Conolly Norman
Conolly
Norman
In Brief
The physician whom Mulligan mentions in connection with the Richmond Lunatic Asylum, "Conolly
Norman," was a prominent Irish "alienist," or
psychiatrist, who supervised several such institutions in the
later 19th century. The spelling used in Hans Walter Gabler's
edition, "Connolly Norman," is incorrect.
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Born in 1853 near Derry in County Donegal, Norman studied
medicine at Trinity College, Dublin from 1870 to 1874. He
worked at the Monaghan District Lunatic Asylum after receiving
his degree, and then took a job at the Bethlem Royal Hospital
in London (the famous "Bedlam") in 1880. In 1882 he returned
to Ireland to become Resident Medical Superintendent at the
Castlebar District Lunatic Asylum in County Mayo, and in 1885
he resigned that job to take the same position at the Monaghan
asylum. In 1886 he was made Resident Medical Superintendent of
the Richmond asylum, the largest and most important in
Ireland, and remained in that job until his death in 1908. He
is credited with improving primitive conditions at the
Richmond asylum.
Norman's given name is spelled with one "n" in various
medical articles and transcribed lectures, as well as in
obituaries published upon his death. Every printed text of Telemachus
before the 1980s, starting with The Little Review
version published in 1918, reflects this widely recognized
spelling of his name. It is bizarre, then, that Gabler,
apparently preferring Joyce's handwritten version in the
Rosenbach manuscript to all other evidence, adds a second "n."
This change was one of many deplored in "The Scandal of Ulysses,"
John Kidd's 1988 attack on the new edition in The New York
Review of Books.
