BIOGRAPHY: WILLA MURPHYreviews George Sigerson: Poet, Patriot, Scientist and ScholarBy Ken McGilloway Stair Uladh (Ulster Historical Foundation), 156pp. £16.99
IN A MINOR PAMPHLET published in 1866 the botanist, physician and patriot George Sigerson argued for an agricultural project that could transform the Irish economy. The mass cultivation of one crop would multiply capital, diffuse wealth, create sustainable jobs and reverse emigration. Cannabiculture in Ireland: Its Profit and Possibilityinsists that home-grown is the answer to Ireland's troubles and calls for cannabis production to be added immediately to the curriculum of all State-funded schools. "The advantages accruing," Sigerson stresses, "would be immense."
Before any recently elected TDs rush out to the National Library of Ireland pamphlet collection, they should know that Sigerson’s high hopes for hemp were more about rope, canvas and cloth than pipes, bongs and brownies. The pamphlet is nevertheless part of the Victorian scholar’s lifelong mission to relieve the nation’s pain. “Nations sometimes suffer from diseases,” he writes elsewhere, “and require remedies not less by the surgeon’s knife than by the mental or intellectual aid of the physician.”
A glance at some of the doctor's other titles gives us some sense of the intellectual range he brought to bear on "that great patient, one's country": Political Prisoners at Home and Abroad; On the Need for Village Hospitals in Ireland; Celtic Influence on the Evolution of Rimed Hymns; The Advantages of Ambidexterity; Discovery of Fish Remains in the Alluvial Clay of the River Foyle. An influential figure in Celtic Revival circles, Sigerson moved effortlessly between seemingly unrelated fields of knowledge: neurology and politics, Gaelic poetry and plant life, linguistics and social reform, archaeology and athletics. (Gaelic football's Sigerson Cup is one of his many legacies.)
Ken McGilloway’s engaging study hopes to put this extraordinary thinker and reformist back on the radar of Irish readers and researchers, who are given, in extended appendices, a selection of excerpts from Sigerson’s vast and varied writings.
A typical day in the life of the physician began with lecturing at the Catholic University, followed by afternoon consultations with patients. In the evening he entertained the Dublin intelligentsia at his Clare Street home, an important social-networking site for patriots and poets of the day. Some of the dinner guests were also his afternoon patients: Maud Gonne’s treatment for nerves involved avoiding a certain bothersome Co Sligo poet, and the unsettled Austin Clarke was put on a diet of black pudding and mild shock treatments. James Joyce, who heard the “butter-blond Sigurdson” lecture at UCD, encouraged a troubled Nora Barnacle to attend his surgery.
Later, when the guests had gone home, the therapist to the nation worked deep into the night translating old Irish poetry and writing political pieces for the Nation. Sleep was not a high priority for this self-described "Ulsterman of Viking race", whose boundless energy and intellectual reach led Douglas Hyde to describe him as "a giant oak".
Sigerson’s long flaxen locks and outsized beard helped perfect his Viking look. Indeed, he liked to remind his fellow Revivalists that he was a descendant of Sigurd the Stout, who clashed with Brian Boru at Clontarf. His own name was testament to the “commingling of races” that made up Irish identity. Throughout his life and work Sigerson delighted in demonstrating this cross-fertilisation of peoples and cultures. He himself was the product of a mixed marriage in Ulster, where he perhaps first learned the advantages of two-handedness, or at least, in his father’s spade foundry, how to dig with either foot.
The young Sigerson was schooled in France to escape sectarian tensions in Ulster, and later studied in Paris under the groundbreaking neurologist JM Charcot. Sitting at the desk next to him was another Sig: the young Freud. This European formation, as Luke Gibbons has argued, was to have a profound influence on the doctor’s later treatment of his nation.
Sigerson belonged to that genus of Victorian scholar who discovered, or invented, the idea of the family tree across multiple disciplines. Darwin's On the Origin of Speciesand Schleicher's work in comparative philology are just two famous examples of a 19th-century explosion of root-and-branch thinking to explain everything from plants, rocks and animals to languages, cultures and "races". Looked at from a distance, a tree diagram mapping connections between Sanskrit and Greek looks a lot like another showing that the tobacco plant and the potato belong to the same family.
It was this kind of thinking that inspired Romantic nationalists in Ireland and elsewhere to join in a race to excavate and chart the unique characteristics of their people. This helps explain the frantic dusting-down of the language and myths of “Celtic” Ireland during the Revival. If you can climb down the branches back to your roots, then your essential Irishness is as undeniable as the existence of the oak tree or the elephant. Despite his nationalist leanings, Sigerson, a true polymath, rejected any such arguments from blood. The Irish, like their poetry, are a mix of styles and forms. It is difficult not to hear echoes of Sigerson in Joyce’s later assertion that in the vast fabric of Ireland “it is useless to look for a thread that may have remained pure and virgin and without having undergone the influence of a neighbouring thread”.
So while many of his Revivalist counterparts were busy seeking out the clean roots of Irish identity, Sigerson was always more concerned to show the tangled branches. He once compared Ireland to the multiple interlocking colours of an illuminated manuscript, another place where threads are difficult to unravel and roots remain hidden.
Willa Murphy lectures in English at the University of Ulster
