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 even more serious illness. It was common for women – and their babies – to die in childbirth.

The Meath Hospital, which served the poor of the Liberties, was on Coombe Street before relocating to a larger site at Long Lane in 1822. The following year, Dr John Kirby purchased the vacant Meath Hospital building in the Coombe and established a school of anatomy and surgery there.

During a snowstorm that gripped Dublin in the winter of 1825, two pregnant women from the Liberties struggled across the city towards the Rotunda hospital. Founded in 1745 by the enterprising obstetrician Dr Bartholomew Mosse, the Rotunda was the only dedicated maternity hospital for the women of Dublin and beyond.

The two women – their names are forgotten – reached only as far as Thomas Street before complications made it impossible to continue. Both women died from exposure to the bitter winter weather, as did their unborn children. One of the women was found by a passerby at the corner of Skinner’s Alley, now Christchurch Place.

The tragedy deeply affected Liberties local Margaret Boyle. Determined to ensure that women should no longer have to cross the city to give birth, she persuaded Dr Kirby and his colleagues to provide space in their school in the Coombe to serve the poor women of the area. They agreed.

Obstetrical services were soon offered from a single ward consisting of just 15 beds. Most of the maternity care, however, was administered in the community, where doctors and nurses were dispatched to women in labour in their own homes. (Coombe master John Ringland attended the homebirth of the Nobel Prize-winning playwright George Bernard Shaw in 1856.) This was the beginning of the Coombe hospital.

When Dr Kirby and his medical school moved elsewhere, Boyle and colleagues took over the building. In 1829, four new wards opened, creating the first dedicated maternity hospital south of the Liffey. (The National Maternity Hospital at Holles Street was established in 1894.)

Margaret Boyle’s will suggests that the original ambition to establish a lying-in hospital came from her late husband, Philip, a wealthy merchant, who wanted “to promote the establishing and endowing [of] a lying-in hospital in some part of the Earl of Meath’s Liberty, for the reception and relief of poor women in labour in that neighbourhood”. But it took Margaret’s determination to turn that ambition into reality. Her name was inscribed on the facade of the old Coombe hospital.

Margaret Boyle had enormous tenacity and civic spirit, yet her name has largely disappeared from the historical record. In fact, she does not appear in the Dictionary of Irish Biography or even on Wikipedia.

A new exhibition at the Little Museum of Dublin celebrates her legacy as a social reformer. But “Born in Dublin: 200 Years of The Coombe Hospital” is not simply the story of its founder: it is the story of generations of women, newborns, families and hospital staff, and of the transformation of maternity care over the past two centuries.

This is both a celebration and a reminder: a celebration, that is, of what medicine can achieve, and a reminder that there is still work to be done to ensure women’s health has the recognition and investment it deserves.

In 1867, Queen Victoria granted the Coombe a royal charter, with its bylaws continuing to underpin the governance of the hospital to this day. This charter features in the exhibition, on public display for the first time, alongside never-before-seen photographs and documents, memorabilia and medical equipment, including a recreated neonatal unit.

Having weathered pandemics, wars and rebellions, the Coombe has secured an enduring place in the social history of Ireland’s capital. During the 1916 Rising, the hospital provided emergency aid to many of those caught up in the upheaval. In his article “Doing the Coombe in 1916,” Dr Donough Macnamara reflected upon his midwifery training amid an “electrical atmosphere of unrest and natural renaissance”. The Irish Times praised “the staff of the Coombe hospital for the work they did, both in attending to numerous cases and also for giving shelter to many poor women and children for safety”.

Medical knowledge has changed considerably since the Coombe’s founding, when physicians believed health depended on balancing the four bodily humours (fluids): blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Treatments could be harsh and painful. Mercury was used for purging and infections, opium eased pain, while Peruvian bark (quinine) reduced fevers. Surgery depended on anatomical knowledge and speed, with amputation often carried out to prevent infection and gangrene.

Similarly, dietary practices now considered outdated persisted until relatively recently. Many Irish people will remember the practice of mothers drinking stout to boost their iron levels after childbirth. Stout was marketed as a fortifying drink that restored strength. Some doctors and midwives recommended stout to pregnant women, believing it could help to prevent anaemia. Guinness even provided the Coombe with its own supply of the black stuff. In reality, stout contains only trace amounts of iron.

Some of the most remarkable evidence of progress at the Coombe comes from its smallest patients.

In August 2024, Stephany and Matheus Gomez, a Brazilian couple living in Kildare, arrived at the Coombe after Stephany went into early labour. The couple had previously lost a son, Dom, at 21 weeks. Their son Ollie was born at 22 weeks and four days’ gestation, weighing just 420g – he was small enough to fit in his father’s hand – and given a 5 per cent chance of survival.

After months of intensive medical care, including multiple blood transfusions, Ollie survived, becoming the most premature baby to have survived in the hospital’s history. In August 2026, he celebrated his second birthday.

Ollie’s story represents medicine at its most extraordinary. Yet the history of maternal healthcare is not simply a story of progress. It is also a story of women being misunderstood, controlled and overlooked.

For much of Ireland’s recent history, sex and reproductive health were surrounded by silence. Between 1935 and 1979, contraception was illegal; books and pamphlets on family planning were banned as indecent, while sexual education was often shaped by religious teaching. Accessing effective contraception remained difficult, particularly when doctors or pharmacists were unwilling to provide it. Against this backdrop, the Coombe operated a dedicated family planning unit in the early 1970s. Despite such developments, women continued to have large families.

In a souvenir programme marking the Coombe’s 150th anniversary in 1976, former master Prof JK Feeney noted that from its foundation until the mid-1960s, one in 10 women admitted to the Coombe were classified as having “great grand multiparity”, meaning they had given birth to eight or more children.

The history of the Coombe shows progress as a movement, built over time by people committed to advancing women’s health. In the 1970s, medics John Drumm, Dermot FitzGerald and Bernard Stuart pioneered Doppler ultrasound technology, becoming the first to use it to monitor blood flow in the umbilical artery. This medical breakthrough transformed maternity care worldwide, helping clinicians identify at-risk pregnancies and prevent countless stillbirths.

[ Irish women’s birth stories: ‘Women are so vulnerable when they’re pregnant’Opens in new window ]

Over the past two centuries, the maternal survival rate has improved dramatically. Between 1928–1935, the maternal mortality rate was one in 181 cases; in 2020–2023 it was one in 31,063. Advances in medical care have also transformed the prospects for newborns such as Ollie, whose chances of survival would once have been unimaginable.

The hospital’s board decided to relocate from the Coombe to Cork Street in 1935. It took almost 20 years to acquire the new site and more than another decade to complete the building. When it finally opened in 1967, the “New” Coombe hospital was the largest maternity unit in Ireland and Britain, boasting 156 maternity beds, 58 gynaecology beds and 51 cots, reflecting Dublin’s growing reliance on hospital-based delivery care.

When the “New” Coombe opened, a Dublin Health Authority porter called William Farrell stayed behind in the old hospital to guard the vacant premises. “When I walk through those old corridors,” he said, “I often think about the people who’ve walked there in all sorts of mental states before, and when I look in the old delivery theatres, I often think of the people who came into the world there – and how many are famous today.”

Luminaries born in the Coombe include the Chieftains’ Seán Potts, The Dubliners’ Barney McKenna, singer-songwriter Imelda May, rugby legend Seán O’Brien and even Mayo’s most delicious musician and comedian, Garron Noone. The hospital featured in iconic rural Irish TV drama Glenroe, when Miley Byrne and his pregnant wife, Biddy, appeared in one of its wards. In 1998, broadcaster Marty Whelan opened Café Coombe, recording in the visitors’ book that he had “two Coombe babies” … and was open to having a third.

[ Construction of new National Maternity Hospital expected to begin next yearOpens in new window ]

The story of the Coombe is incomplete without its staff. Take housekeeper Mary McLaughlin. In 1921, at just 12 years old, she began working at the hospital. She would spend the next 64 years working there, never missing a single day of work. When Mary Mac – as she was fondly known by colleagues – retired, a journalist quipped: “That’s a long time to spend in hospital without being sick.”

Former Coombe matron Rita Kelly recalled that Mary described herself simply as the “matron’s maid”, but that scarcely reflected her loyalty and commitment. After board meetings, the ever-thoughtful Mary Mac would quietly rescue the leftover sandwiches for hungry colleagues, especially those working night shifts.

In addition to serving as a vital resource for the community, the Coombe is also a part of Dublin’s folklore. A colleague recently told me a story about his commute to the Little Museum. As he passed by the Coombe on a 77A bus, he overheard two men sitting in front of him.

“Did your sister have her baby yet?” one asked.

“No, not yet,” replied his friend. “But the doctors told her that if she doesn’t have it today, they’ll have to seduce her in the morning.”

‘Born in Dublin: 200 Years of The Coombe Hospital’ is now open. More information at littlemuseum.ie

Dr Daryl Hendley Rooney is Curator of the Little Museum of Dublin