5 - ‘Boys to Men’: Rites of Passage, Sport, Masculinity and Medical Student Culture, c.1880–1930

Summary

Writing in 1892, Henry Albert Hinkson, in a book entitled Student life in Trinity College, Dublin, described university years in the following way:

It is a time when one stands on the very edge of life, eager for a plunge into life's joyous waters, when one has assumed the toga of oneapos;s manhood, and is yet a boy in heart. Despite the responsibilities of examinations and lectures, there is a delightful freedom and reckless gaiety in college life, and a camaraderie never felt in later years.

Hinkson's description of university life draws attention to the role of universities in aiding the transformation of boys to men and the juxtaposition of the serious and more frivolous aspects of college life. Recent scholarship has explored these themes, illuminating how manliness became a crucial force in student life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Although identity construction became an important part of the culture of medical schools, less work has been done on the performance of identity of medical students. While recent valuable studies have highlighted how the image of the medical student was improved in the nineteenth century and the importance of shared educational activities in helping to create cohesive bonds between future medical practitioners, less attention has been paid to how masculine ideals were passed on to medical students and how educational and extra-curricular spheres became centres of gendered performance and sites for the maintenance of hegemonic masculinity. Ultimately, as I will argue here, this identity construction, through various rites of passage, and social and educational activities, aimed to preserve Irish medicine as a masculine sphere. Women students, though largely treated in an inclusive manner for educational experiences, were generally excluded from these activities from their admission to Irish medical schools from the late nineteenth century up until at least the mid-twentieth century. As Dyhouse has shown for British medical schools, ‘women might be just about tolerable if they confined themselves to the role of spectators, when (whether in the operating theatre or in the sports field) their role was essentially one of admiring male performance’.

According to Roy Porter, the ‘boisterous, jovial sporting atmosphere of the all-male medical school with its student hi-jinks and horseplay’ consolidated an ‘esprit de corps that helped doctors to present some kind of united front’.