User:DubhEire/Our Lady's Hospice



Our Lady's Hospice is a Hospice with its main centre in Harold's Cross, Dublin and a specialist palliative care unit in Blackrock, County Dublin in Ireland. The Hospice was founded and run by the Religious Sisters of Charity, a Congregation themselves founded by Mary Aikenhead. They provide specialist care for people with a range of needs from rehabilitation to end of life care.

Our Lady's Hospice is a member of the Irish Hospice Foundation.

Mary Aikenhead
Mary Aikenhead (1787 – 1858) was born in Cork and was a member of the Anglican Communion until the age of 15 when she converted to Roman Catholicism. During her life she founded 13 houses around Ireland, all working for the poor, the ignorant, the imprisoned, the sick, the dying and the deprived. She established St. Vincent's Hospital, in St. Stephen's Green in Dublin in 1834, the first hospital in Ireland to be staffed and run by women. The hospital was the precursor of St. Vincent's University Hospital in Elm Park, County Dublin.

Religious Sisters of Charity
In 1815, Mary Aikenhead founded the Congregation of the Religious Sisters of Charity in Dublin in response to the grinding poverty pervading the city. The Congregation's response to the needs of the people was inspired by their motto Caritas Christi Urget Nos, meaning The love of Christ empowers us.

Our Lady's Mount
In 1845, Mary Aikenhead, who owing to illness had been advised to move from the city to the country, bought "Greenmount", a late 18th century house on raised ground at Harold's Cross. She bought it from a family called Webb who were members of the Society of Friends (Quakers). A price was agreed with the Sisters and the Webb family kept their word despite a higher offer being received from the Mount Jerome Cemetery Company. The Sisters renamed the house to "Our Lady's Mount" and Mary Aikenhead moved there in September 1845. Within days, 20 novices and 30 Sisters followed their Superior General to what had now become the Mother House and Novitiate of the congregation.

Infectious Diseases in Dublin
Around the time the hospice was founded, the incidence of TB in Dublin was twice that of anywhere in Ireland and even that of London and Glasgow. The incidences of typhoid and measles was triple that of London. By 1889 it was claimed that Dublin had the highest death rate of any Continent or North American city, where it was topped only by Calcutta. Dublin's high mortality rates were reasoned at the time to very sick rural people moving to Dublin in search of care, and thus contributing to Dublin's mortality rate.

Reasearch by Thomas Wrigley Grimsham in the early 1880s showed that the instance of TB in Ireland was rising compared to the rest of the UK where it was falling. He was able to show that from the 1860s to the 1880s there was a steady increase in the number of deaths of TB and it was also more prelevant in urban areas.

Establishing the Hospice
The Congregation established Our Lady's Hospice in Harold's Cross in 1879.

The role of Our Lady's Mount was changed as a result of an epidemic of smallpox in Dublin in January 1879. A number of patients with smallpox were admitted to St. Vincent's Hospital and a young novice from Our Lady's Mount contracted the infection while attending the hospital for nursing instruction. She passed it on to 16 other Sisters in Our Lady's Mount and while none died, it was considered advisable to move further from the city to Our Lady's Mount, especially as the number of Sisters was also growing.

The admission criteria of Jervis Street Hospital, which opened in 1718 and Dr. Steevens' Hospital opened in 1720, stated that there were "no bars as to religious or ailments as long as the latter were not infectious". Such a policy of refusal of admission was common in those days and was the main reason for the foundation of the Hospice. Apart from a shortage of beds there were other reasons for rejection. A fear of infection of existing patients by a new patient, the absence of any effective treatment for many diseases and the medical staff's preference to admit those they could help, which in those days were the minority.

For some years the Congregation had been thinking of opening a Hospice. Two Sisters at St. Vincent's Hospital, Mother Charles Hynes and Mother Philip Neri Russell were particularly anxious to pursue this mission and discussed it with the Mother General. Their views were recorded at the time, seeing and feeling how very hard it was to send away the poor, dismissed by the doctors as beyond hope of recovery. Some having very poor homes and others no friends willing to receive them, they bethought themselves of having a hospice or home where these poor sufferers might be received.

There were just two hospitals at that time in Dublin which took fever patients. The Hardwicke, which opened in 1803 beside the Richmond, and St. Laurence's on Cork Street which opened in 1804.

However there were other competing needs and it was not until three years following Mary Aikenhead's death that the Hospice was finally opened with nine beds. At that time, the Superior at Harold's Cross was Anna Gaynor (Mother Mary John). She was one of five daughters of a Roscommon couple who had moved to a house in Belvedere Place, then the fashionable area of Dublin. Anna helped her parents in their visits to the starving and sick in Roscommon during the Famine and the epidemics of typhoid, cholera and typhus which accompanied it.

Anna Gaynor joined the Sisters of Charity, made her profession in 1857 and succeeded to the post of Superior in Harold's Cross in 1879. The Extended Care Unit at the Hospice is named after her.

Fund Raising
The "pennies of the poor" often kept the Hospice going and they were substantial as the people of Dublin rallied to its Mary Aikenhead support. For example, at one stage the staff at Clery's Department store collected £2,000 in copper coins over a number of years.

Sr. Mary Eustace Eaton who ran the Sodality of the Children of Mary which met in the grounds of the Hospice organised them as collectors and subsequently extended this to a band of men who tramped the streets, roads and lanes of Dublin on Sunday's gathering money. In one year alone, 1890, "the Sunday collections" reached £505.

By 1880 the number of beds in the Hospice had been increased to 40. From the beginning, fundraising was the lifeline of the Hospice. By 1886, Dublin Corporation was giving the Hospice an annual grant of £250, while money from donors, fundraising and bequests came to £1,535.

The need for expansion was urgent and in 1886, the Hospice received a donation of £8,000 from Charles Hamill. On July 18, 1886 the foundation stone for a new Hospice was blessed by the Archbishop of Dublin. Then as now the affluent were frequently glad to come together to support worthy causes. There was a great gathering at the blessing of the foundation stone including such notables as the Lord Mayor of Dublin, John Redmond MP who gave an address, William O'Brien MP and the poet Katherine Tynan. A subscription list was opened and by the evening it had reached £1,000.

The new Hospice was designed by William R. Byrne and built by Richard Toole. Fronted with granite from Ballyknockan in Co. Wicklow, with limestone for the windows and front porch it looks the same today as when it was built.

There were three wards on each of the two main floors, with 110 new beds. There were five rooms for private patients and the top storey was for staff.

The Hospice was open to all creeds and classes and admissions were for disease, poverty, starvation and helplessness. It is recorded that it took in "Protestants, professors of Irish and French, doctors, solicitors, soldiers and sailors".

The first medical doctor to work in the Hospice was Dr. Dudley White who was appointed there in 1879 and he was followed by a distinguished body of physicians and visiting physicians. From the beginning there was an interest in being at the forefront of care. In 1961, the country's first geriatrician, Dr. John Fleetwood was appointed to the Hospice.

As the 1950s ended there was a change in the conditions from which patients suffered. The scourge of TB - from which so many Hospice patients had suffered -was being beaten and there was an increase in the number of patients with cancer.

By 1978 a new Rheumatology Rehabilitation Unit was provided and a new Palliative Care Unit was built in 1993. The three Centres which are at present in the Hospice - Extended Care, Rheumatology Rehabilitation and Palliative Care - were then in place.

Harolds Cross
New buildings were added including a night school for women and girls, a Sunday School and in 1851 a large day school was started.

Throughout the 20th century there were developments - a new laundry, the rose garden and the Hospice developed and upgraded its Palliative Care and Rheumatology Rehabilitation facilities.

Developments are continuing. The building of a new €13.5 million 50 bed Extended Care Unit was completed in March 2006.

A new Education and Research Centre costing €6.5 million commenced construction in April 2006 and was officially opened by Mary Harney TD in April 2008.

Milltown
A property in Milltown County Dublin was bought and named Mount St. Anne's.

Blackrock (The Venerable Louis and Zelie Martin Hospice)
In December 2003, Our Lady's Hospice opened a satellite unit for specialist palliative care in Blackrock, Co. Dublin. It was provided through the generosity of the Louis and Zelie Martin Foundation. (53.299°N, -6.1782°W)