By Brian MacMahon “All available evidence suggests that he was a conscientious doctor and humanitarian who maintained high standards of care and hygiene.” Serbin, a hamlet in Lee County, Texas, is the spiritual home of an ethnic minority known as the Wends. Sometimes known as Sorbs, the Wends have been described as one of the … Read more
Epidemic disease and social reaction By Laurence Geary “Fear, mass panic and hysteria were features of all serious outbreaks of fever, cholera and other communicable diseases in early modern and modern Ireland.” In the past, disease epidemics in Ireland provoked a very powerful social reaction, particularly outbreaks of the country’s deadliest infections: bacillary dysentery, cholera, … Read more
The Irish connection By Stephen McGarry “Charles Edward Stuart, grandson of the deposed King James II, believed that his time had come to restore the deposed Catholic dynasty to the throne that they had lost in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688.” On 16 April 1746, a cold, tired and hungry Scottish Jacobite army stood on … Read more
The fresco of St Patrick’s Purgatory and ‘St Patrick’s Well’ in Umbria By Brenda Moore-McCann “It is probably the first, the largest and the most complex artistic representation of Purgatory and the St Patrick legend in existence.” In 1998, while on an art history research trip to Italy, I came across a spectacular sixteenth-century well … Read more