By ANNE DELANEY
I always think that the portrayal of Ireland as the ‘Emerald Isle’ is a lyrical and accurate way to describe our verdant country. Anyone who has flown over Ireland and seen our glowing landscape can testify to that. That gravel-voiced singer, Johnny Cash, was inspired to write the evocative song ‘Forty Shades of Green’ when he viewed Ireland’s shimmering green fields from his aeroplane, following a visit in 1959.
The man who coined that beautiful phrase ‘the Emerald Isle’ was one William Drennan. He used it in his poem entitled ‘When Erin First Rose.’ He wrote:
‘Nor one feeling of vengeance presume to defile
The cause, or the men, of the Emerald Isle’
William Drennan was born in Rosemary Street in Belfast in 1754, the third surviving child of Rev. Thomas Drennan and his wife Anne. Drennan was greatly influenced by his principled father Thomas.
William wrote of his father ‘I am the son of an honest man… a Protestant Dissenting Minister…’
It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that William followed in his father’s footsteps and enrolled in the University of Glasgow in 1769 where he studied medicine, specialising in obstetrics. He later returned home to work as a doctor in the Poorhouse in Belfast, where many infectious diseases such as smallpox ravaged the inmates of the Poorhouse, killing many and leaving others terribly disfigured.
In 1782 he presented a paper proposing a system of public inoculation against smallpox, using a smallpox variolation which involved the insertion of ground-down smallpox scabs from patients with a mild version of the disease, into carefully made skin incisions. He was also an early advocate of preventative hand-washing.
In 1967, almost 150 years after Drennan’s death, the World Health Organisation (WHO) embarked on a campaign to eradicate smallpox. The basis of their programme of immunisation was not dissimilar to Drennan’s. In 1980 WHO announced the abolition of smallpox. It was one of the key successes of 20th century medical history. Drennan was indeed a man ahead of his time.
Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own