George Sigerson, who died 100 years ago on February 17th, was a physician, biologist, poet, author and cultural activist. He was born on January 11th, 1836, at Holyhill, Strabane, Co Tyrone, the youngest of 11 children. His father, George, was a land and mill owner; his mother, Nancy Neilson, was a descendant of United Irishmen founder Samuel Neilson.
George jnr attended a local school and then Letterkenny Academy before being sent to St Joseph’s College, Montrouge, France, where he excelled academically.
After France, he attended Queen’s Colleges Galway and Cork, where he studied medicine. Nationalist friends influenced him to also study the Irish language and he was active in literary circles. Among his friends were the Young Irelanders Ralph and Isaac Varian, whose cousin Hester – a painter, writer and musician – he later married. He took the doctor of medicine degree in 1859 and the master in surgery in 1865, and also studied at the Catholic University Medical School in Cecilia Street, Dublin, with which he was to have a long academic connection. He became licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians Ireland (RCPI) in 1875. As a youth, Sigerson contributed poems, translations and sketches to the Nation, the Harp, the Celt and other periodicals, and his first book, The Poets and Poetry of Munster, was published when he was 24. In it, he described himself as “an Ulsterman and of Viking race” and expressed resentment at the damage done by the English to the Irish language.
He was influenced by the Young Ireland writers Thomas Davis and John Mitchel.
Lexicographer at Large – Frank McNally on Dinneen’s Dictionary and the Dáil row about unparliamentary Irish
For Whom the Bells Toll – Frank McNally on the ups and downs of “sound baths”
All fired up – Ita O’Kelly on keeping the homes fires burning
‘A man of remarkable presence’: The physician and poet who gave his name to the Sigerson Cup
His consistent engagement in political journalism (many of his articles were collected and published in book form under the title Modern Ireland in 1869) “was probably responsible for his failure to obtain a hospital appointment”, according to JB Lyons, who wrote the entry on him in the Dictionary of Irish Biography. His appointment as lecturer in botany in the Catholic University Medical School in 1865 compensated to some extent, although Lyons pointed out that it was an “unendowed and struggling institution”. Eventually he became professor of biology in University College Dublin (UCD) but continued to be very committed to literature. He was president of the National Literary Society, and published Bards of the Gael and Gall in 1897. He visited France annually in the 1870s and studied under the pioneering neurologist JM Charcot and others. His translation into English of Charcot’s Leçons sur les maladies du système nerveux was published in 1877. Sigmund Freud was a fellow student with him under Charcot and Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris.
After their marriage in 1861, the Sigersons lived variously in Synge Street, Richmond Hill (Rathmines) and finally Clare Street in Dublin. William, their eldest son, died before he was two and the surviving children were Dora, George and Hester.
Lyons wrote that “in his prime, Sigerson was a man of remarkable presence, and lines borrowed from his own Saga of King Lir may be used to describe him: ‘Magnificent he stood; his red-brown locks / From ample brow and kingly head flowed down.’ Advancing years increased rather than diminished his stature.”
His Sunday evening soirées were popular. Mary Colum (wife of the poet Padraic) left a detailed picture of them: “Sigerson was very ‘Frenchified’, his house full of French furniture and bibelots . . . After a glass of sherry, the connecting doors were thrown open, the doctor would gravely offer his arm to the youngest lady present, and march with her into the dining room, placing her on his right, with the most important lady on his left. He led the conversation, urging the whole table to take part, while he tackled the roast with a carving knife which he had sharpened loudly.” He was 82 by the time the RCPI, of which he had been a licentiate since 1875, made him an honorary fellow. At the conferral, having thanked the college for the honour, Sigerson referred to his mixed career interests. “Nations sometimes suffered from diseases and required remedies not less by the surgeon’s knife than by the mental or intellectual aid of the physician. When that great patient – one’s country – suffered, let it not be accounted odd that the physician took part in what he considered his duty to relieve pain, to heal wounds, to cultivate hope, and assure her of a happier future. It is true that in leisure hours he had essayed something in the lighter paths of literature, but a change of work was often the best recreation . . . ”
His last book, The Easter song of Sedulius, was published in 1922. He was a member of the Irish Free State Seanad and was mentally alert to shortly before his death from a stroke. His portrait by Sir John Lavery is in UCD, and drawings by John B Yeats in the National Library of Ireland, which holds Sigerson’s papers. His interest in Gaelic games led him to purchase a trophy in 1911 for an annual Gaelic football competition among the three NUI colleges; known as the Sigerson Cup, it was later opened to other universities and third-level colleges.
