Dublin’s Cow Pock Institution

And, now after all, let me mention a great discovery that has lately been made for the benefit and good of mankind in general, I mean the Vaccine Inoculation or Cow Pock, which is uniformly mild, inoffensive, free from pain or danger, either in old or young, and an infallible preventative of the small pox, it is never fatal nor yet contagious. The Small Pox has for 12 centuries, been destroying in every year, an immense proportion of the world. [Dublin Time-Piece, 1804]

Outbreaks of small pox in a district could result in fatalities of 20% of the population. It was known that dairymaids were immune due to their exposure to Cow Pox, a much milder disease. After Edward Jenner conducted an experiment where he exposed an eight year old boy to the cow pox pustules on the dairy maid Sarah Nelmes’ hand, and then deliberately exposed him to small pox, he published the results that the boy did not contract small pox, and thus cow pox was an effective vaccination. From the time of its publication in 1798, Jenner’s work became hugely influential in establishing national vaccination programmes. (The word vaccination comes from the Latin for cow, vacca.)

In Dublin, vaccination was available to children of the city in the Dispensary for the Infant Poor soon after Jenner’s publication. Following some extensive vaccination work in Cork, demand in Dublin quickly surged, and in January 1804 the Dublin Cow Pock Institution was opened on North Cope St (now Talbot St) to focus solely on vaccination for small pox. Children of the poor could attend on Tuesdays and Fridays from 11 – 3 pm.  Some archives for the Cow Pock Institution are held by the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, including a subscription book dating from 16^th March 1804. The process of securing “cow pock matter” for the purposes of vaccination needed funding, and as well as vaccinating children in the city, packets of fresh lymph were circulated to local dispensaries around the country as part of a nationwide vaccination effort. While vaccination was free for the poor, it otherwise incurred a charge, something which later became contentious. Medical practitioners and other dispensaries could apply to be supplied with packets of infection for half a guinea per annum, and Union Workhouses for a guinea per annum. All post relating to the Cow Pock Institution was free thanks to an agreement with the General Post Office; a letter exists in the National Archives from Dr Hugh Ferguson, apothecary at the Cow-Pock Institution to the government acknowledging the support that is “essential to the existence of their Institution“. The Cow Pock Institution relocated to beside the GPO in the 1860s.

(North) Cope St is hard to pin down. Its southside namesake in Temple Bar still exists, which can confuse searches. (North) Cope St is not on Rocque’s 1756 map of the city, nor Bernard Scalé’s update in 1773, but does appear on the 1798 plan of the city, now running along the north of Marlborough Bowling Green, extending from Earl St. By the time the Ordnance Survey men were mapping the city, a Dispensary is marked in the location, but by this stage it is now Talbot St, named after 2^nd Earl Talbot, who was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1817 – 1821. Thus (North) Cope St must be one of the contenders for street names with the shortest lifespan!

Cope St: Top left – Rocque (1756) shows Marlborough Green but no street; top right (1798) shows Cope St running on the north edge of Marlborough Green; bottom OS map (~1840) shows Dispensary marked but now Talbot St; Marlborough Green now gone

Reports of the progress of the Institution were published each year, and in its first year 1000 vaccinations were carried out, rising to 4000 by the end of the decade, along with 3500 packets distributed nationally. Vaccination capacity increased after 1815, when rural dispensaries/hospitals offered vaccination to poor people locally.  While the upper and middle classes generally engaged with the vaccination programme – infections among those classes became very low – it was more difficult to engage the working class and the poor. There was an uneasiness about being exposed to vaccination and a lot of misinformation about the dangers of vaccination, captured in a famous satirical cartoon of the time. Repeated publications and statistics were used to reassure the public about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine, and steadily more people became vaccinated. While there were continued outbreaks – 1500 people died from smallpox in an outbreak Dublin in 1878– their number and extent was much less thanks to ongoing vaccination.

Concern over the safety of vaccination was captured in this satirical cartoon by James Gilray, showing people morphing into cows

The Dublin Cow Pock Institution closed in 1877 when its duties were continued by hospitals. Ireland reported its last case of smallpox in 1907, and the World Health Organisation declared the complete eradication of the disease in 1980.

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Notes

• Elizabeth Malcolm and Greta Jones (1999) Medicine, Disease and the State in Ireland 1650-1940, Cork University Press.
• Samuel B Labatt (1809), “The Cow Pock Institution”, The Belfast Monthly Magazine, 2(8), 183-185.
• Archives area available at the RCPI, NAI, NLI, and the Wellcome Library.

Rocque’s Plan of the City 1756 and 1757 now online

From “Survey of the city and suburbs of Dublin” (1757)

After arriving in Dublin about 1754, John Rocque began his famous surveys of the city. In total, Rocque published six maps of the city; all the more impressive given the short time he spent here. The first was his “Exact Survey of the City and Suburbs of Dublin“. This was published in 1756, and  provides glorious detail of every corner of the city and its suburbs. You can have your very own reduced size copy from the Royal Irish Academy,* or view it online at the Bibliothèque nationale de France at this link. This was later updated by Bernard Scalé, and you can see how useful the comparison is in my previous article on Hume St and Ely Place. This was followed in quick succession by a Survey of the City and Suburbs of Dublin, now also online, and a Survey of the City, Harbour, Bay and Environs of Dublin, online here. Rocque wrote in an accompanying guide to the latter:

But we see in this Map, that Dublin is one of the finest and largest Cities of Europe, as well on Account of its Quays, which reach with Order and Regularity from one End of the Town to the other, as on Account of a great many grand Buildings in different parts on either Side; for instance Kildare house, the Barracks, Hospitals, Parliament-house, the College, and the Castle, which is the residence of the Lord Lieutenent, &c. and also on account of several spacious and magnificent Streets, the Gardens, Walks, &c

In this guide, Rocque also offers his opinion of the locals. They are “frank, polite, affable, make it their pleasure to live much with each other and their Honour to treat Strangers with Politeness and Civility“.

In 1760, he published An Actual Survey of the County of Dublin, which is magnificent—it reaches as far south as Lord Powerscourt’s recently revitalised estate outside Enniskerry in County Wicklow (Rocque knew who paid the bills). That one is visible in the Map Library of TCD. Other maps included an undated precursor to his 1756 map and a 1762 map of the baronies of Dublin, probably published by his wife after his death.

Click and enjoy these beautiful maps!

Notes

• *Lennon and Montagues’ book on Rocque’s plan of the city is a must read for cartophiles: Colm Lennon and John Montague, 2010, John Rocque’s Dublin: A Guide to the Georgian City, Royal Irish Academy, Dublin.
• F O’K (1974) John Rocque on Dublin and Dubliners 1756, Dublin Historical Record, 27(4), 146-147.
• B. P. Bowen (1948) John Rocque’s Maps of Dublin, Dublin Historical Record, 9(4), 117-127.

 

Hume Row and Smith’s Buildings now Ely Place

Stephen’s Green East on Rocque’s map, shows an unoccupied plot that would later become Hume St (from cover of Lennon and Montague) 

Ely Place seems to have formed almost by accident in 1768. Rocque’s 1756 plan of the city shows that the east side of St Stephen’s Green had some vacant plots, including one plot that aligns with what is now Hume St. Perhaps spotting an opportunity to increase the earning potential of the land area, Gustavus Hume (the man who brought Richard Cassels to Ireland) constructed Hume St. With Ely House the first house to be built in 1771 at the end of Hume St, the connection from Merrion St turning the corner to Hume St—thus forming Ely Place—was a natural result of the new arrangement. The name Ely comes from the marriage of Gustavus’ daughter to the Earl of Ely. Maurice Craig notes—with some satisfaction I feel—that not only were these city streets adjacent, but the ancestral homes Ely Lodge and Castle Hume are also side by side in Enniskillen (Craig, 1952).

Updated version of Rocque’s map by Scalé, 1773

Hume’s work was captured on Scalé’s update of Rocque’s map in 1773, although Ely Place was called Hume Row, until Ely House was built (Irish Builder, 1893). By the time Dublin was mapped again in 1789, it is recorded as Ely Place. Since then, Ely Place has enjoyed a significant status. Even as the shift away from Dublin hit St Stephen’s Green in the 1820s and 1830s, Ely was quoted as being “more select” (McCabe, 2011).

Ely House, by Flora H Mitchell (links to National Library of Ireland catalogue)

Ely House, now Nos. 7 – 8 is the largest house on the street. It was the first to be built, and is clear to see on Scalé’s map, facing Hume St. No. 7 was home to the physicist and Trinity Fellow George Francis Fitzgerald, and there is a plaque in his honour, the first of three plaques at this junction.

Much more interesting for me though is next door, No. 6, which was bought from the Earl of Clare by the 4th Viscount Powerscourt, prior to selling up his very grand townhouse on South William St. Poor Lord Clare, the Lord Chancellor, was attacked by a mob in College Green during riots of 1795, according to a story retold by his sister in 1807:

My late brother the Earl of Clare was always an active, faithful servant to his king and country and ever supported the Protestant interest both in Ireland and England… on the day Lord Fitzwilliam was re-called [prompting the riots], when my brother, was returning from the Castle, after having assisted in swearing in the newly-arrived Lord Lieutenant, a ferocious mob of no less than 5,000 men and several hundred women, assembled together in College green, and all along the avenues to my brother’s house. The male part of the insurgents were armed with … every other weapon necessary to break open my brother’s house: and the women were all of them armed with aprons full of paving stones. They wounded my brother, in the temples in College green; and if he hand not sheltered himself by holding his great square Official Purse before him, he would have been stoned to death. [Irish Builder, 1893]

No. 6, Ely Place. Lord Powerscourt had to retrieve his paintings while his step-grandmother was away. (from McCullough, 1989)

The Earl escaped further injury by dressing up as a kitchen maid once he arrived at the back door of his house. Having escaped this drama, he died in 1802 and the house was sold to 4th Viscount Powerscourt. This Lord Powerscourt, one of only five Irish Lords to oppose the Act of Union (that is my tenuous link to the previous post about Pitt St) died in 1809 and the house became the dower-house of his second wife, Isabella, the Dowager Viscountess Powerscourt. A formidable woman, she lived there until 1848, out-living not only her step-son but her step-grandson, who was just eight when his father died. When he came of age, one of his duties was to retrieve paintings and furniture from the house at 6 Ely Place taken from the house at Enniskerry by Isabella. In his memoirs, Mervyn, 7th Viscount describes the operation (Wingfield, 1903):

All the family pictures now at Powerscourt… had been removed by Dowager Lady Powerscourt sometime in my father’s minority and before his marriage. He was determined to recover the pictures, and on occasion when Isabella, Lady Powerscourt, was absent he went to the house with a van and carried off all the pictures and brought them back to Powerscourt.

Doorway of Hume House,birthplace of Richard Griffith taken in 2012.

Powerscourt did however install a new staircase in the 1830s. Soon after the Dowager’s death in 1848, No. 6, along with its pair No. 5 (Glentworth House) had a very different use—they were given over in 1859 to the Offices of the General Valuation and Boundary Survey of Ireland under Sir Richard Griffith, becoming the nerve centre of his enormous land valuation survey. Griffith’s birthplace was just opposite, at the junction of Ely and Hume. Marked with an old plaque, it is now neglected—a sad testimony to the man involved in every major undertaking in 19th century Irish administration: Bog Surveys, Ordnance Survey, Griffith Valuation, Census. For good measure, he is also father of Irish geology, having been Professor of Geology and Mining at the Royal Dublin Society. The Valuation Office moved out in 1998 to the Irish Life Mall.

Quoin at No. 1 Smith’s Buildings, Ely Place

The extension of Ely Place towards the Royal Hibernian Academy was originally called Smith’s Buildings, with Thomas Dodd Smith, builder living at No. 1. Not sounding grand enough, its residents opted instead for the name Ely Place Upper. A stone quoin with the engraving “Smith’s Buildings” is visible at No. 1, of the 5-block terrace at the end of Ely Place Upper.

The third plaque is dedicated to George Moore, who lived at No. 4 Ely Place Upper, and apparently made use of the garden at No 15, opposite, now the site of the Royal Hibernian Academy (Moore, 1966). The Tinker, by Douglas Hyde, first President of Ireland, was played in the garden in 1906, as Gaelige (Daly, 1945). It seems everywhere you look on this street, there is something to commemorate with a plaque!

Three plaques in this area, George Francis Fitzgerald, Sir Richard Griffith, and George Moore

Further reading and notes:

Pettigrew & Oulton’s Dublin Directory 1842
Dublin Street Directory for Ely Place. The Dowager is at No. 6.

• If plasterwork is your thing, Christine Casey (2005) has a lot to say about that, along with Ros Kavanagh, both of which feature a picture the staircase at Ely House. (Christine Casey,2005, The Buildings of Dublin, Yale University Press, Ros Kavanagh, 2007, Irish Arts Review, 24(3), 80 – 83).
• Niall McCullough’s gorgeous book also has a lot about the architecture of Ely Place, including a picture of the kitchens at Ely House, architectural plans for No. 5 and No 6, and pictured here, the impressive entrance hall and staircase at No. 6. (Niall McCullough, 1989, Dublin: an urban history, Anne Street Press).
• Old Dublin Mansion Houses, The Irish Builder, 1893, XXXV, May 1, 100 – 102.
• Maurice Craig, 1952, (2006 repr), Dublin 1660 – 1860: The shaping of a city, Liberties Press.
• M. H. Daly, 1945, La Touche Bridge to Hoggen Green, Dublin Historical Record, 7(4), 121 – 133.
• Colm Lennon and John Montague, 2010, John Rocque’s Dublin: A Guide to the Georgian City, Royal Irish Academy, Dublin.
• Desmond McCabe, 2011, St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, 1660–1875, Government Publications, Dublin.
• Desmond F Moore, 1966, The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin Historical Record, 21(1), 28 – 37.
• Mervyn Wingfield, 1903, A Description and History of Powerscourt.

Edited 29 March to insert photograph of quoin at Smith’s Buildings and amend text that said I couldn’t find it… 🙂