'Dear Father my health has broken down': Writing Health in Irish Charity Letters, 1922-1940

Abstract

Through an exploration of thousands of Irish begging letters, written between 1920 and 1940 to the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, this paper brings together medical history and the history of the scribal culture of ordinary people in order to offer a 'new history from below' of poverty, ill health and the patient. It examines the writing of health in the narratives the poor created; the relationship they constructed between ill health, religion, poverty and medicine; and the role this construction played in making a case for charitable consideration. It is argued that in the hands of these ordinary writers, medical language became a weapon of agency in the process of negotiation with their church. These authors appropriated the role of the patient, often using ill health to politicize poverty as an injustice.