RCPI and the Enlistment of Medics at the Start of the First World War

Photograph of British soldiers from the Royal Army Medical Corps, taken from an Andrew John Horne photograph book

It is estimated that approximately 206,000 Irishmen enlisted in the British army during the Great War of 1914-1918. Of these, approximately 3,000 were medics, 400 of whom were students. At the beginning of the war, around one-third of doctors in the British Armed Forces were Irish.[1]

The archival collections of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland contain a number of items which show how medics associated with the College were the target of a British army recruitment drive. These items include a letter from the Director General of the British Royal Army Medical Corps and the Royal Navy to the Registrar and Dean of the College dated 30 July 1914, two days after Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and six days before the United Kingdom formally declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914. In this letter, the Director-General asked the Dean and Registrar ‘if you would be good enough to recommend young qualified practitioners to volunteer for service as Temporary Surgeons in the Royal Navy, should it be necessary to mobilise the Fleet’. 

A similar letter was sent to the College on 1 August 1914 by Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Henry Burtchaell, an Irish doctor in the Army Medical Service. In his letter, Burchaell asked the College authorities to provide information ‘as to the probable number of Junior Medical Graduates in touch with your School, who would be likely to accept temporary service in the Army for attachment to the Royal Army Medical Corps in the event of a national emergency’. In a letter of reply written three days later on 4 August 1914, however, the Registrar of the College stated his regret ‘that he is unable to furnish any names of candidates at the present time’.[2]

While the College authorities seemed to have been lukewarm towards army recruitment in the early period of the War, a change of attitude occurred in the following months and years. An entry into the College Journal contains the minutes of a meeting of 31 March 1915, at which a draft welcome address from the College to Lord Wimborne, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, was approved by those present. The letter states that:

‘In this great cause the Fellows, Members and Licentiates of this College are willingly taking their part both at home and abroad, endeavouring, as far as in them lies, to bring health and healing to those who have suffered, and to ward off those attacks of disease which have so often proved the most dangerous enemies of armies in the field. 

The military service of such persons connected to the College was not without its cost, however. At a meeting of 1 October 1915 it was stated that ‘the President and Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland desire to convey to their colleagues Dr MacDowel and Dr O’Carroll an expression of deep sympathy with them on the sad occasion of the death in action of their brave and gallant sons’.[3]

The Dr O’Carroll referred to in this entry was Dr Joseph O’Carroll, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, who was elected President in 1916 for two consecutive sessions. During the War Dr O’Carroll was consultant physician to the Military Heart Hospital and to the Red Cross Hospital in Dublin Castle, and, later, the only consultant physician to the Forces in Ireland, with the rank of Colonel. Dr O’Carroll’s deceased son was Frank Brendan O’Carroll. Born on 18 July 1895, Frank Brendan was a student at University College Dublin in 1914, who intended pursuing a career in law. At the outbreak of the war he applied for and was given a commission with the 6^th Battalion Dublin Fusiliers on 24 September 1914. On 11 July 1915 the 6^th Battalion embarked for action in the Gallipoli Campaign, arriving at Suvla Bay on 6 August. Frank Brendan was killed just four days later on 10 August, three weeks after his twentieth birthday. One of 36,000 killed he has no known grave, but is commemorated on the Helles Memorial in Gallipoli, Turkey.[4] In memory of his son, Dr O’Carroll endowed a bed to the children’s ward in the Richmond Hospital, Whitworth, and commissioned a plaque by Oliver Sheppard to be placed on the walls of the Richmond.

Following the War, Dr O’Carroll was awarded the OBE in recognition of his services. However, this award came during the time of Black and Tan atrocities in Ireland in 1920, and Dr O’Carroll’s nationalist principles forced him to relinquish the honour as a mark of his disapproval of British Government policy.

Letter from Dr Joseph O'Carroll to Dr TPC Kirkpatrick in which he expresses thanks to Dr Kirkpatrick for his expressions of condolence following the death of Frank Brendan O'Carroll (Kirkpatrick Index)

More posts regarding the First World War on the RCPI Heritage Centre blog can be found here.

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