RCSI Heritage Collections

One of the many treats of RCSI's Surgeons & Insurgents exhibition is the remarkably detailed scale model of St Stephen's Green in Easter Week 1916. To add to the re-creation, Mary O'Doherty, Special Collections Librarian of the RCSI Library, has looked at Thom's Dublin City Directory 1916  to see who was living and working on the Green and surrounding streets 100 years ago. Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland building in the scale model created for ' Surgeons & Insurgents: RCSI and the Easter Rising ' exhibition, open to the public until 17th April 2016. Free entry, book place here . Image credit: Billy Cahill. St. Stephen's Green in 1916 was a fairly well-to-do part of the city having received a proper facelift in the 1870s from the gift of Sir Arthur Edward Guinness (later known as Lord Ardilaun), whose statue faces RCSI today. Sir Arthur purchased the Green, paid off its debts, returned it to the public and took an active part in the lan...

 "We always talked of having a Rising, but, although we talked of it,  we never realised that it was so near...For little more than a week before the Rising there was tremendous excitement - a sort of seething undercurrent. You felt that something was going to happen. But what it was, you did not know." Mary Josephine Ryan As we prepare for the launch of Surgeons & Insurgents , the RCSI's 1916 exhibition and lecture series, we are looking at statements from contemporary witnesses on what they remembered about the lead up to the Rising.  To book your ticket for the exhibition and lecture series, see www.rcsi.ie/2016 . Free Entry, but booking required. From our school history books, we know that the Rebels took the British administration in Ireland and many Dublin citizens by surprise with their actions in Easter Week. But delving into the Bureau of Military History's online collection of witness statements about the months, weeks and days before...