A Noontide Blazing: Brigid Lyons Thornton - Rebel, Soldier, Doctor

On Easter Week 1916, medical student, Brigid Lyons Thornton drove from Longford to Dublin to serve in the Four Courts. Surrender brought imprisonment. Instead of a May-time dawn chorus, she heard from her cell in Kilmainham the shooting of fourteen of her idols. Brigid mirrored the great ideal of her time: the attainment of an Irish Republic. She found other fronts where a woman could also fight: votes for women, Belgian refugees, political prisoners. Injustice and deprivation roused her energy and compassion. Her activities were noted by Michael Collins and she became a confidante. In 1921, she shared in his stranger-than-fiction attempt to spring Sean MacKeown from Mountjoy. Despite her revolutionary activities Brigid qualified in 1922. Commissioned by Collins, she became the only woman officer ever in the new Free State Army. Descriptions of her altered relationships with some of her former comrades, now Civil War enemies, make the most tragic reading in this story. Struck down by tuberculosis, she was sent to Switzerland with fellow officers similarly afflicted. There she learned how the Swiss treated TB, a knowledge that was of immense professional advantage in her later years. In 1927, she took her Diploma in Public Health and entered the public health service, first in Kildare, later in Co Cork and finally in Dublin Corporation where she served until her retirement. In her time she helped eradicate those infectious diseases which had once decimated the children of Dublin. She died in April 1987 and was buried on the 71st anniversary of the Easter Rising.