Invalid Cookery, Nursing and Domestic Medicine in Ireland, c. 1900.

This article uses a 1903 text by the Irish cookery instructress Kathleen Ferguson to examine the intersections between food, medicine and domestic work. Sick Room Cookery, and numerous texts like it, drew on traditions of domestic medicine and Anglo-Irish gastronomy while also seeking to establish female expertise informed by modern science and medicine. Placing the text in its broader cultural context, the article examines how it fit into the tradition of domestic medicine and the emerging profession of domestic science. Giving equal weight to the history of food and of medicine, and seeing each as shaped by historical context, help us to see the practice of feeding the sick in a different way.

Eozoön: debunking the dawn animal.

Discovered in the nineteenth century by the Canadian Geological Survey, the Eozoön canadense fossil, or 'dawn animal of Canada', created a sensation in the geological community. Only a few initially challenged its status as a fossil organism, including two professors in the remote Irish town of Galway. These men claimed that Eozoön was nothing more than a mineral formation and did not represent the discovery of the primordial organism. Supporters of Eozoön closed ranks and a heated debate soon broke out in a range of periodicals. The story of Eozoön lays bare the construction of scientific credibility, a process that was threatened in the second half of the nineteenth century by the proliferation of popular science.