Ada English spent four decades working at Ballinasloe District Lunatic Asylum, during which time she introduced significant therapeutic innovations. A passionate participant in the Easter Rising, English spent six months in Galway Jail for possessing nationalistic literature and was elected as a Teachta Dála in 1921. A friend to Pearse, McDonagh, Griffith, Mellows, De Valera and others, she became heavily involved in the Civil War.
Brendan Kelly's engaging and sensitive biography reveals the gifted, compassionate and modest woman behind the revolutionary medical achievements and political engagement, her education and medical training, her forty-year career at Ballinasloe and her position within the context of pioneering Irish medical women, such as Kathleen Lynn and Dorothy Stopford Price.
Kelly's work also shines light on a woman whose abiding concern was for those she cared for so much so that she requested to be buried alongside her former patients.
