‘The Irish race have been remarkable from the earliest times, for their taste and aptitude for the study of medicine,’ observed The Tablet in 1876, to which generations of patients on both sides of the Irish Sea would fondly attestThe first three medical students graduated from Queen’s College, Cork – now University College Cork, or UCC – in 1852, during the six-year period that The Tablet was published in Dublin. Since colleges of physicians and surgeons had been founded in Dublin in the seventeenth century, Irish medical schools had produced more doctors than were needed at home and, until the 1960s, the majority of Cork medical graduates sought work abroad, mostly in Britain, where many of them went into general practice. The provision of primary care in t