Description
This is the untold story of the life and work of Dr Adeline (Ada) English (1875-1944), a pioneering Irish psychiatrist deeply involved in Irish politics. Ada English spent four decades working at Ballinasloe District Lunatic Asylum, during which time she introduced significant therapeutic innovations. A passionate participant in the Easter Rising, English spent six months in Galway Jail for possessing nationalistic literature and was elected as a Teachta Dála in 1921. A friend to Pearse, McDonagh, Griffith, Mellows, De Valera and others, she became heavily involved in the Civil War. Brendan Kelly s engaging and sensitive biography reveals the gifted, compassionate and modest woman behind the revolutionary medical achievements and political engagement, her education and medical training, her forty-year career at Ballinasloe and her position within the context of pioneering Irish medical women, such as Kathleen Lynn and Dorothy Stopford Price. Kelly s work also shines light on a woman whose abiding concern was for those she cared for so much so that she requested to be buried alongside her former patients.