The Royal College of Physicians of Ireland can now celebrate its 350-year history in style thanks to a high-tech refurbishment. Elaine Edwards reports
An historic medical building that many Dublin residents pass almost daily and yet may never have visited will reopen later this week after a massive restoration programme.
The Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI) building on Kildare Street - rebranded simply Number Six by the college - has been transformed from a largely 18th and 19th century construction, increasingly impractical for the needs of the college and its members, into a 21st century facility for medical education, seminars, conferences and major college events.
Number Six, almost next door to Leinster House, is also a mine of medical history.
It is home to Dun's Library, one of the most extensive libraries of historical medical books in Europe. The collection includes more than 30,000 books and journals, including items dating from the early 16th century.
It is a treasure trove for anyone with even a passing interest in medicine or rare books. Dusty titles such as Diseases of Women beg to be lifted carefully from the shelves and explored further.
There are early editions of works by some of the founding fathers of modern medicine, including Hippocrates, Paracelsus, Galen and Avicenna.
Dun's library also boasts a copy of Theobald Anguilbert's Mensa Philosophica published in Lyon in the first half of the 16th century, described by the college librarian, Robert Mills, as probably the first medical work by an Irishman to be printed.
New glass display cabinets downstairs will allow the college to display properly for the first time its extensive silver collection and its trove of old medical instruments.
Rather oddly, the college collection boasts a toothbrush that once belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte. Jonathan Bailey, secretary of the RCPI, explains that it was donated by a doctor, Barry O'Meara, who was of Irish descent and who was one of the emperor's physicians for a time during his second period of exile, on St Helena.
A history of the college between 1963 and 1988 by Dr David Mitchell, a former president and treasurer of the RCPI, contains nuggets of information such as the fact that Dr Douglas Mellon of the RCPI coined the phrase "Smokers Die Younger" as a warning for cigarette packets in 1978. But it languished in a drawer at the Department of Health before it finally appeared 10 years later.
The Corrigan Hall used for formal receptions and the many conferring ceremonies hosted by the college and its affiliated professional bodies every year, is equipped with the latest hi-tech meeting room toy - glass doors that turn opaque at the flick of a switch.
Lecture rooms are all equipped with audio visual technology and presentations or ceremonies taking place in the Corrigan Hall, for example, can be fed directly downstairs to a lecture room. The building has been made accessible for people with disabilities.
Fitters were hand-sewing specially commissioned carpets last week, lit from above as they worked by wonderful, contemporary chandeliers also specially designed for the building. A new, extended kitchen will cater for several hundred people during conferences and major events.
"Nearly all the medical meetings are a day or even two or three days now, so you have to cater for them," says Bailey.
A large collection of valuable 18th and 19th century paintings had been stored in a temperature-controlled facility in Kill, Co Kildare during the three-year refurbishment. Last week, luminaries such as John Stearne, the college's first president after King Charles II's 1667 charter established the College of Physicians, had been carefully re-hung on freshly painted walls.
Architect Bryan Roe of Scott Tallon Walker says the project's main challenge was "changing it from an 1860s building but at the same time keeping it as an 1860s building with 2005 technology in it".
"To me, that's the success of the scheme. It's a building that has been restyled and renewed, but it's still the building they built for themselves to do what they need it to do. And it still has the ability to take them into the next century," says Roe.
Jonathan Bailey says the restored building now gives the college the capacity it needed.
"We have put an awful lot of work into ensuring we don't disturb anything and that we only enhance what the college already had."
The Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, in association with the Section of History of Medicine of Ireland, will hold a special meeting to celebrate the reopening of the college and the 350th anniversary of its foundation next month. The programme is entitled Irish Medicine Through 350 Years.