RCSI Heritage Collections

  This year’s One Dublin, One Book, The Coroner’s Daughter , is historical fiction and a crime novel, set in the Dublin of 1816. Moreover, it is medical historical fiction, and imagined around an RCSI anatomist. So, with this book in our minds, let’s take a glimpse at the archives with RCSI Heritage Collections. In the year 1816, RCSI had been operating under its First Charter, which was granted to the College by George III in 1784. The surgeons had formally broken the historical ties with the Guild of Barber-Surgeons- a goal the College founders had set out to achieve when they met and formed the Dublin Society of Surgeons in 1783.   RCSI was established to set and support professional standards for surgical training and practice. RCSI Royal Charter, 1784 Rules of the Dublin Society of Surgeons, 1783   The backdrop of ‘the College of Surgeons’ in 1816 would have been the first iteration of the building erected on a disused Quaker burial ground, on St. Stephen’s Green and the cor

RCSI Heritage Collections has been awarded funding from the Heritage Council to celebrate the life and legacy of pioneering Irish surgeon Abraham Colles on the 250th anniversary of his birth in 2023. Abraham Colles (1773-1843) was a surgeon, physician, and anatomist, and a leading figure in the golden age of Irish medicine in the 19th century. He also had a strong connection with RCSI being a past pupil, professor and President of the College. Colles revolutionised the teaching of anatomy in medical schools around the world with the publication of his ground-breaking Treatise on Surgical Anatomy in 1811. This work prompted a radical departure from established approaches to the study of human anatomy and proposed a new model of teaching that lent itself much more readily to the realities of clinical practice for surgeons and physicians in the nineteenth century. This innovative approach to the teaching of anatomy paved the way for new discoveries and fresh observations regarding the in