Current Seminar Series
Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland (CHOMI) Seminar Programme
2025/2026
Our hybrid seminars will run between 4 and 5pm Dublin time. The in-person presentations will take place in K114 in the Newman Building and be live-streamed via zoom (registration links below).
Autumn Trimester
18th September 2025
Not 'Goodenough' - Migrating doctors, medical schools and Dublin voluntary hospitals in the mid-twentieth century.
Professor Mary E. Daly (University College Dublin)
Abstract: In the early 1950s all the medical schools in independent Ireland were visited by both the General Medical Council in the UK and the American Medical Association, in order to determine whether Irish medical degrees would continue to be recognised in Britain and the USA. In 1944 the Goodenough Committee recommended major changes in medical education in Britain. Given that the Irish medical schools were training many more doctors than the country required, these critical reports posed a serious threat to the career prospects of many Irish doctors. The changes that these external reviews required, in laboratory facilities and clinical teaching challenged the governance and structures of teaching hospitals and their relationship with the medical schools. This paper is my first attempt to disentangle this complex story, which is vital to the history of Dublin hospitals in the twentieth century. It extends that story beyond the common focus on church/state relations to a more complex one that includes the hospitals and their governors, hospital consultants, the department of health, the universities (including the RCSI), and the Catholic church and female religious congregations.
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9th October 2025
Crossing borders: British activists in the international HIV/AIDS movement
Dr. George Severs (Geneva Graduate Institute)
Abstract: HIV/AIDS has always been a global health problem. As such, activist responses to it necessarily crossed borders. In this paper, I explore the transnational networks which emerged between activists responding to HIV/AIDS, using the understudied English HIV/AIDS activist movement as its point of departure. ACT UP’s presence in England, for example, makes more sense when we account for the transatlantic network of queer activists which was in place as the epidemic took hold. Many HIV/AIDS activist organisations collaborated on campaigns, and these collaborations were often facilitated by meetings of the International AIDS Conference. I will reconstruct some of the campaigning efforts which took place between international activists at such conferences, before exploring the most consciously international HIV/AIDS activist network, the International Community of Women Living with HIV and AIDS (ICW). Headquartered in London for much of the period, the ICW allows us to explore England’s part within a global and growing activist community.
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6th November 2025
India's Covid Crisis and the Management of the Dead
Dr. Manikarnika Dutta (University College Dublin)
Abstract: Urban local governments in India have long struggled with the sensitive task of handling the dead during emergencies, particularly in times of epidemics and natural disasters. The challenge of corpse management is not new; it dates back to the cholera outbreaks, famines, and plague waves of the colonial period in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and continues to haunt municipal administrations in the modern era, most visibly during the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2020-21, the nation faced global criticism when local authorities were accused of failing to dispose of pandemic victims’ bodies in ways that respected cultural norms and ethical expectations. Reports and images of decomposed, half-burnt, and abandoned corpses along riverbanks and mass cremation grounds fuelled fear of contagion and raised disturbing questions about the erosion of the idea of a ‘dignified death.’
National and international media widely documented these failures, turning body disposal into an issue of both public health and human rights. Central to the debate was Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, often interpreted as safeguarding dignity not only for the living but also for the deceased. This interpretation prompted calls for stronger legal measures, including recommendations by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) for a dedicated framework to ensure respectful treatment of the dead.
This paper explores these debates by situating the Covid-19 experience within broader historical and legal trajectories. It examines how questions of contagion, sanitation, risk, and environmental management intersect with constitutional values, exposing deep social, political, cultural, economic, and ethical dilemmas in governing the infectious dead.