DOI: 10.7925/drs1.ucdlib_280000
title: Richmond Hospital Medical Illustrations

description: The Richmond Hospital Medical Illustrations is a collection of illustrations depicting medical conditions treated at the Richmond Hospital, Dublin. The illustrations mainly date from the 19th century, with a small number from the early 20th century, and many depict diseases that are now not commonly seen. The illustrations are accompanied by two catalogues listing the drawings. The artist is not identified for many of the illustrations but known artists include J. Connolly, J.H. Burnside, Miss B. O'Farrell, and Sydney A. Sewell. The cases depicted include those treated by surgeons associated with Richmond Hospital such as Robert Adams, Edward Hutton, Christopher Fleming, John Hamilton, and Robert William Smith. This collection will be of interest to medical educators and practitioners, public health specialists, historians of medicine, social historians and humanities scholars more generally.
description: Users are advised that this collection contains graphic medical images which may cause upset or distress. These include images of diseases, illnesses, injuries, surgical procedures, anatomy, and dissections. A content warning has been added to images that depict children. A content warning and user discretion thumbnail have been added to images featuring graphic nudity. This collection also uses historical medical terms that may cause offence. Where these terms appear on an item, they been retained to provide historical context but the current term has been added (indicated by square brackets).
description: Scope and content: The Richmond Hospital Collections consists of 998 medical illustrations which often also contain case descriptions, in manuscript or printed form, on the reverse side of the leaf. The illustrations, drawn by professional artists and occasionally signed by them, were executed largely in watercolours. In addition to the illustrations, the collection includes two manuscript registers or catalogues of the illustrations, typically identifying an illustration and referencing it through a numbering system corresponding to annotations on the illustrations themselves.
description: Biographical/historical information: Richmond Surgical Hospital was opened in 1811, consisted of 120 beds and was housed in an old converted convent on Channel Row, North Brunswick Street, Dublin 7. It was named after Charles Lennox, fourth Duke of Richmond and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1807 to 1813. In 1816 a new operating theatre, designed by Francis Johnston, was built at the rear of the hospital and in 1838 the surgeons subscribed £2,700 to the cost of founding and maintaining a museum which contained '1,000 very expensive drawings and about 2,500 wax preparations'. We are told that this museum was 'resorted to by foreigners from all parts of the world'. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Governors began to purchase the adjoining lands on Channel Row which were occupied by 'dairy yards, manure heaps, and some objectionable trades'. This made possible the erection of a fine new surgical hospital in 1897 at an estimated cost of £25,000.
description: Biographical/historical information: The new 'Richmond', built on the pavilion principle by the architects Carroll and Batchelor, adhered to the Nightingale recommendations that the pavilions should be no higher than two storeys, each being capable of containing a large airy ward with accommodation for fourteen patients, a nurse's room, a ward kitchen, and a small two-bedded ward for seriously ill patients. A particularly charming feature of the wards were the verandas which were once used as an open-air location for convalescent patients to sit and talk on; latter-day policy relegated these areas to storage, a fate that was to befall all the recreational facilities and the once carefully tended gardens that gave to the hospitals an air of tranquility. The wanton destruction of Dublin's Georgian and Victorian hospitals by philistine administrators in search of expedient solutions to problems usually of their own making, without any consideration for the aesthetic and functional attributes of their institutions, is a sad reflection on a later age. Another remarkable feature of the new hospital was its brightness - there was a window to every bed. The operating theatre, facing north from the central block, had a glazed roof so as to admit as much natural light as possible. The theatre could accommodate a large number of students on tiered rows and there were commodious anaesthetic and sterilising rooms in keeping with the remarkable advances in surgery that had taken place towards the end of the nineteenth century. The exterior of the new hospital was, if anything, more striking than were its internal features. The central red-brick block flanked by projecting wings terminating in delicate verandas surmounted by copper domes gave the passer-by a waft of the exotic, which no doubt accounts for the well-known tale that the Richmond owes its unusual appearance to a mix-up in architectural plans, whereby those destined for the new House of Industry Hospital found their way to the Taj Mahal and the extension planned for that splendid establishment as a consequence was erected on North Brunswick Street. The 'Old Richmond' continued in service, functioning in varying ways up to the time of the hospital's closure as an accident department, wards, stores, a records department, and a mortuary. The foundation stone of the Benedictine Nuns' convent remains in what was the stores area of the building. (Adapted from Eoin O'Brien et al., The House of Industry Hospitals 1772-1987, (Dublin: Anniversary Press, 1988), 22-33)
description: Ownership/custodial history: These papers were deposited in UCD Archives in January 2012 by UCD School of Medicine and Medical Science.
description: Funding: Funder: Royal Irish Academy ; funding stream: Nowlan Digitisation Grants.