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James Mullin (1846–1920) was born in Cookstown, County Tyrone, the only child of abjectly poor Catholic tenant farmers. Although forced to leave school at the age of 11 to be apprenticed to a carpenter and wheelwright, his passion for learning eventually led to him to Cookstown Academy and from there to Queen’s College Galway, where he studied medicine with the help of scholarships and prizes. On graduation in 1880 Mullin secured a medical assistantship in Brynmawr in south Wales, but quickly swapped it for a better paid post in nearby Blaenavon, where he worked for a former Galway classmate, a fact that lends weight to the view that ethnic support networks were as important for skilled Irish immigrants as they were for their unskilled compatriots. 1 There followed a period of locum work at various locations in England and Wales, Mullin’s autobiographical account of which provides glimpses of the racial and religious prejudices with which an Irish doctor had to contend in the late Victorian era. He eventually established a successful medical practice in the burgeoning town of Cardiff, where he worked with ‘the regularity of an automaton moved by faultless machinery’ until the onset of diabetes caused him to retire in his late fifties. Mullin’s last years were devoted to ‘the pursuit of travel spiced with journalism, and sometimes mingled with a renewal of professional duties as ship’s surgeon’ on ocean cruises to various parts of Europe, Africa and Asia. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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