In 1853, after some years of consideration about entering the medical profession, 16-year-old James Little (1837–1916) commenced his medical studies. After a family council, ‘the best bargain was made’ for Little to be assigned as an apprentice to Dr Cohan in Armagh before commencing his studies in Dublin. In November of that year, ‘an offer of becoming an inmate in William Stephen's Family was at last made and at once embraced and thither I sent with my father – I went round to the different professors – took out my tickets and entered upon my 1st year as a Dublin Medical Student at the Royal College of Surgeons’.

Little does not live up to the stereotype that has often been presented of the nineteenth-century medical student. He found student life lonely, did not mix with other medical students, and studied alone, stating ‘this may have kept me from dissipation but I would not advise such a course’. Little also struggled financially as he was not sent enough money by his father. However, by his second session of study, he ‘felt more a man’ and now had the courage to ask his father for money for his sundry expenses. At the same time, considering matters retrospectively, Little regretted that he had not socialised more with his fellow students, stating that if he had he ‘might have done some things which were wrong’, but that he would have been ‘more manly – I would have studied better, I would have got on faster and some bad habits would have been corrected’, and that his want of money for recreations did him much harm.

The experiences of medical students of the past, like James Little, have received surprisingly little attention from historians. In his ambitious comparative study of medical education in Britain, France, the United States and Germany, Thomas Neville Bonner asserted that ‘the lives and experiences of students in general and their impact on medical education have been too little studied’. Similarly, echoing such sentiments more recently, Keir Waddington has commented that ‘in the historiography of medical education, students are largely absent or silent consumers’. This book aims to address this historiographical gap through an exploration of the experiences of medical students who trained at Irish institutions in roughly the 100-year period between the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century.