RCSI Heritage Collections

This year marks 300 years since a lady by the name of Mary Mercer set up a shelter for poor girls in 1724 on the site we now know as the Mercer's building.   However, the site itself boasts over 700 years of medical history on Stephen Street Lower in Dublin. Originally known as St. Stephen’s Chapel and thought to be in existence since approximately 1230, the site had become a Lazar House (Leper Hospital) by 1394 but, returning to 1724, after ten years of the home acting as a shelter, in 1734 management of the site was taken over by a group of physicians and surgeons who together founded Mercer’s Hospital as a charitable institution which continued to operate for another 249 years. The following blog will explore aspects of the last 300 years of medical history at the Mercer's site and its connections to the wider medical profession in Ireland.     Mercer's Hospital c. 1734   RCSI Heritage Collections, J.B. Lyons Records Mercer's Hospital logo and motto- ‘Fac Similite...

Earlier this year, RCSI Heritage Collections was delighted to receive the very generous donation of the archive belonging to the well-known chemists, Hayes, Conyngham & Robinson.   We have only recently begun to explore the collection, but we can already tell it is a treasure trove, an unparalleled insight into a profession undergoing a century of relentless change.  Given that Halloween occurred last week, Project Archivist, Erin McRae – who will be cataloguing this collection – has looked into HCR’s bottles, ledgers and recipe books to bring us this blogpost on one potentially ghoulish aspect of the pharmacists’ trade: the use of poisons.  An apothecary in his laboratory concocting a mixture. Wood engraving by F.Mc F(?), 1876, after H.S. Marks. Wellcome Collection Poisons and their Uses: From High Fashion to Medicine In the popular imagination, poisons, and their potential to cause death has long been a source of morbid fascination. Poison is defined as “a subs...

The first RCSI student newsletter, Mistura, was published in 1953. Successive class cohorts have continued the tradition, with student newsletters and magazines coming and going under many names and in various forms ever since. As part of the most recent traunch of newly-digitised material from the College Archive to hit our Digital Collections site, you can now explore select RCSI student newsletters from the 1960s  here .  Peering Into the Past Student newsletters provide a unique insight into the evolution of the student experience at RCSI. Through the written word – serious, creative, and comic – they chart the academic and extra-curricular activities of the student body over the past 70 years. Sporting and social life feature prominently, club and society outings providing the same distraction and release for students past as they continue to do for those present. From the stress of exams to the challenges of finding suitable accommodation, some of the academic and social...

The town of Saint-Lô in Normandy was a German stronghold in Northern France in the lead up to the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944. Like many others towns in the region, it was all but destroyed by Allied bombings during the effort to liberate Northern France from German occupation in the weeks and months that followed. Central to rehabilitation efforts in Saint-Lô was a small group of humanitarian missionaries from Ireland who set up a Red Cross hospital in the town’s remains, L'hôpital irlandais de Saint-Lô. Among these was nurse Mary Frances Crowley, who served as Matron of the hospital at Saint-Lô between 1945 and 1947. A pioneer of nurse education in Ireland, she later became the Foundation Dean of the RCSI Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery in 1974. Mary Frances Crowley,  painted by William Nathans for  RCSI Women on Walls (2019) To commemorate the anniversary of Crowley’s birth on 1 August 1906, Project Archivist Erin McRae tells the story of Mary Crowley’s role in the estab...

With the Olympic Games officially getting under way today, we thought we’d look at some of RCSI’s Olympic connections. Pat O'Callaghan (1906-1991, Lic. 1927) First and foremost there is RCSI Licentiate Pat O’Callaghan (1906–1991, Lic. 1927). A hammer-thrower, he won Gold at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, the first competitor to do so under the Irish tricolour. ‘I am glad of my victory,’ he later said, ‘not for the victory for myself, but for the fact that the world has been shown that Ireland has a flag, that Ireland has a National Anthem, and, in fact, we have a nationality.’ Four years later, he took home Gold again from the Los Angeles Games. In 1936, owing to an internal dispute, Ireland did not send a team to Berlin – but O’Callaghan was there nonetheless, personally invited by Adolf Hitler (he was a hammer-throw enthusiast; the winner that year threw two metres short of O’Callaghan’s personal best). In later life O’Callaghan turned down Louis B. Mayer’s invitation for him to...

  It’s Bloomsday this Sunday, celebrating the day on which Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) takes place.   RCSI has many Joycean connections, probably the most prominent of which is the appearance in Dubliners (1914) of the clock over the front door of 123 St Stephen’s Green (‘He went as far as the clock of the College of Surgeons: it was on the stroke of ten’).   RCSI Professor and President (and bon viveur ) Charles Cameron is one of the real-life people named in Ulysses itself (‘The annual dinner you know.   Boiled shirt affair.   The lord mayor was there… and sir Charles Cameron’). But did you know that Joyce had originally aspired to a career in medicine?   In April 1902, he enrolled at the Catholic University Medical School in Cecilia Street (now the Temple Bar home of Urban Outfitters).   At the time this School opened, it was unlicensed and unchartered, meaning its students were on the road to receiving essentially worthless qualifications.   But...