In recent times, the focus of medical history has begun to shift from the English urban and metropolitan to the provincial and rural. This new collection of essays edited by James Kelly and Fiona Clark makes a significant and welcome contribution to such developments, shedding new light on a country whose medical historiography is still relatively (and puzzlingly) sparse. As the editors state in their introduction, Irish medical historiography has often been framed around biographies and institutions and also written by practitioners rather than historians. Such approaches, they argue, while perhaps restrictive in some senses, have borne fruit in providing Irish medical history with a coherent narrative structure. Commendably, the editors have chosen not to adopt an isolationist position for this study nor simply to rehash well-trodden antiquarian and folkloric tropes. Instead, they have sought to locate Ireland firmly within the broader skein of early modern medical culture and to demonstrate its value as an exemplar for a range of medico-historical themes. As the title indeed suggests, this is Ireland and medicine—not a narrative of Irish medicine.

The majority of essays are dedicated to medical practice and practitioners, and the range of approaches adopted within them certainly seems to justify this decision. Liam Chambers's paper about the eighteenth-century Irish physician and luminary, Bernard Connor, underlines this. Chambers's study of Connor demonstrates not only the impact made by individual Irishmen upon the eighteenth-century medical milieu, in Connor's case a significant one, but also the ways in which his own social, cultural, and religious background—in effect, his “Irishness”—served to shape and inform his medical worldview. Fiona Clark also charts the impact of the Irish practitioner abroad through the life of the Irish émigré physician Daniel O'Sullivan. O'Sullivan's conscious attempts to advance his career abroad highlight the career strategies of practitioners, and the utilization of support networks and connections, including the important link between Ireland and Spain.

This strong sense of connectedness between Ireland and continental Europe is emphasized elsewhere in the collection. Laurence Brockliss looks at the relative paucity of medical training in Ireland and highlights the large numbers of Irish physicians who trained and graduated abroad. Brockliss skillfully unpicks the often complex strategies employed by prospective graduates in order to obtain licenses to practice and the value of medicine as a vehicle for social mobility—a theme also evident in Chambers's essay. Here again, the important divergences between Catholic and Protestant graduates, such as their various destinations to practice, serves to further underline the importance of the Irish context.

Toby Barnard also picks up a similar theme in his discussion of the impact of medical professionals upon the wider Irish cultural milieu. Barnard argues that a range of factors, from exposure to different cultures through traveling abroad for medical training to a desire to use science to advance medical knowledge, meant that Irish doctors played an important and influential role in eighteenth-century scientific institutions such as the Dublin-based Medico-Philosophical Society.

Something of the premodern path of Irish medicine is also explored. Charlie Dillon provides a useful overview of the importance of Gaelic elite patronage and its implications for the formation of dynastic medical families of practitioners. In doing so, he also explores the strong influence of Continental ideas upon traditional Irish medicine before the seventeenth century. Mary Ann Lyons notes the importance of the seventeenth century as a transition period in terms of the medical profession in Ireland. The emergence of a “new breed of graduate physician” (22), who advocated university training and denounced unlicensed quacks and mountebanks, led to an increasing impetus to provide official medical training facilities in seventeenth-century Dublin. Her analysis of the casebooks of two unlicensed practitioners also provides an interesting juxtaposition to such debates and demonstrates the range of approaches and “styles” of healing on offer in early modern Dublin.

When the book does move away from medical practice, though, it makes useful contributions to a number of current debates in medical history. Wendy Churchill's study of the James-Jurin correspondence is a case in point. As Churchill points out, correspondence networks have attracted a great deal of recent interest, and especially those between patient and practitioner. The recovery of factors such as patient narratives, gender care strategies, and the semantics of sickness in Ireland all serve to add to our growing understanding of the importance of medical correspondence in the sickness experience. Domestic medicine is another important area and one that should perhaps have justified more space within the volume. It would, for example, have been particularly interesting to learn more about the important issue of domestic and familial medicine in Ireland, especially domestic care of the sick and also perhaps the position of Ireland within the medical market. Nevertheless, James Kelly's survey of the form and function of Irish remedy collections and the growing importance of printed medical works covers an impressive amount of ground.

In sum, therefore, this book represents a substantial step forward for Irish medical history and one that is to be applauded for the depth and scope of its content. A frequent cry from reviewers of regional medical histories is that for “more comparisons,” and there are certainly many points raised in this book that beg further analysis in relation to other areas—Wales is an obvious example. But this work demonstrates that studies of individual areas, regions, and countries can stand perfectly well on their own merits. In locating Ireland within the much broader medical world, rather than as a country apart, exploring uniquely Irish elements such as religion and medical training, and demonstrating the ways in which Ireland actually exerted influence upon medicine in various ways, the editors raise a number of further interesting questions. It is to be hoped that momentum is maintained and that other studies, perhaps of domestic medicine and the sickness/patient experience in Ireland, may follow in the near future.