[1] At age 16 he was admitted to Trinity College Dublin (TCD) (Scholar 1781, BA 1783, MA 1789, MB & MD 1793) and completing studies medicine at the University of Edinburgh.
He studied not only his patients' ailments but also their environments, noting that in the slums of Dublin certain families rented a small room for a few guineas a year, sub-letting to others who paid them sixpence-halfpenny per week to lay down a bed of straw in a corner.
Its call for "a brotherhood of affection [...] and a union of power among Irishmen of every religious persuasion" to secure “an impartial and adequate representation of the Irish nation in parliament",[3] was too rhetorical.
He admitted to having collected and given evidence to the liberal Lord Moira on the atrocities and tortures visited upon country people by Crown forces as they sought to break up and disarm the United Irish organisation; but denied himself having had any part in the movement as it prepared for insurrection.
[6] Stokes allowed his membership of the United Irishmen to lapse, but when in January 1793 the Society appointed a committee to draw up a scheme of parliamentary reform, he had submitted a plan.
[1] Like McDonnell, Stokes befriended, and maintained a correspondence, with Thomas Russell without embracing the United Irishman‘s radical democratic and insurrectionary politics.
[8] In the new work, he questioned the "trap" or "spectre" of population growth proposed by Robert Malthus: the argument that as common people use "abundance" to enlarge families rather than to increase their comforts, "all attempts ... to ameliorate the condition of the poor are fruitless and mistaken".
[9][10] Already, as a medical man, he had deplored what he depicted as the Malthusian view of hospitals, workhouses and quarantines as vain attempts to "delay the thinning of the people, which is necessary to the happiness of mankind".
Rather than fret about “our numbers", Stokes argued for the division of large holdings, the encouragement and assistance of manufacture, and investment in inland navigation and roads.