Nineteenth-century Ireland saw the rise of modern Irish nationalism, sweeping changes in land reform, the growth o f a new bourgeois class and the parallel decline and collapse of eighteenth-century social structures. In short, it was a period that crystallised the major social features of modem Ireland. R.V. Comerford asserts that the preoccupation with the ‘mythic march of the nation’ has detracted from the importance of the latter half of the nineteenth century.1 This study seeks to highlight the significance of this time period in relation to laying the foundation stones for a centralised and modern health-care system. This system in turn would ensure that the figure of the doctor was a real presence in the lives of the public and, as the Dublin Medical Press indicates, it bolstered the perception of the medical practitioner as moral guardian of society in general. This thesis is not a study of the medical profession in Ireland in the nineteenth century. Though the structures and the hierarchical and elitist nature of the medical establishment are explored, it is the doctors’ widening perception of their role in society, so carefully documented in the Dublin Medical Press, that the study seeks to highlight. That is not to say that the thesis is the study of the Dublin Medical Press itself.2 Rather, the Dublin Medical Press is examined in this study as a framework of the developing moral role of the medical profession in Ireland in this period.