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.He studied in Paris under Jean Martin Charcot, thefounder of modern neurology and Freud s mentor in the study andtreatment of hysteria through the talking cure.As favoured studentsof Charcot, Sigerson and Freud were invited to translate selections ofCharcot s Leçons into English and German respectively.Sigerson alsopublished articles on a variety of scientific and medical topics in theleading Irish and British journals in these fields.As a prominent Dublin113114 Science, Politics and the Irish Literary Revivalnaturalist, he also took part in the Irish debate about Charles Darwin stheory of evolution by natural selection, corresponded with Darwinand was nominated by the latter for membership of the élite LinnaeanSociety of London.Sigerson was also one of the leading figures of the Irish LiteraryRevival (hereafter the  Revival ) of the late nineteenth and early twenti-eth centuries to which he contributed as a poet, an anthologist, atranslator of Irish language poetry into English, a defender of the Irishlanguage, and a champion of the openness and inclusiveness of Irishculture.Between the 1860s and the 1900s he was politically active inrelation to much that was going on in Irish nationalism.Initially hedid so as a journalist in the radical nationalist coteries around TheShamrock and other journals where the residual remnants of YoungIreland rubbed shoulders with Fenians.Later he became a respectedpublic commentator on Fenianism, the land question and Irish polit-ical prisoners.The views of this later Sigerson were listened to withrespect by the English political and intellectual élite.Through the poetand novelist Hester Varian, Sigerson married into the political and lit-erary legacy of Young Ireland.Their daughter, Dora Sigerson Shortermaintained the familial link between radical nationalism and artisticproduction.A sculptor, artist and poet, Dora worked on the 1916memorial in the chapel of Glasnevin Cemetery and wrote The Tricolour(1922), a collection of poems eulogising the leaders of the EasterRising.3Within the social history of medicine in Ireland, the life of GeorgeSigerson is notable for the ways in which it illustrates how a particulartype of career and public role for a medical man was possible withinthe culture of care of the Dublin medical world in the later nineteenthand early twentieth centuries.In that culture of care, Sigerson s self-fashioning could still be formulated in the terms of a polymathicmodel, which predated the professionalisation and the scientismthat were coming to the fore in Irish medicine, as elsewhere, at thattime.As well as embodying some of the distinguishing features ofintellectual life in the Ireland of his time, Sigerson s role as a manof science and a public intellectual can also be seen as contributingpart of an Irish dimension to the historiography of national stylesof science.Combining a career in the bio-medical sciences with a life-time of interventions as a public intellectual, Sigerson was part ofan Irish medical lineage that also includes Sylvester O Halloran(1728 1807), Richard Robert Madden (1798 1886) and Sir WilliamWilde (1815 1876).James McGeachie 115A new assessment of Sigerson, integrating his role in the Revival andin contemporary nationalist polemic with his career in science andmedicine, is well overdue.This essay will make some suggestions as tohow such a reassessment might be made.It will begin with an outlineof the disparate but frequently interconnected strands of the career tra-jectory of this latterly neglected late-Victorian phenomenon, invariablyreferred to by contemporaries as  Dr.Sigerson.Sigerson s public repu-tation, and the high esteem in which he was held in his final years,will then be contrasted with the more recent scholarly neglect of him.The significant absences of Sigerson from recent studies of the culturalhistory of the Revival will be noted.This will be followed by an exam-ination of how Sigerson has been represented in two discrete areas ofscholarship: in the essays on the history of Irish medicine by thelate J.B.Lyons, and in the interdisciplinary work in Irish studies bythe Field Day cohort.With reference to these two bodies of work, itwill be suggested that Sigerson s particular combination of a careerin the bio-medical sciences with a prominent role in the Revival and inthe wider nationalist polemic of the period add significant dimensionsto our understandings of Irish medical history, of the Revival, and ofthe culture of intellectual life in modern Ireland.George Sigerson was the youngest son of a substantial Strabanefamily whose prosperity came both from inherited land and frommanufacturing.4 From his parents religiously mixed marriage, Sigersonwas also linked by blood with two of the primary historic strands ofIrish national memory.5 Through his mother, a protestant Nielson ofStrabane who was related to the United Irishman Samuel Nielson,there was a living connection both with the non-sectarian republicanproject of the United Irishmen and with the regional particularism ofthe politics of the north-west of Ireland.6 And with a Derry Catholicfather whose family had moved there from Kerry, there was also afamily link with the displaced native Irish of seventeenth-centuryMunster and, further back, with the old Pale families of medieval andearly modern Dublin.Douglas Hyde notes that  one ChristopherSigerson appears amongst the list of the transplanted Irish in 1654 andDr Sigerson was probably of the same family & If so, heredity wouldsufficiently account for his strong national sympathies.7Those  strong national sympathies , however, were supplementedfrom an early stage of Sigerson s schooldays by the beginnings of a life-long engagement with France.After initial schooling at the Glebeschool in Strabane and at Letterkenny Academy under the latter sFranco-Hibernian headmaster, a Dr Grenand, Sigerson moved to France116 Science, Politics and the Irish Literary Revivalitself to attend the Collège St Joseph, in what was then the newParisian suburb of Auteuil [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]