Rotunda Hospital

In 1745 Bartholomew Mosse, surgeon and man-midwife, founded the original Dublin Lying-In Hospital as a maternity training hospital, the first of its kind.The Rotunda Hospital is unique as an institution in that it has continued to provide an unbroken record of service to women and babies since its foundation in 1745 and has occupied its present premises since 1757. The Rotunda is the oldest, continuously-running maternity hospital in the world. 9000 babies are born here every year while all about them the cogs of the city whirr and roll. The new Luas line will pass the doors of the hospital that were once attended by horse-drawn ambulances. Mosse’s ambition to build a dedicated maternity hospital in Dublin had both public and private motivations. He wished to provide medical care and shelter to penniless mothers of Dublin after encountering unspeakable conditions in the course of his practice in the aftermath of the 1739 famine. Few people in Ireland at the time had any midwifery training and Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland were even penalised if they practised. Mosse sought to change all that. During the Easter Rising, through battles and barricades, Dublin women made their way up Moore Street and Capel Street on foot to reach the sanctity of the hospital. Neither social standing nor religion mattered there, a rare attitude in Irish society at that time. Many devoted nationalists had worked inside the hospital and aided the Republican movement, Dr Kathleen Lynn and Bridget Lyons Thornton amongst them. Mary McDonald, latterly a prominent figure in the Irish Countrywomen’s Association, was a midwife in the Rotunda at the time of the Rising when the hospital was occupied by British military. Staff were ordered to carry on with their work. “We saw snipers at work from the top of the houses of Parnell Square. We saw all the prisoners collected into the lawn in front of the hospital and marched away to prison,” she wrote. The Rotunda was referenced in James Joyce's Ulysses. In Joyce’s time it was a renowned concert hall. It was somewhat obliquely referred to in Ulysses in the phrase “Accouching the Rotundaties” as Bloom passed while attending the funeral of Paddy Dignam, who died in a drunken stupor.