Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/McDonnell, Robert
McDONNELL, ROBERT (1828–1889), surgeon, born at Dublin 15 March 1828, was second son of Dr. John McDonnell, a descendant of Ian Vohr of Isla and Cantyre, whose great-grandson was Alaster MacColl Macdonald [q. v.] Robert was educated privately until he entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1844. In the following year he was apprenticed to Richard Carmichael, the great Irish surgeon, and on Carmichael's death by drowning in 1849 he was transferred to Robert Moore Peile. Robert graduated B.A. and M.B. in 1850, obtained the license of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland on 22 Feb. 1851, and was admitted a fellow on 24 Aug. 1853. He afterwards visited Edinburgh, Paris, and Vienna. In 1855, during the Crimean war, he was attached to the British Hospital at Smyrna, and he volunteered as civil surgeon to serve in the general hospital in the camp before Sebastopol, where he remained until the end of the siege. For his services he received the British medal and clasp and the Turkish medal. In 1856 he was appointed demonstrator of anatomy in the Carmichael school of medicine, where he afterwards became lecturer on anatomy and physiology. In 1857 he proceeded M.D. in the university of Dublin, and in 1864 he was admitted to the degree of M.D. in the Queen's University in Ireland. He was appointed a surgeon to Jervis Street Hospital in Dublin in 1863, and three years later he was elected surgeon to Steevens's Hospital, and professor of descriptive anatomy in the medical school attached to it. In 1857 he was appointed medical superintendent of the Mountjoy government prison. In the discharge of his official duties he came into collision with the prisons board upon questions of the food supply and general treatment of the prisoners under his charge. He stoutly maintained that the medical officer should exercise an unfettered discretion in such matters. The board thought otherwise, and he resigned his post in 1867. Some demur was made to granting him a pension, but in the interests of his professional brethren he fought out the battle, and eventually obtained the pension. The sum of money thus acquired he contributed annually until his death to the Royal Medical Benevolent Fund Society. He was twice elected by the senate of the Dublin University a member of the university council. For some years he was an examiner at the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland, a body of which he was elected president in 1877. In 1885 he was elected president of the Academy of Medicine in Ireland, an honourable position which he filled for three years. He belonged to several of the leading English scientific societies, and among others to the Royal Society, of which he was elected a fellow on 1 June 1865. He died suddenly at his house in Merrion Square, Dublin, on Monday, 6 May 1889, as is supposed of rupture of an aneurysm. He was twice married, and left one son by his second wife. A portrait was presented by his friends to the Irish College of Surgeons after his death.
McDonnell was an Irishman of the very best type; of strong individuality, of many and varied attainments; he was a wise surgeon and a graceful speaker, honourable, fearless, and upright, yet popular with all parties. An offer of knighthood was twice declined by him. He wrote no books, but his contributions to surgical and scientific literature were so numerous that they fill a column of the ‘Royal Society's Catalogue of Scientific Papers.’ He edited a volume of the works of Abraham Colles for the New Sydenham Society in 1881.
[History of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland by Sir Charles Cameron, Dublin, 1886, pp. 429-32; Lancet, 1889,i. 965; British Medical Journal, 1889, i. 1092.]