if you wish to follow usually writes Prof Pierce A Grace concerning the rise of Irish normal follow
Irish Normal Follow – The Lengthy Story
Michael V. Hanna
ICGP and A.A. Farmar, Dublin, 2024, 304 pages.
Even although a lot of my Nineteen Seventies classmates would commit their lives to the self-discipline, the one sort of physician we by no means noticed in our undergraduate coaching was the overall practitioner; we had no lectures from GPs, and we by no means visited a GP’s surgical procedure. Based on Michael V. Hanna in Irish Normal Follow – The Lengthy Story, when John Fleetwood was invited to offer a single lecture to the ultimate yr medical college students in UCD within the early Nineteen Fifties, the Dean selected to introduce him as a lecturer in geriatrics: ‘it will provide you with extra standing than as a GP’.
Again then GPs ran single-handed, remoted practices usually in competitors with one another; till 1971 many had been dispensary medical doctors. They normally lived over the store, had been out there in any respect hours and steadily visited sufferers at house in all weathers. Fifty years on all has modified. A lot medical scholar training now takes place in multi-practitioner normal practices or major care centres the place the scholars are immersed within the follow group and be taught a substantial amount of their medication by doing in addition to observing.
Prof Pierce Grace
Tutorial departments of normal follow maintain their very own with the extra conventional departments in medical colleges, and an Irish School of Normal Follow (ICGP) has statutory accountability for postgraduate vocational coaching, persevering with medical training (CME) {and professional} growth generally follow.
Commissioned by the ICGP to rejoice its first forty years, Irish Normal Follow is in two elements. Half One presents a story historical past of the evolution of Irish medication and society from the Gaelic physicians of late medieval Eire by means of the emergence of the medical professions within the lengthy eighteenth century, the evolution of dispensaries within the nineteenth, and the ideological battles between church and state over medical care within the twentieth.
Reflecting Michael Hanna’s experience in native and institutional historical past, the narrative is interspersed with fascinating ‘case research’ reflecting the experiences of a number of exceptional people and establishments during the last 4 hundred years. For instance, Dr Mary J Farrell (1892-1973) MD, MAO, Dip Public Well being, who graduated from UCD in 1916, had handled British First World Battle casualties and victims of the 1918/19 influenza epidemic in England earlier than travelling to work in West Africa within the Nineteen Twenties.
In 1930 she was appointed dispensary physician to Longford city. There, one evening, she delivered a Traveller girl of a wholesome child boy in a discipline beneath a canvas shelter by the sunshine of an oil lamp held by the lady’s husband. Other than treating her many sufferers – within the dispensary and wherever they occurred to reside – she was required to maintain a number of registers, report month-to-month to the Board of Well being and Help, vaccinate her dispensary sufferers and, as Medical Officer for Well being, perform sanitary inspections which regularly resulted in litigation and attendance in court docket.
Beloved by all, she retired in 1963 and died in 1973. She is remembered by a plaque in her native Longford and a scholar medal in UCD. The world of the apothecary and the dispensary physician was full of comparable tales.
Half Two is dedicated to the historical past of the ICGP. Within the tooth of opposition from the established Royal Faculties, a School of Normal Practitioners (CGP) was launched within the UK in 1952; it grew to become the RCGP in 1967. In 1953 an Irish school of the CGP was established and over the following ten years three extra Irish colleges adopted.
In 1975 the Irish Institute of Normal Follow was based, its remit to supervise vocational coaching of GPs, help CME and encourage analysis generally follow. It was a brief hop from there to establishing the ICGP in 1984. Since then, the ICGP has developed its membership examination (MICGP), launched a really profitable journal, Discussion board, developed a nationwide community of schools to help postgraduate training, collaborated with the colleges in creating departments and chairs of normal follow, and established a purpose-built headquarters in Lincoln Place in Dublin.
It is a handsomely produced e book with wonderful footnotes, bibliography and appendices. The chapters are brief, informative and simply learn. Every a part of the e book incorporates a sequence of lovely, colored illustrations together with, in Half One a web page from the fifteenth century E-book of the O’Lees, and a number of other pictures from the excellent 2012 TCD tercentenary exhibition illustrating the day-to-day work of normal practitioners in Half Two.
This e book brings to life the story, previous and current, of normal follow in Eire and is an excellent tribute to the ICGP and a celebration of the women and men who take care of most of us more often than not. This e book is an effective learn and will probably be of curiosity to Irish medical practitioners of all types. 
Writer
Prof Pierce A. Grace is Adjunct Professor of Surgical Science, Graduate Entry Medical Faculty, College of Limerick.
