The cahill family
In April 2022, John D. Cahill III shared with the New York Celtic Medical Society (NYCMS) and his son, John D. Cahill IV, his reminiscences about his life in medicine, his family, and the three-generation history of the Cahill family’s involvement in the NYCMS.
Tragically, by December 2023, both father and son had passed away. We honour the memory of the Cahill family with the renaming of the society’s major recognition of outstanding colleagues as the Cahill Healer’s Award.
Oliver St.John Gogarty: 1878 -1957
Otolaryngologist, writer, athlete and politician, and a former member of the New York Celtic Medical Society, Dr. Oliver St. John Gogarty spent the last years of his life as a New Yorker, living at 45 East 61 Street, between Park and Madison. New York was his place of exile, where he focused on his literary career and frequented the bars on Third Avenue, eventually dying of a heart attack at Beth Israel Hospital on 22 September 1957 at the age of 79.
How Oliver St. John St.John (pronounced ‘Sin Gin’) Gogarty ended up in New York is the end of a long path through some of the most pivotal events in Irish politics and literature in the 20th Century.
gertrude b. kelly : 1862-1934
There is a public park on 16th Street just West of Eighth Avenue in Chelsea in New York City. It is named the Dr. Gertrude B. Kelly Playground, one of five model playgrounds built by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses in 1934, and dedicated to the memory of Dr. Kelly by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia on May 16, 1936. The playground is decorated with four-leafed clover leaves and a Celtic-styled dog, and the caduceus, representing the Irish origins of this New York physician.
Gertrude Kelly had died two years previously in 1934, and New York City was honouring her with a playground named in her memory. Her story is that of an extraordinary Irish immigrant physician and an outspoken, courageous activist.
