When not playing with skulls, Grattan could be found behind the counter handing out drugs at Grattan & Co. Medical Hall in the Corn Market in Belfast. I suspect business was brisk. The Belfast Museum holds his personal collection of skulls.
Chemistry has other uses, especially in the making of beer. Cornelius O’ Sullivan (1841–1907), from Cork, became the first brewer’s chemist with Bass & Co., which had the slogan, “Aaah, that’s Bass!” O’Sullivan learned the chemistry of brewing in 1865 in Berlin, where they made exceptional beer. When war broke out between Germany and Austria in 1866, he volunteered for ambulance work but retired when someone threw a limb at him during a visit to an anatomy department, which was just typical anatomist behaviour at the time.
His duty as a brewer’s chemist was to taste the ales at 11.00 a.m. and play sport for the afternoon. Unbelievably, O’Sullivan was unhappy with this workload, and he wanted to do more. Obviously, he didn’t taste enough of the brew. He applied science to the challenge of producing a consistent and predictable quality beer, which is exactly what we have come to expect from our ales. “Aaah, that’s Bass!”
Just a Little Prick
There were some notable Irish contributors to the development of contemporary medicine and public health. Francis Rynd (1801-1861) was probably the first doctor in the world to administer a hypodermic injection. In June 1844 he was treating a patient with a pain in the face, an affliction we now know to be caused by the too-close proximity of an annoying person. But Rynd didn’t know that. Instead, he devised a special instrument that allowed him to inject a solution of acetate of morphine, dissolved in creosote, under the patient’s skin. The guinea pig made an instant recovery.
Next, Rynd used injections to cure a bed-ridden patient with sciatica who was soon up and walking twenty miles. It wasn’t until 1861 that he actually published a pamphlet in time to contribute to a raging medical debate about who had actually invented the syringe.
Another notable medical achievement is that he encased Philip Crampton’s (1777–1858) corpse in cement, as requested in his will. Crampton had been Rynd’s tutor. He helped establish “the bedside manner” for doctors, for which Dublin became famous in the nineteenth century. This probably involved muttering platitudes about the weather as a prelude to sawing off the limbs of the patient in the bed, without anesthetic. Anesthesiology was developed later as a response to the failure of the bedside manner. Crampton was also famous for saving the life of a choking diner in a restaurant by opening the diner’s windpipe. He could swim across Lough Bray, ride his horse into the city, chat at a patient’s bedside and amputate a limb – all before breakfast. He had an avian eyemuscle and an extinct reptile named after him. Crampton ordered his body to be encased in cement, probably to avoid the dreaded anatomists.142
Rynd knocked down a pedestrian while out riding in his carriage in Clontarf. He wasn’t adept at the roadside manner because a fight broke out between himself and the pedestrian. The row resulted in Rynd suffering a fatal heart attack.
The Hazards of Hygeine
A notable contributor to the field of public health was Mary Mallon (1869–1938), who became known to posterity as “Typhoid Mary”. This was not because she found a cure for typhoid but because of her fatal participation in improving our understanding of its transmission.
However, she didn’t transmit it in Ireland. Thankfully, Mallon emigrated to America when she was fourteen, where she worked as a domestic cook in New York. In August 1906 she was working for a banker when six members of his family became ill with typhoid fever. The investigating epidemiologist, George Soper, applied a radical new idea from Europe to the case. He believed that a healthy carrier might have caused the outbreak. Soper discovered that Mallon had been present at seven previous outbreaks of fever at her former employers’ homes, accounting for twenty-two victims, including one fatality. He confronted Mallon where she was working preparing food, and demanded samples of her blood, urine and faeces, there and then. She chased him from her kitchen with a carving fork. She resisted all further attempts to compel her to submit samples.
Eventually she was arrested and forced into hospital where the samples were collected under duress. Tests proved that she was a carrier of typhoid bacilli, which she harboured in her gall bladder, excreted in her faeces and transmitted via her hands to the food she cooked. Just in case you were wondering, toilet paper was invented around 1880 but there were many traditionalists who resisted using it. This was also before the widespread recognition of the importance of hand washing after using the toilet.
Consequently, Mallon was detained in isolation at Riverside Hospital. In 1909 she lost a court case for her release. However, in 1910 she was freed after agreeing by affidavit to change jobs and to consistently observe hygienic precautions. However, she resented both her new life as a laundress and the enormous inconvenience of having to wash her hands every time she went to the loo. She returned to cooking and not washing her hands in 1912. In 1915 she was discovered cooking in a maternity hospital under an assumed name. The hospital had experienced an outbreak of typhoid fever, resulting in two deaths. Mallon was sent back to isolation in hospital. She eventually became a laboratory assistant at the hospital. She died, still in isolation, in 1938 – a forgotten protester against the tyranny of the new-fangled hygiene.
Scientettes with Pipettes
In the good old days women were understandably barred from membership of the royal scientific societies. Men needed their own space in which to do their deep thinking about the movement of objects on inclined planes, noxious fumes, the nature of light, bi-axial crystals, complex numbers, rehearsing a new bedside manner, and so on, without being asked if they remembered to put the cat out or if a bum looked big in an eighteenth-century bustle. Of course it did! The serene daydreams of these men in relation to having laws named after them or future atomic bombs were brutally interrupted by gender equal opportunists. These state-of-the-art women weren’t content to be operated on by eminent “surgeons”. They insisted on making their own contribution to science.
Cork woman Mary Ball (1812–1898) came from a family with a shared interest in natural history. She achieved the distinction of being both a scientist and a woman without, like her sailing sisters Anne Bonny (1698?–1782) and Grace O’Malley (c.1530–c.1603), having to resort to drag.143 Ball specialised in collecting invertebrates and shells because she lived beside the sea. She was a friend of Baron de Sélys-Longchamps, who was an international authority on dragonflies. Ball was the first person ever to record the shrill sound made by corixidae water bugs rubbing their legs or wings together. This contribution is surely proof of the advantage for science of the equality of gender representation. I don’t know what technology Ball used to record these sounds because the phonautograph, which was the earliest recording device, was only available from 1857. That medium consisted of smoked paper onto which a stylus traced a wavy line. Perhaps she wrote them down phonetically. Her brother published her observations, or stridulations, if you want to get very technical, in 1845. She had a mollusc and a seaweed named after her.
Alice Perry (1885–1969) was the first woman to obtain an engineering degree in Ireland and the UK. She won a scholarship to Queen’s College, Galway where she initially enrolled on an arts degree like the few other women in the college. However, when she excelled at mathematics in her first year, she transferred to engineering. Perry graduated first in her class with a first-class honours degree in 1906. Her younger sister, Molly, was considered to be the most distinguished mathematician of her time in Queen’s College. Perry became Galway’s county surveyor when she graduated, making her Ireland’s first female county surveyor. However, it couldn’t last. She ended up writing spiritual poems in Boston.
George Boole (1815–1864) was an eminent mathematician and logician at Queen’s College Cork. He invented Boolean logic, which became the basis of modern digital computing. He can be regarded as “the f
ather of computer science”. However, he was also the father of three impressive daughters. Boole died young, leaving his girls to the care of his wife Mary, an educational psychologist who pioneered modern pedagogy and an eccentric philosopher (as opposed to the normal kind), who ran a bohemian home for her daughters.
The Boole sisters, who were the grand-nieces of George Everest, after whom Mount Everest is named, were bursting with brains, and each left their mark on history. When her husband died in 1864, Mary returned to London, leaving her daughter Alicia (1860–1940) in the unhappy care of her grandmother in Cork. Alicia followed her mother to London in 1871, and attended the Queen’s College school where her mother was both librarian and mathematics teacher. It is an outrageous oversight that the Boole Library in University College Cork is named after George, who was not a librarian, rather than Mary, who was.
Alicia Boole Stott’s formal mathematics education could only stretch to the first two books of Euclid, which was all they had at home. However, she experimented with wooden cubes to develop an understanding of four-dimensional geometry. On her own she constructed cardboard models of the three-dimensional cross-sections of all the six regular four-dimensional figures, using only rulers and a compass. She introduced the term “polytope” to describe the figures represented by the models. After marrying in 1889 she gave up her mathematical interests to become a devoted housewife. Before you start getting outraged, it was actually her husband who got her interested in work that was being done on polytopes at Groningen University, Holland in around 1900. He was very proud of her cubes. On his insistence, she sent photographs of her models to and was invited to collaborate with Pieter Schoute, a Dutch mathematician known for his work on polytopes and Euclidean geometry. Schoute persuaded her to publish her work, under her married name of course. In 1914 she was awarded an honorary degree and her models were publicly exhibited. Following Schoute’s death, she collaborated with H.S.M. Coxeter. Together they investigated the four-dimensional polytope of the amateur mathematician Thorold Gosset. She introduced new productive methods, which are beyond me, and made two further discoveries relating to polyhedral constructions.
Boole Stott’s son, Leonard Stott, was a pioneer in the treatment of tuberculosis. He invented a portable X-ray machine, and devised a system of navigation based on spherical trigonometry. Boole Stott’s sister Lucy (1862–1905) was a chemistry autodidact who never attended university. She became a lecturer at the London School of Medicine for women. She was the first woman to be elected a fellow of the Institute of Chemistry in 1894.
Boole Stott’s other sister was the novelist Ethel L. Voynich (1864–1960). Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-seven, when she married, Voynich dressed in black as an outward sign of her being in mourning for the state of the world. She was the original goth. She studied music in Berlin between 1882 and 1885. She then studied Russian with an exiled revolutionary in London. She travelled in Russia between 1887 and 1889, giving music lessons in St Petersburg. Back in London in 1891, she married a Polish exile. In 1894 she travelled alone to Ukraine to organise a smuggling ring for banned books. She also translated books from Russian. At that time she had an affair with a British spy who supposedly had eleven passports and eleven wives. They travelled to Italy together. He left her in Florence to return to one of his wives.
Voynich wrote her first and most successful novel in 1897, The Gadfly, which was drawn from her own life experiences. Her heroine was inspired by the life of Charlotte Wilson, mistress of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. The book was a bestseller, especially amongst international revolutionaries and anarchists, of whom there were many in the late nineteenth century, except in Ireland. It was translated into over thirty languages, adapted for the theatre and the cinema, and made into an opera. A 1955 Soviet film version, with a score by Shostakovich, won an award at the Cannes Film Festival. When this reignited Russian interest in her, excited Russian literati extracted her from retirement in New York.
The Non-Applications of Engineering
Traditionally it is difficult for Irish people to stay focused on the sciences. If we don’t concentrate we tend to drift into dangerous areas like poetry. It is even more difficult for us to apply science in the form of engineering because we tend to start playing music or writing plays. The history of engineering is peppered with many illustrious engineering students who never became successful engineers.
Dennis Lardner (1793–1859), from Dublin, contributed to raising national engineering consciousness by making technology available to a mass readership. Changing his first name to Dionysius, he entered Trinners in 1812 where he won sixteen college prizes. He lectured and wrote on philosophy, mathematics and steam engines, producing the first popular accounts of the new steam technology. He wrote encyclopaedias, pamphlets, as you would expect, and lectures dealing with popularising the sciences, including Charles Babbage’s computing machine144 and steam travel.
Lardner was annoyingly self-confident and stubborn, which is typical of those who are almost always mistaken in their opinions. His predictions on the future of technologies were consistently wrong. He was widely regarded in the scientific community as being an ass. William Makepeace Thackeray called him “Dionysius Diddler”. However, he didn’t care because he made a fortune from lecture tours, and his books went into at least fifteen editions. In 1845 he settled in Paris where several railway companies employed him as an expert witness in law cases involving steam. He wrote Railway Economy in 1850, a book that supposedly influenced Karl Marx.
While he successfully raised popular awareness of engineering wonders, albeit in a faulty way, he is best remembered for his contribution to the arts rather than the sciences by illegitimately fathering a playwright who made Shakespeare look like a slacker. Lardner married Cecelia Flood while he was still an undergraduate in 1815. However, he had a son, Dion Boucicault (1820-1890), with Anna Boursiquot in 1820 (that family was not obsessed with the consistent spelling of their name). At the time of her affair with Lardner, Anna was married to a Dublin wine merchant, Samuel Boursiquot, and was the sister of George Darley (1795–1846) who was the then fashionable combination of poet, critic and mathematician. Cecelia left Lardner after denouncing his affair in front of a group of dinner guests. I love those kinds of dinners.
Lardner moved in with Anna and her husband Samuel to start writing his Cabinet Encyclopaedia, which appeared over twenty years from 1829. He co-wrote twelve volumes with contributions from Mary Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, and the Irish writer and musician Thomas Moore (1779–1852). However, the ménage à trios didn’t last. He left that pair to elope with a “lady of mature years”, the not-ironically named Mrs Mary Heavyside. Her husband, Mr Heavyside, was awarded a generous £8,000145 in damages against Lardner for the seduction of his wife. But he could afford it because Lardner brought out a second set of encyclopaedias called The Museum of Science and Art in twelve volumes, which had 50,000 subscribers.
Dion Boucicault was sent to London by his mother to become an apprentice engineer. Thanks to his training, he became an actor, a playwright and a theatre manager. His career was distinguished by a roller coaster of unprecedented successes followed by spectacular failures, nervous breakdowns and bankruptcies. In other words, he made yet another distinguished contribution to Irish civil engineering.
His first play, Lodgings to Let, was performed in 1839 when he was nineteen. When his second play failed, he moved back home to his mother in Dublin, as you do. His next play, London Assurance, was a hit. However, success went to his head, and he quickly squandered his earnings. He was reduced to writing and selling poems, if you can imagine such a humiliation. He made a mess of editing Maestro, failed with his feminist play, West End, abandoned a three-volume novel and wrote a couple of awful plays. At the age of twenty-two, he was declared bankrupt.
However, resorting to a traditional form of fundraising, he married a wealthy French widow. He threw her off a mountain, allege
dly, during a holiday in Switzerland. Anyway, whatever happened, she was satisfactorily dead. He became enthusiastic about French theatre during his brief marriage in Paris so, using his deceased wife’s money, he opened a French theatre in London. But it was closed due to rioting because, at that time, Londoners were quite rightly sick of French dramas. He was bankrupt again in 1848, aged twenty-eight. He rebuilt his career in part by inventing popular stage devices. Queen Victoria, who was a fan, commissioned a watercolour of him to hang on her bedroom wall and blow kisses at.
He went to America in 1853 with a young actress, as you do in the theatre, with whom he had six children, as you shouldn’t do when you are trying to scrape a living in the theatre. After a run of bad luck, coupled with mismanagment of a string of theatres, he wrote another hit almost by accident. By 1860 he was back in London acting in The Colleen Bawn, which he also wrote. That play was the biggest sensation for decades. A successful opera was produced from it. Boucicault managed to sue a variety of producers for breach of copyright. He toured Britain and Ireland, crowning his triumph with an adultery scandal in 1862 that destroyed his newfound reputation. He was bankrupt again in 1863, aged forty-three.
In 1856 his play Arrah-na-Pogue, staged at the Theatre Royal in Dublin, was a huge success. He collaborated on a weekly instalment novel that was received each week to cries of plagiarism. Finally, he announced his retirement from show business and had a nervous breakdown. The following year he wrote Formosa for the London stage. He then produced the most costly dramatic failure of the entire nineteenth century, Babil and Bijou. After that, he fled to America in 1872.
In 1874 in New York he had unprecedented success, even by his own erratic standards. As proof that you cannot suppress an engineering training forever, he pioneered fireproof scenery in 1877. He had another nervous breakdown in 1879 following a series of successes and failures. It must have been stressful wondering if one of his plays would be sensationally wonderful or unbelievably bad.
Poet, Madman, Scoundrel Page 23
