As well as the artworks on the walls, we also hold a collection of watercolour medical illustrations dating from the 1830s to the 1870s.
In these medical illustrations, women are viewed through the eyes of the medical practitioner, as patients and exemplar of diseases, not as individuals.
Most of the women would have been patients in Dublin’s public hospitals and from a lower socio-economic class. It is likely their permission was not sought to carry out the works, but through the accident of their survival we have images of individual women and girls, whose images, and possibly names, would otherwise have been lost to history.
View all the images of female patients in our online digital collections
