Laura Kelly's Irish Women in Medicine sets some ambitious goals: first, she argues against the prevailing view that the Irish medical establishment was hostile to women; second, she suggests that examining the status of women in Irish medicine offers insight into how women fared in the British medical community; and third, she offers a narrative of the kinds of women who entered the medical profession in Ireland. She enhances this approach with a detailed examination of five medical graduates about whom a significant body of source material exists, illuminating their experiences both during medical school and afterward. Kelly further suggests that her work offers a fresh perspective in its focus on medical students, rather than on institutions or medical professionals.

Kelly repeats, throughout the book, that the Irish medical establishment was far more liberal than its British counterpart. As evidence she cites the fact that the Kings and Queens College of Physicians of Ireland (KQCPI) admitted women to sit for licensure exams in 1877, earlier than any British institution, and that Irish medical schools generally were more open to admitting women. In addition, women in Irish medical schools were not segregated from male students in most aspects of their medical education; they sat in the same lecture halls, took the same exams, and worked side by side on hospital wards as trainee doctors. The one exception to this was in the dissecting arena. The idea of female medical students dissecting cadavers was, apparently, too much for the male medical establishment to contemplate, and women were given separate dissecting facilities. (Kelly does not adequately explain why men and women working together in the dissecting theater was regarded as problematic.)

As often as Kelly repeats the claim about the supposed liberality of the Irish medical profession, she offers little evidence to support it. The fact that Irish medical schools admitted women earlier than their British counterparts is not, on its own, enough to substantiate a claim of liberality. Indeed, two of the four reasons she offers for the admission of women to KQCPI had more to do with financial issues than with gender, and in fact these reasons indicate that other factors besides equality drove women's entry into the medical profession. While 759 women matriculated at Irish medical schools between 1885 and 1922, that's fewer than 20 per year, presumably well below the corresponding number of men. And it is not clear how many of these women went on to graduate and practice medicine. “Liberal” might be too strong a word to describe the Irish medical establishment's attitude toward female medical students.

Kelly is more successful in describing women's experiences in medical school and after. She goes into some detail about the kinds of women who were likely to attend medical school (primarily Protestant and primarily middle class), their experiences as students, and their fate after graduation. She notes that many medical professionals expected women to go into missionary work or to work in the field of public health, given its focus on children and families. While some women did go abroad to work as medical missionaries, and others eventually found their way into the public health arena (although initially opportunities in public health were limited), women also worked in general practice, in hospitals, and in asylums. In other words, according to Kelly, the medical profession was not necessarily segregated along gendered lines. And in a perhaps telling aside, Kelly notes that few women entered specialties in gynecology in spite of the preconceived assumption that women would be more comfortable with, and more likely to confide in, female doctors. This may have been a function of women's distrust of female doctors generally, or it may have been symptomatic of the overall lack of opportunities for female doctors: few women medical graduates secured specialist posts of any kind.

In spite of Kelly's contention that the Irish medical profession was more liberal than its British counterpart, she acknowledges that opportunities for women in Ireland were limited after graduation. This may not be surprising given that the first female medical students to enter Irish medical schools were British women who expected to return to Britain, or go elsewhere, after graduation. (Indeed, Kelly suggests that one of the reasons women were admitted into KQCPI in the first place was that the schools needed the funds these female students would bring, but because they were British, they would not compete with men for positions in Ireland after they graduated.) As more university places became available for female students, it does not appear that opportunities for women graduates expanded appreciably. During World War I, female doctors certainly put their skills and training to good use, but this did not translate into expanded opportunities for women once the war ended. Women who were particularly ambitious likely had to emigrate to find good positions, and many women married and started families after graduating and thus never actually practiced medicine. So while Kelly insists throughout that the Irish medical community was more “liberal” toward women, and treated women “fairly,” the argument seems to be based on little more than the fact that women were allowed to attend lectures alongside men. It does not appear that women were welcomed into the practicing medical community in large numbers or that they enjoyed the same professional opportunities as their male counterparts.

Those who want a more analytical or interpretive approach to the question of women in the Irish medical profession may be disappointed by Kelly's work. However, this book provides a much needed corrective to the existing literature on the history of the Irish medical profession by placing female medical students front and center. It is located firmly within the body of feminist scholarship that seeks to rectify the exclusion of women from mainstream history by offering narrative accounts of what women did and how they lived, and by asserting that women's experiences are of equal value to men's.