Eamonn Duggan remembers the physician and poet who gave his name to the Sigerson Cup

 

The name George Sigerson is probably recognised by many readers, most especially, those who have even a passing interest in Gaelic Games. Every year for at least a week we hear many sports bulletins report on the latest results in the Sigerson Cup, a football competition for the higher education institutions across the country.

Yet, the chances are, the majority of those listening to the reports have little or no idea about the man who lent his name to the long-standing competition which sent many students on a path to becoming formidable and well-known inter-county players.

The reality is, George Sigerson was much more than a sponsor of a football competition, he was, in fact, a man of many talents who contributed enormously to Irish society during what was called the Irish Literary Revival era and, for a number of decades after it. This then is his story.

George Sigerson was born on 11 January, 1836 at Holy Hill, near Strabane in County Tyrone, the son of William and Nancy Sigerson. He was the youngest of eleven children and had three surviving brothers and three surviving sisters. He went on to attend the Academy at Letterkenny before completing his education at St Joseph’s College, Montrouge in France.

By all accounts he was a top-class student in France and he then went on to study medicine at Queen’s University in Galway and Queen’s College in Cork, earning his degree in 1859. Sigerson then returned to France and made his way to Paris where he studied at the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital where a fellow student was the great Sigmund Freud.

Eventually, Sigerson returned to Ireland and opened up a medical practise in Dublin, specialising in the area of neurology. During his extraordinary life he became one of the foremost authorities on diseases of the nervous system and was a prolific writer on scientific subjects.

He went on to lecture in medicine at the Catholic University of Ireland and became a professor of zoology and, later botany, at University College, Dublin.

Though content in Dublin and, in Ireland, Sigerson never lost his love for France and continued to visit that country on a regular basis throughout his long life.
Sigerson cultivated a number of friendships with individuals who had nationalist tendencies and they urged him to perfect his knowledge of the Irish language. He duly did so and, it is said one of his greatest ambitions was to save the language from ‘a slow but certain death’.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own