SET IN STONE Not all of the RCSI hospitals are still in operation but their sites remain hugely significant in the built environment, evocative of their 300-year-old teaching and research tradition. Antonia Hart explains
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n Ireland, as elsewhere, Eventually, separate institutions developed the care of the sick was to provide the House traditionally provided by of Industr y’s distinct religious orders. As the 17th century gave way to services. These included the the 18th, the increasing Hardwicke Fever Hospital problem of providing for and the Whitworth, as the sick poor, in particular, well as the Richmond. The could no longer be ignored, Richmond prided itself and the establishment of the not just on its progressive first Irish hospitals began. approach, but also on being Initially, they were all in a superb teaching hospital. Dublin. Some were publicly It is no surprise that in funded, like the Foundling the early days some of the Hospital and Workhouse demonstrations students Dr Steevens’ Hospital, founded in 1733, now the Health Service Executive (HSE) administrative headquarters. (1703) in James’s Street, observed were harrowing while other voluntar y in the extreme. In 1825 a hospitals were kickstarted by private legacies and fundraising. Among 14-year-old boy had a portion of his lower jaw removed. He ‘seemed to suffer these were the Charitable Infirmary, later known as Jervis Street (1718), the most severe torture’, newspaper reports noted, and a watching student later wrote that he ‘screamed and struggled’, though he later walked out of Dr Steevens’ (1733), and the Mercer (1734). These were followed by others the room alone, waving away offers of help. The operation was performed like St Patrick’s (1746), for mental health patients, and the Rotunda (1745), by Mr Richard Carmichael, and was so well attended by an eager audience known widely as the first lying-in hospital. Actual medical care was scant of surgeons and students that Carmichael struggled to get sufficient elbow enough, but over these 50 years, the notion of healthcare, and the physical room to work. Just over 25 years later, Mr John MacDonnell read about the embodiment of it, in hospital buildings, had taken root. In 1765, parliament use of ether in a medical journal. The following day he built the necessary enacted groundbreaking legislation providing for the establishment of county infirmaries in 30 of the 32 counties, and the Royal College of Surgeons itself apparatus and tested it on himself, and on the day after he administered came into being in 1784, beginning an association with training and practice ether to Drogheda girl Mary Kane before a successful amputation of her in Irish hospitals which has lasted for nearly 240 years. Not all of the RCSI arm. The following year, Mr John Hamilton amputated a forearm, while hospitals are still in operation, of course, but their sites remain evocative his patient benefited from a chloroform-soaked handkerchief. Doctors at and significant elements of our built environment, and their 300-year-old the Richmond were slow to embrace Sir Joseph Lister’s use of antiseptics, but they were quick to follow Sir Thomas Myles, who availed himself of the teaching and research tradition remains vibrant in today’s medical landscape. Richmond’s kitchen fire, boiling his instruments in a kettle. A marvellous The Richmond Hospital served the population of Dublin for almost 200 years before its closure in 1987. Its origins lay in the House of Industry set up image of surgery in progress survives in the RCSI heritage collections: a in 1773 in Channel Row (now North Brunswick Street), designed to provide detailed photograph of Richmond doctor, Dr Emily Winifred Dickson being accommodation and employment for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged. examined performing surgery there in 1896. Dr Dickson was the first female Dr Daniel Rainey offered his services, from the outset, as physician without fellow of the RCSI, and other photographs from the Richmond at that time show her surrounded by male colleagues. any payment, and he helped to establish it as a centre of research and teaching, delivering the hospital’s first paper, on the post-mortem process, in 1775. Apart from its forward-thinking approach to what we now call healthcare, its
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