Malta 1865 : medical background to Berkeley George Andrew Moynihan

Abstract

This paper was read on the 8th May at the Medical School, St. Luke's Hospital, at a meeting of the Moynihan Chirurgical Club. The year 1865 was not a particularly attractive one for the Moynihan`s stay in Malta, since on the 20th June cholera broke out in the Island, the epidemic reaching its peak at the beginning of August. When the epidemic broke out in June, Mrs. Ellen Moynihan, the wife of Army Captain Andrew Moynihan and future mother of Berkeley George Andrew was in her fifth month of pregnancy. She and her husband were living in the married quarters attached to Pembroke Camp, and on the 27th July cholera appeared in the camp but it made little headway there being only eleven cases of which, however, nine ended fatally. The Moynihans escaped and in that house overlooking St. George's Bay, while the epidemic was still raging, Berkeley George Andrew was born on the 2nd October, 1865. The medical scenario at that time was not satisfactory: in hospital the attendants were ill-mannered, unreliable, untrained and illiterate. On the other hand, the physician was cultured, fully trained and with seven years of university education behind him. The year 1865 was however for Moynihan a memorable one because it marks his birth and his survivial through a cholera epidemic, and because without Joseph Lister's fundamental contribution to surgery in that year - the introduction of antisepsis - there would not have been a world famous abdominal surgeon Moynihan in later years.