title: Wilde's worlds: Sir William Wilde in Victorian Ireland.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Other contributors to this collection have evoked the disparate worlds inhabited by Sir William Wilde.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  To provide an overall assessment of his career.
  
  
  METHODS
  Looking at the historical conditions that made possible such a career spanning such disparate worlds. Deploying methodologies developed by historians of medicine and sociologists of science, the article brings together Wilde the nineteenth century clinician and Dublin man of science, the Wilde of the Census and of the west of Ireland, William Wilde Victorian medical man and Wilde the Irish medical man-the historian of Irish medical traditions and the biographer of Irish medical men, and William Wilde as an Irish Victorian.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  A variety of close British Isles parallels can be drawn between Wilde and his cohort in the medical elite of Dublin and their clinical peers in Edinburgh and London both in terms of clinical practice and self-presentation and in terms of the social and political challenges facing their respective ancient regime hegemonies in an age of democratic radicalisation. The shared ideological interests of Wilde and his cohort, however, were also challenged by the socio-political particularities and complexities of Ireland during the first half of the nineteenth century culminating in the catastrophe of the Great Famine. William Wilde saw the practice of scientific medicine as offering a means of deliverance from historical catastrophe for Irish society and invoked a specifically Irish scientific and medical tradition going back to the engagement with the condition of Ireland by enlightened medical men in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
authors.affiliation: Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, School of English and History, Ulster University, Shore Road, Newtwnabbey, Co. Antrim, BT37 OQB, Northern Ireland, UK. ja.mcgeachie@ulster.ac.uk.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: McGeachie
mesh_terms: D049672:History, 19th Century; D006801:Humans; D007494:Ireland; D011057:Politics; D010818:Practice Patterns, Physicians' / Q000266:history*; D012767:Ships / Q000266:history; D014195:Travel / Q000266:history
keywords: Centres of calculation; Irish complexities; Irish tradition of scientific medicine; National catastrophe, medical deliverance from; Network of enterprises; Parallels with Darwin’s early career; Savant Dublin; Victorian elite medicine