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Early Doctors and Apothecaries (Chemists), Cork City and County
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Barry, John Milner (1768–1822), physician, was born in Kilgobbin Castle, Ballinadee, Co. Cork, eldest among two sons and nine daughters of James Barry (d. 1804) and Elizabeth Barry (née Milner), co-heiress of William Milner of Dunmanway, Co. Cork. Educated at a school near Bandon, Co. Cork, he graduated MD (1792) at Edinburgh University and subsequently returned to Cork, where he established a medical practice.
(1768-1822), 1802, 1805, 1809, 1812, 1820, 1823 Dr. John Milner Barry, Edinburgh Doctor, Marlboro St living 1805, 1812 Cook St. Cork Fever Hospital Eldest son of James Barry and Elizabeth Milner, KIlgobbin, Bandon. John Milner M.D. “for the benefit rendered to the City in the Establishment of Fever Hospitals to which he so materially contributed”. Freedom. From Bandon. Son TCD admissions, BARRY Edward Milner 1843 23 John Medicus Cork 1801-1802, Committee for Conducting and Regulating the House of Recovery. John Milner Barry and Charles Barry, M.D. Physicians 1807 subscriber Cork Institution. 1816 corresponding member Kings and Queens College of Physicians of Ireland. 1820 subscriber Cork Library. 1823, Corresponding member College Physicians of Ireland. 822 committee Cork Branch Auxiliary Hibernian Scripture Society. 1809 Printed 7th annual report of the Cork House of Recovery for the Prevention and Cure of Fevers. Total admitted 278 persons. With descriptions by John Milner Barry MD and Charles Daly MD, including observation of a large number of females admitted in the summer, the appearance of Scarlet Fever in different parts of the town. Ballinadee There is a memorial plaque to Dr John Milner Barry credited with founding Cork Fever Hospital city to prevent the spread of Typhus Fever in 1802 “Cork committee 1818 Lancastrian system Milner Barry continued “A meeting of the Fever Hospital Committee took place in the Crawford Institute of Science and Arts in Cork, 136 years ago today on 20 February 1890.
The symptoms of typhoid fever were described in medical journals at the time of Hippocrates in the fifth century BC. However, it was not until the first half of the nineteenth century that typhoid fever was clearly distinguished from other such diseases. In the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the principal infectious diseases that threatened public health in Ireland were tuberculosis, smallpox and fever (a generic term that covered typhus, relapsing and typhoid). Hunger, poverty, dirt and overcrowding were the main causes.
” “The Irish people had an unrivalled knowledge of fever, its symptoms and its consequences. Experience taught them that the disease was contagious and the fear of infection drove them to quarantine those who contracted the illness. By the opening decades of the nineteenth century, ‘fever huts’ were established where the sick were placed.
They consisted of a few stakes, covered with long sods called scraws and a small portion of straw or rushes. The stakes and sods were usually placed against the fragment of a wall, the gable of a tumbled house or against a ditch. The middle and upper classes attempted to isolate the infected within their own homes, but domestic segregation did little to check the spread of disease.
Popular attempts to address and mitigate the impact of fever were paralleled by institutional ones. Fever hospitals were established in Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Kilkenny, Belfast and Limerick under special Acts of Parliament in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These hospitals were complemented by three distinct types of publicly-funded fever hospitals that were established following legislation in 1807, 1818 and 1843.
Typhoid is contagious and the bacteria, Salmonella typhosa, may be found in contaminated food or water — especially water polluted by sewage — and is transmitted through the mouth. Typhoid was practically endemic in armies, a factor which contributed to the spread of the disease here, Cork City in Ireland having been a garrison city for centuries.
In 1800, there was a virulent outbreak of typhoid in Cork and not less than 4,000 persons were treated. The disease affected all classes but especially the poor, who lived in extremely unhygienic and insanitary conditions. Unemployment and poverty were major contributory factors.” “In 1802 John Milner Barry established the first fever hospital in Cork City in Ireland which was located at the top of the appropriately named Fever Hospital Steps adjacent to and east of Our Lady’s Well Brewery in Blackpool and west of Victoria Barracks. The response to his appeal to the citizens for financial help was immediate and generous. At the first meeting of the Fever Hospital Committee, the Church of Ireland Bishop, Thomas Stopford, presided. The following were Vice-Presidents: Dr Moylan, Catholic Bishop; John Longfield MD; John Callanan MD; William Beamish; Richard Lane, and Cooper Penrose. From then on the Fever Hospital served the citizens well through many outbreaks of typhoid.
Dr Milner Barry introduced vaccination into Cork in 1800, and was the first to make it known to any Irish city. In 1824, a monument with a long laudatory inscription was erected to his memory in the grounds of the Fever Hospital by Corkonians.
In 1890, the Chief Medical Officer was able to report to the Annual General Meeting of the Committee that there had been only 143 patients with the disease during the previous year.
John Milner Barry, Bandon Born, Shinach in Irish to Prevent Small Pox
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In a pamphlet published in Cork in 1800, Barry observed that for the previous half century and more country people were familiar with cowpox, which they termed ‘shinach’, from the Irish word sine, meaning teat (of an animal); they recognised the mildness of the cowpox infection and its ability to provide immunity from smallpox.
A Church of Ireland clergyman in the parish of Moviddy in east Muskerry informed Barry that ‘shinach’ was well known in the locality and had long been deemed a preventive of smallpox.
Barry had encountered several individuals who as children had been deliberately exposed to cowpox infection.
Fifty-year-old Joanna Sullivan related that when she was 13 she and a number of other children were taken to a dairy, where they were made to squeeze the cows’ teats until their hands were covered with ‘the fluid matter of the disorder’, which they called the ‘shinach’.
Cowpox appears to have been endemic in mid- and west Cork in the middle decades of the 18th century and, according to one of Barry’s informants, whose account was substantiated by his octogenarian grandmother, country people exposed themselves deliberately to the disease, such was the general belief that those who contracted cowpox were ever after protected from the more virulent smallpox.
Barry concluded that popular belief in the anti-variolous power of cowpox was as old as the disease itself.
West Cork History 