Medical Practitioners & Patient Registers
College of Surgeons in Dublin - image from the wellcome collection
Certain professions followed by our ancestors would have potentially needed periods of study or formal apprenticeship before qualification and lifelong practice. This is particularly true of those who made medicine and healing their calling of which I had several practitioners in my own family tree. How to find out more about their working lives? Here are some sources I have found useful;
The General Medical Council's UK Medical Registers, 1859 - 1959 (Anc=£) - Every 4th year is available via this source, which will also include any kin who both qualified and practised in Ireland. Look out for the letter "I" after a qualification year to signify they studied in Ireland and note their addresses (there may be corroborating entries in later Will Calendars for example.) By tracking your relative forward in the directories until they are no longer listed, you should also get a good approximation of when to search for a death record.
The Royal College of Nursing's UK & Ireland Nursing Registers, 1898-1968 (Anc=£) is another medical source where, historically, I imagine you are mostly going to find women relatives. If they married, their maiden names also appear in the register but I'm afraid these are not indexed. If you are hunting for a possible marriage, query the database with her exact first name only and use the exact registration date as well. OK, with a common first name, your results list will still be pretty long, but the other piece of information that remained constant was the registration number so with a bit of patience you should be able to find your married nurse if she carried on working.
Apothecaries in Ireland, 1791-1829 - This is quite a nice find as having some apothecaries in the family and wanting to see if I could find out more, I simply used a search engine and came up with this on an Irish academic site called DIPPAM (Documenting Ireland: Parliament, People and Migration.) You should be able to track your relative via these Guild records as an apprentice for 7 years through to becoming licensed to either open a shop and / or take on apprentices themselves. There's also an end chapter listing all the really naughty ones who broke the rules and got fined! The original archives were transferred to the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland when the Guild moved out of their original building - you can find out a bit more on this RCPI blog piece.
A much broader timespan of this same resource, with register images, is also now a collection on Ancestry - see Ireland, Apothecary Records, 1736-1920 (Anc=£).
Ancestry also have just over a hundred years of hospital registers in their Ireland, Patient and Staff Hospital Registers, 1816-1919 (Anc=£) collection. Early records may relate to fever hospitals (set up in response to typhus epidemics for example) or lock hospitals (set up to "treat" / "imprison" women diagnosed with venereal diseases.) The collection also claims to include staff but a search for my great aunt whom I knew to be a nurse in Sir Patrick Duns Hospital around 1911 did not find her as staff. She was listed as a patient though in 1912 but only identified as Nurse Hopkins in the register.
And finally, if you are curious about the history of some of the Dublin hospitals, I stumbled across a nice wee page of information on the Dublin City Library and Archives that supports their database of transcripts from the Dublin Fire Brigade Ambulance Log book, Easter 1916.
The General Medical Council's UK Medical Registers, 1859 - 1959 (Anc=£) - Every 4th year is available via this source, which will also include any kin who both qualified and practised in Ireland. Look out for the letter "I" after a qualification year to signify they studied in Ireland and note their addresses (there may be corroborating entries in later Will Calendars for example.) By tracking your relative forward in the directories until they are no longer listed, you should also get a good approximation of when to search for a death record.
The Royal College of Nursing's UK & Ireland Nursing Registers, 1898-1968 (Anc=£) is another medical source where, historically, I imagine you are mostly going to find women relatives. If they married, their maiden names also appear in the register but I'm afraid these are not indexed. If you are hunting for a possible marriage, query the database with her exact first name only and use the exact registration date as well. OK, with a common first name, your results list will still be pretty long, but the other piece of information that remained constant was the registration number so with a bit of patience you should be able to find your married nurse if she carried on working.
Apothecaries in Ireland, 1791-1829 - This is quite a nice find as having some apothecaries in the family and wanting to see if I could find out more, I simply used a search engine and came up with this on an Irish academic site called DIPPAM (Documenting Ireland: Parliament, People and Migration.) You should be able to track your relative via these Guild records as an apprentice for 7 years through to becoming licensed to either open a shop and / or take on apprentices themselves. There's also an end chapter listing all the really naughty ones who broke the rules and got fined! The original archives were transferred to the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland when the Guild moved out of their original building - you can find out a bit more on this RCPI blog piece.
A much broader timespan of this same resource, with register images, is also now a collection on Ancestry - see Ireland, Apothecary Records, 1736-1920 (Anc=£).
Ancestry also have just over a hundred years of hospital registers in their Ireland, Patient and Staff Hospital Registers, 1816-1919 (Anc=£) collection. Early records may relate to fever hospitals (set up in response to typhus epidemics for example) or lock hospitals (set up to "treat" / "imprison" women diagnosed with venereal diseases.) The collection also claims to include staff but a search for my great aunt whom I knew to be a nurse in Sir Patrick Duns Hospital around 1911 did not find her as staff. She was listed as a patient though in 1912 but only identified as Nurse Hopkins in the register.
And finally, if you are curious about the history of some of the Dublin hospitals, I stumbled across a nice wee page of information on the Dublin City Library and Archives that supports their database of transcripts from the Dublin Fire Brigade Ambulance Log book, Easter 1916.
(c) Irish Geneaography - 2023
