Home and away – Brian Maye on Kevin Izod O’Doherty, revolutionary Irish nationalist and pioneering Australian doctor

Transported to Tasmania for revolutionary nationalist activism, Dublin medical doctor Kevin Izod O’Doherty became one of the pioneers of the medical profession in Queensland, Australia, a reforming member of parliament there, and was also a member of the UK House of Commons for a time. He was born 200 years ago on September 7th.

He was the youngest of four children of William Izod Doherty, a Catholic solicitor, and Anne McEvoy, and following attendance at Dr Wall’s School in Hume Street, Dublin, he began studying medicine at the Catholic Medical School and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 1842. He was a surgical assistant at the fever hospital in the County of Dublin Infirmary during the fever epidemic caused by the Great Famine and joined the Young Ireland movement on its foundation in January 1847. He helped establish a club of radical students and with Richard D’Alton Williams founded and co-edited the Irish Tribune which advocated a rising.

Following the paper’s suppression, he was arrested in July 1848. With character references from senior medical colleagues and skilfully defended by Issac Butt, he had to be tried three times before being found guilty of treason felony and sentenced to 10 years’ transportation to Tasmania. Once there, he accepted ticket of leave, which gave him free movement in the police district of Oatlands, north of Hobart, where he assisted the government surgeon.

Permitted to move to Hobart in August 1850, he worked as a surgeon at St Mary’s Hospital. Some other Irish prisoners nicknamed him “St Kevin”, probably because of his willingness to give medical service.

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Granted a conditional pardon in June 1854, which barred him from settling in Ireland or Britain, he secretly returned to Ireland in 1855 and in August that year in London, he married his fiancée Mary Anne Kelly, who wrote patriotic poetry in the Nation newspaper under the pseudonym “Eva”.

They moved to Paris and he continued to study medicine there and although he was granted a full pardon in 1856, he’d already returned to Ireland for his first child’s birth.

He completed his medical studies in Dublin and worked in Hume Street Hospital.

A disagreement with his two brothers (who opposed his politics) over the family inheritance and the lack of nationalist political activity in post-Famine Ireland disillusioned him and he emigrated with his family to Australia in 1860. Following a few years’ medical work near Brisbane, he moved there in 1865 and established an extensive practice. “An innovative and highly respected physician, he became honorary visiting surgeon to Brisbane, was appointed a member of the Australian medical registration board and the central board of health, and produced several influential reports on public health in the colony,” according to Patrick M Geoghegan and James Quinn, who wrote the entry on him in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.

Elected president of Queensland Medical Society in 1882, he also involved himself in the region’s politics, representing Brisbane in the Queensland Legislative Assembly (1867-73), during which he introduced its first public-health act and a pharmacy bill to help poorer people. During his time on the Queensland Legislative Council (1877-85), as an independent liberal he represented the interests of tradesmen and small farmers against the large landowners and particularly opposed captured native Australians being used as indentured labourers on Queensland’s cotton and sugar-cane plantations.

As Brisbane’s primary Catholic layman on health and education issues, he often got advice from the Catholic bishop of Brisbane, James Quinn, whom he knew from Ireland since the 1850s. He showed his dedication to Irish causes by founding a Hibernian Society to bring together Irish-Australians of all religions, so that religious divisions wouldn’t sour Australian public life. In 1879, he raised £12,000 for the relief of distress in the west of Ireland and led Irish organisations in Australia that supported Home Rule for Ireland.

Returning to Ireland in 1885, he was awarded the freedom of Dublin and was elected MP for Co Meath, but when the first Home Rule Bill was defeated in 1886, he did not seek re-election, possibly for financial reasons, and returned to Australia. Following a period as a government medical officer in North Queensland, he returned to Brisbane in 1890, but economic recession caused his medical practice to decline and when deteriorating eyesight led to blindness in the late 1890s, he ceased working. Adding to his suffering in that decade was the tragic loss of his four sons, two of his three daughters having died before that.

He died on July 15th, 1905, and was buried in Toowong Cemetery, Brisbane. The Queensland Irish Association raised a very impressive monument over his and his wife’s grave (she died in May 1910), in the form of a Celtic cross, in January 1912.