RCSI Heritage Collections

This evening RCSI welcomes very special guest Mary Robinson, President of the Mary Robinson Foundation - Climate Justice, Former President of Ireland & Former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to receive the Emily Winifred Dickson Award. The Award was established in honour of Emily Winifred Dickson who was the first female Fellow (1893) of the surgical Royal Colleges in Britain and Ireland. This distinguished award recognises women who have made an outstanding contribution to their field. In honour of her visit, we take a look back at two previous occasions in which Mary Robinson has visited the College. The first was in 1991 when Mary Robinson, as President of Ireland, officially opened the new RCSI Mercer Library and Mercer Medical Centre. This site was formerly Mercer's Hospital and had closed its doors in 1983 after almost 250 years of medical service. In 1984, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland purchased the building and decided to rebuild is so tha...

Nowadays when venturing abroad an essential for most people is a travel guide, be it in the physical form of a guidebook or the electronic version on your phone or tablet. Either way they are a wealth of information about the city, country, continent you are planning on visiting. Travel guides, such as Lonely Planet and Rough Guides , have been around only since the 1970s but here in the RCSI Heritage Collections we have some that are a lot older than that! As you can imagine travel guides and books were essential reads back in the mid to late 1800s. If you were going to travel somewhere you had no idea what it was like and most likely had never met anyone from your destination before. Remember this was a time before internet and Google! So what fabulous travel guides do we have in store for you today? Well, off to our first stop...... Philadelphia ! Travel guide of Philadelphia dated 1824 From a medical point of view, Philadelphia was a city worth visiting because it was ...

He went as far as the clock of the College of Surgeons: it was on the stroke of ten. He set off briskly along the northern side of the Green, hurrying for fear of Corley....  - James Joyce; 'Dubliners' With the release of the Central Bank of Ireland's commemorative medal to James Joyce a few months back the above quote from 'Two Gallants' has been in my mind. The clock above the front entrance to the College is a beautiful eye-catching sky blue colour, much like Dublin's sky these last few sunny days. It was made by James Booth and Sons who were prominent watch and clock makers based in Dublin. James had his workshop near Stephen's Green North from 1823 and he is registered in the Dublin Street Directory 1862 as a 'foreign and English watch and clock maker' . His son James Jnr. worked on Nassau Street in 1868 and the business continued up until the 1950s. Booth was popular among the fashionable and wealthy in Dublin and he received a large sh...