Two centuries of Dublin’s Coombe hospital: ‘I often think of the people who came into the world there’
It is hard to imagine Dublin without the Coombe hospital, which celebrates its 200th birthday this year. The hospital was founded in the Georgian era, when Dublin was widely regarded as the second city of the British Empire. Behind the elegant streets and grand public buildings of the Hibernian metropolis – what historian David Dickson has called its “gorgeous mask” – lay a very different reality. Poverty, overcrowding and disease were all too common at that time. Some of the great institutions of the 18th century – including the Royal Hospital for Incurables (founded in 1744), St Patrick’s hospital (1746) and the Meath Hospital (1753) – expanded medical care, yet infectious disease remained widespread. The Act of Union abolished Dublin’s parliament in 1801, and the city endured an economic decline. In the early years of the 19th century, many people feared being admitted to a hospital lest they contract an…