Dublin 1745-1922: Hospitals, Spectacle and Vice (review)

The relationship of public buildings—particularly hospitals—with the social and physical environment in which they are located and the public that they were established to serve provides the primary theme of this ambitious and suggestive book. Guided by the conviction that "traditional architectural histories" have "limited our understanding" of urban landscapes by "their narrow focus on the planned aspects of building and urban space," Gary Boyd treats what he terms "non-planned elements, encompassing those unofficial activities which almost inevitably appropriate public space" (p. 200). The result is a markedly different urban history, in which architectural form and style are subordinated to use, and meaning is conveyed in a narrative that melds "medicine, colonialism, consumerism, religion, entertainment and sex" (p. 200). This has prompted the author to extend the parameters of his inquiry far from its ostensible subject—hospitals—to include a broad range of cultural phenomena. This is necessary, he maintains, to allow "new connections to be made, personal histories to be placed in social contexts and apparently arbitrary moments of intersection or coincidence to reveal their true significance" (p. 200), and it is gratifying to note that while much of what he has to say is familiar, he has provided new perspectives on and insight into the Georgian cityscape of Dublin.

This is true especially of the consideration accorded the Lying-In Hospital founded in Dublin in 1745, which dominates three of the book's four chapters. This is well known as the first maternity hospital to be established in the British Isles, and its history has been chronicled reverentially in a sequence of narrowly focused institutional accounts. Boyd does not ignore that history: he has useful observations to make on the nature of the voluntary hospital sector and on the impact of the Palladian architectural style on layout and function, and he rehearses, to good effect, familiar data on mortality rates, which reveal that the establishment of the hospital did not bring about an incremental improvement in infant and maternal mortality. But it is his engagement with the Pleasure Gardens and Assembly Rooms attached to the hospital, which were established in order to provide the funding necessary to run the institution, that allows him the opportunity to embark on a discourse with "the unofficial activities" in what he terms "the landscapes of pleasure" (p. 46), and to demonstrate the extent to which the hospital was part of an environment that was defined increasingly by attraction. It is in this context, also, that he engages with mid-eighteenth-century social exchange, urban development, the perception of gender, and social relations.

Boyd's approach and interpretation owe much to Michel Foucault's description of the hospital as a means of ensuring that the working classes were kept in a subordinate but economically available state, but he appeals also to postcolonial theory to assist him in placing the hospital in the fast-evolving landscape of Dublin. Neither approach is entirely persuasive, requiring as they do that the author subordinate the philanthropic or self-interested motives of the principals to the lineaments of the theories to which he appeals, but they do encourage a variety of provocative readings and, in a chapter on the Dublin demimonde, an intriguing, but essentially forced, attempt to link the Lying-In Hospital's Pleasure Gardens with the sexual underworld of the capital.

This leads, in turn, to an account of the less-well-known efforts that were made in the late eighteenth century to provide hospital care for those with venereal and other "incurable" diseases— one of the most rewarding parts of the volume, for though the author's predilection for theoretical speculation is not absent, it is less interpretively commanding. This observation is still more pertinent to the account provided of prostitution in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dublin, by which point the author has...