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History
Mary Aikenhead foundress of the Religious Sisters of Charity founded St Vincent’s Hospital on St Stephen’s Green in 1834 to care for the sick poor in the city of Dublin.
Born in Cork in 1787 of an upper class Protestant father and Catholic mother, Mary Aikenhead was deeply affected by her father’s work as a doctor among the poor and by his death-bed conversion to Catholicism.
In 1802, she became a Catholic and, in 1808 went to stay with her friend Anna O’Brien in Dublin. Here she witnessed widespread unemployment and poverty. It was in Mrs O’Brien’s home that Mary first met with Father Daniel Murray, later to become Archbishop of Dublin. He was eager to establish a new foundation of women who would respond to the needs of the poor in the city. He saw in Mary Aikenhead one who would make an excellent leader of a congregation and would care for these suffering people now living in dreadful conditions.
In 1815 after she had spent some years in formation in the Bar Convent in York, England, Mary Aikenhead returned to Dublin and set up the Congregation of the Religious Sisters of Charity to care for the sick poor in their own homes.
During the trying times of the Cholera epidemic she was determined to establish a hospital where the suffering poor would receive all the aid that medical skills could provide and be attended, nursed and cared for by the sisters of the Congregation. She was not satisfied with visiting and treating the sick in their miserable and disease-ridden homes. The medical care, comfort and shelter that they required was lacking.
The first assistance towards the establishment of a hospital was in the form of a sum of £3000, the dowry of one of her sisters given for the purchase of a suitable house. On the 23rd January in 1834 the sisters took possession of 56 east St Stephen’s Green. The building was the town house of the Earl of Meath. The house was in excellent repair but much construction work had to be done before the building could function as a hospital.
This was an oasis in the midst of great suffering and squalor.
St Vincent’s was the first Catholic hospital in Ireland and the first to be administered and staffed by women.
The hospital was transferred to its present site in Elm Park in 1970.