centuries and decades have witnessed a succession of historic styles in movable furniture (tables, desks, chairs etc.), the original book-shelves, cases, glass-panes and other fittings remain as they were in the 1730s. Indeed, the Edward Worth Library was probably the first in Ireland to protect books behind glass-fronted doors.

About the Lecture Series

SERIES TWO - February 2010

Lecture 4, 'MEDICINE AND THE STATE: THE POOR LAW MEDICAL SERVICE IN IRELAND, 1851-1921'.

Speaker, Laurence Geary, Senior Lecturer in History, University College Cork. Date: Wednesday 10 February 2010 at 5.30pm. Venue: National Library; Chair: Dr Catherine Cox (UCD).

Lecture 5, 'DUBLIN'S FIRST ANTIGONES; FROM J-J BARTHÉLEMY (1795) TO HELEN FAUCIT (1845)'

Speaker: Fiona Macintosh, Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, University of Oxford. Date: Thursday 11 February 2010 at 5.30pm. Venue: Dr Steevens's Hospital; Chair: Professor John Dillon (TCD).

Lecture 6, 'LIBRARIES, READERS AND BIBLIOGRAPHERS'

Speaker: David McKitterick, Librarian, Trinity College Cambridge. Date: Wednesday 24 February at 5.30 pm. Venue: Dr Steevens's Hospital; Chair: Dr Charles Benson (TCD).

Lecture 7, 'SCHOLARSHIP AND SACRIFICE; CAN WE BANK ON A HUMANISTIC FUTURE?'

Speaker: W. J. Mc Cormack, Edward Worth Library. Date: 25 February, 2010 at 7.00pm. Venue: Robert Emmet Lecture Theare, Arts Building, TCD; Chair: Dr Eve Patten (TCD).

NOTES ON PARTICIPANTS

CATHERINE COX (chairing Laurence Geary) is a UCD Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland and lecturer at the School of History and Archives, University College Dublin. She has published articles and book chapters on medical practitioners and practice in the nineteenth century and on institutionalisation in Ireland. She has also worked on the history of insanity and asylums in nineteenth-century Ireland. With Prof Hilary Marland, University of Warwick, she is currently working on a Wellcome Trust funded project that is investigating the relationship between Irish migrants, ethnicity and mental illness from c.1850 to 1921. Her forthcoming publications include Managing Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Manchester University Press, 2010) and with Maria Luddy, Cultures of Care in Irish Medical History, 1750-1950 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010).

LAURENCE GEARY is Senior Lecturer in History at University College, Cork; formerly Postdoctoral Fellow, Australian National University; Wellcome Research Fellow, University of Edinburgh; Wellcome Research Fellow, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland; Arts Faculty International Scholar, University of Melbourne, January-July 2006. His research interests include the social and political history of nineteenth-century Ireland; the social history of medicine in Ireland; the social and medical history of the Great Famine; Irish-Australian history. Publications include: Medicine and Charity in Ireland, 1718-1851 (Dublin: UCD Press, 2004); (co-ed., with Margaret Kelleher), Nineteenth-century Ireland: a Guide to Recent Research (Dublin: UCD Press, 2005); (co-ed., with Andrew J. McCarthy), Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. History, Politics and Culture (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2008). He has been President of the Society for the Study of Nineteenth Century Ireland since 2006.

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