Mná na Éireann

“Tuberculosis”

“My mother died when I was eight. I made my First Holy Communion that year. I wore a black dress. I thought I was lovely. There were ten in the family. Six of them died young as well as my mother − all from T.B. It was like a plague. The finest, the best, and the youngest died with it and the old people survived. There was no cure for T.B. long ago. People were terrified of it. It was a death sentence. They called it ‘consumption’ and you always said, ‘God Bless the mark’ after the word. The old people were afraid of a summer cold. It was said that, if it got in on the chest, it caused T.B. They believed, too, that a sign of TB was a high complexion or red rosy cheeks. T.B. in the family was one of the things that mediated against a person in the making of a match. Dr. Noel Browne, God bless him, was responsible for ridding Ireland of T.B. When the cure came in, mobile X-ray units went around making sure that the disease was caught and school children were inoculated against it.”

[ Here is an extract from the Waterford News & Star of 20th December 2002 on the hospital at Ardkeen.

Reference to the appalling conditions endured by people in the 1940s and 1950s, when housing, transport and medicine were generally poor, was made by outgoing Health Board Chairman Dr. Jack Gallagher, who said that the hospital building programme was totally reliant on funding from the Irish Hospital Sweepstake. Prior to and during the Second World War most counties, including Waterford, depended on nineteenth century County Home buildings which were converted to county hospitals – places where people often went to die rather than be cured of various diseases such as tuberculosis, which was rampant at the time. In the city, St. Patrick’s on John’s Hill was developed for general hospital purposes with the County and City Infirmary further down the hill and fronting onto Ballytruckle Road.

“He [ Dr. James Deeny ] knew that the nation was suffering from T.B. on a grand scale”. He was the man responsible for identifying Ardkeen House and its fifty acres of land on the Dunmore Road as the ideal location for the Chest Hospital at Ardkeen. The property, which was owned by the De Bromhead family, was on the market with an asking price of £12,500 but was eventually sold for just over £10,000.

With the support of the then Minister for Health, the late Dr. Noel Browne, who was born in Waterford, the capital cost for the hospital was obtained – largely from the Irish Hospital Sweepstake fund. The original hospital, known as the Chest Hospital Wing of Sub-Regional Sanatorium at Ardkeen, comprised six separate units where a total staff complement of 130 cared for 240 patients. – Comms Team.]