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Kirkpatrick Award

The Kirkpatrick History of Medicine Research Awards encourages and promotes the study of the history of medicine in Ireland.

How the award works

The Kirkpatrick Award is open to all researchers in the field of the history of medicine in Ireland, as well as related social and cultural history fields. The purpose of the award is to support and develop the study of the history of medicine in Ireland, and to promote the use of the library, archive and heritage item collections held by RCPI.

Applicants submit an abstract of their reserach, which must be unpublished and undertaken in the last three years. The shortlisted applicants are invited to present their research at an event in RCPI.

The 2025 Kirkpatrick History of Medicine Award will be held in April 2025, applications will open in early 2025.

Who was Dr Kirkpatrick

Physician and historian Thomas Percy Claude Kirkpatrick (1869-1954), was Registrar of this College for over forty years from 1910 to his death in 1954. He devoted his considerable energies to preserving and developing the College’s library and heritage collections, and much of the strength of today's collections are as a result of his dedication. Kirkpatrick published numerous works on the history of medicine in Ireland and bequeathed his library and archives to the College.

Previous Winners

2022 - Bridget Keown "In the midst of the trouble area during rebellion" Gender and truama on the homefront of the Easter Rising.

No award beween 2019 and 2021

2018 - Triona Waters Remedying the ‘"growing evil": the curable and incurable patients of the Limerick District Lunatic Asylum, 1827-1887.

2017 - David Kilgannon '"Something for the mental defectives of the West": Establishing a centre for the intellectually disabled at Bahola, Co. Mayo.

2016 - Stephen Bance Polio in Ireland. Rehabilitation and re-intergration in the mid-twentieth century.

2015 - Robyn Atcheson The Irish poor law and medical relief for the poor in Belfast in the 1840s.

2014 - Aisling Veale "A class of her own" Negotiating religious and medical identities in Ireland and on the Missions, 1945-1960.

2013 - Dr Clara Cullen War work on the Home Front: The central Sphagnum Moss Depot of Ireland at the Royal College of Science for Ireland 1915-19.

2012 - Dr Anne Mac Lellan Victim or Vector? Tubercular Irish Nurses in England 1930-1960.

2011 - David Durnin War and Medicine: Irish Medical Involvement in the First World War.