RCSI Heritage Collections

  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...

In this lovely, yet completely crazy, Irish summer weather, you may decide to head out and take a stroll around Dublin city. While doing so you will encounter numerous examples of Victorian and Georgian architecture, marble and red brick facades and the modern changes that are happening all over the city. But what you mightn't know is that some of the buildings you look at, pass by every day and may even go in to were once hospitals. Dublin was, and still, is a major international centre for surgical and medicinal excellence and with this development of surgical methods and practise came hospitals. So below are some examples of these long lost hospitals. Next time you are enjoying a glass of wine in The Ely Wine Bar on Ely Place here's a fact you can impress your friends with. Next door in 23 Ely Place there was the Dublin Infirmary for Diseases of the Eye and Ear from 1872-1875 Dublin Infirmary for Diseases of the Eye and Ear, 23 Ely Place All those times you were...