Sony RX0

ALSO VIEWS FROM RICHMOND HILL

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In May 2023 I visited this area … this was the first of the two visits and I used a Sony RX0 camera. After photographing the area I had a chat with a number of locals and they had never heard of the Fever Hospital Steps.

The Cork Fever Hospital and House of Recovery was founded in the year 1802 by Dr. Milner Barry from Bandon, Co. Cork. Fever was endemic in Ireland at the time. The buildings were situated in an ‘airy part’ of the city at the top of Richmond Hill; the steps leading to the hospital from the Murphy’s Brewery area were known as the Fever Hospital steps. The cost of erecting the buildings and the running expenses of the hospital were met mainly by charitable donations, and the administration of the hospital were by a voluntary management committee.

Barry was the eldest son of James Barry of Kilgobbin near Bandon, County Cork. In 1792 he graduated with an MD from the University of Edinburgh, and practised medicine at Cork until his death. He introduced vaccination into Cork in 1800, and thus was the first to make it known to any Irish city.

In 1802 he founded the Cork Fever Hospital and House of Recovery and was its first physician. He held the lectureship on agriculture in the Royal Cork Institution for many years, and resigned the post in 1815.

He married Mary, eldest daughter of William Phair of Brooklodge near Cork in 1808, and died in 1822.

In 1824 a monument with a long laudatory inscription was erected to his memory in the grounds of the Fever Hospital by his fellow-townsmen.

Dr. Barry contributed many papers on vaccination, fever, and similar subjects to the London Medical and Physical Journal, 1800–1 (vols. iii., iv., and vi.); to Dr. Harty’s History of the Contagious Fever Epidemics in Ireland in 1817, 1818, and 1819, Dublin, 1820; to Barker and Cheyne’s Fever in Ireland, Dublin, 1821; and to the Transactions of the Irish College of Physicians, vol. ii. He also published several pamphlets, and wrote many annual reports of the Cork Fever Hospital. In his essays he forcibly described the physical dangers of drunkenness, and the necessity of coercing habitual drunkards by law. He also strongly advocated the development of female education.

Barry’s second son, John O’Brien Milner Barry, (1815–1881), was also a physician. He studied medicine at Paris from 1883 to 1836, and graduated with an MD from the University of Edinburgh in 1837. He practised for some years at Laugharne, at Totnes, and finally, from 1852 till his death in 1881, at Tunbridge. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians shortly before his death in 1822.

In 1936 a Bill was passed through the Dáil where it was decided that a modern fever hospital should be provided, and that the existing institutions should be closed. A new site at Gurranabraher of 18 acres was purchased for £3,314. The old hospital site was sold off in 1962 and the Shandon Court housing estate now stands in its place.