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Poverty and disease loomed large in Ireland during the war years. Many soldiers returned from the front with venereal diseases.

Dr Kathleen Lynn had become an active member of the republican movement in Dublin in the period before the Easter Rising. She was appalled at the levels of infant mortality, so she and a group of like-minded women – many of them doctors – set up St Ultan’s Hospital for infants.

It opened its doors on the south side of Dublin on the 29th of May 1919 and became a hospital unlike any other in Ireland at the time. Harriet Wheelock from the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, who has catalogued Dr Lynn’s diaries, and historian Dr Marie Coleman from Queen’s University take up the story.

Location: 37 Charlemont Street, Dublin: 53°19'52.0"N 6°15'41.0"W
Image: Dr Kathleen Lynn
Image reproduced by kind permission of the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland. Ref code SU/8/3/1