New Publication - Ada English: Patriot and Psychiatrist
A new book written by Dr Brendan Kelly, FRCPI, is the first biography of Ada English, a remarkable Irish psychiatrist
who participated in the Easter Rising and the Civil War, and was elected as a
Teachta Dála.
Dr Adeline (Ada)
English (1875-1944) spent four decades working at Ballinasloe District Lunatic
Asylum, during which time she introduced significant therapeutic innovations. A
passionate participant in the Easter Rising, English spent six months in Galway
Jail for possessing nationalistic literature and was elected as a Teachta Dála
for Sinn Féin in 1921. A friend to Pearse, McDonagh, Griffith, Mellows, De
Valera and others, she became heavily involved in the Irish Civil War.
Brendan Kelly’s
engaging and sensitive biography reveals the gifted, compassionate and modest
woman behind the revolutionary medical achievements and political engagement, her education and medical training, her
forty-year career at Ballinasloe and her position within the context of
pioneering Irish medical women such as Kathleen
Lynn and Dorothy
Stopford Price. Kelly’s work also shines light on a woman whose abiding
concern was for those she cared for – so much so that she requested to be
buried alongside her former patients.
Ada English: Patriot and Psychiatrist is published by the Irish Academic Press and will be launched at 6:00 pm, Wednesday 1st October
2014, in O’Connell House, 58 Merrion Square, Dublin 2. Kathleen Lynch TD, Minister for Primary Care, Social Care
(Disabilities & Older People) and Mental Health, will act as guest speaker at the launch. You can access the book by appointment in RCPI Heritage Centre,
and buy it in all good bookshops nationwide.