1874–1955
One of the first female doctors in Ireland and founder of the first hospital for children
Kathleen Lynn was born near Cong, County Mayo, the daughter and grand-daughter of Church of Ireland clergymen. Kathleen’s locality was often worst hit during the recurrent famines of the nineteenth century, and she witnessed to how poverty and malnutrition caused the most disease and death in her father’s parish. Realising that the local doctor was the most useful member of the community, she formed the outrageous notion of becoming one herself. She was educated abroad, and on her return to Ireland she attended the Royal University, Dublin (as the National University of Ireland was known until the early years of the twentieth century). The university had been conferring degrees on women since 1884, but upon graduating in 1899, Kathleen became one of the first women in Ireland to gain a degree in medicine.
Her gender proved an impediment from the outset as Kathleen could not find a hospital to accept her residency; the doctors at the Adelaide Hospital in Dublin all voted for postponing her appointment ‘indefinitely’, citing a lack of ‘female accommodation’. Kathleen refused to take the hint. She got as much experience as she could working in the Rotunda Lying-In Hospital, the Coombe Lying-In Hospital and Sir Patrick Dun’s hospitals, and then set up her own general practice in her home at 9 Belgrave Road, Rathmines, south Dublin (her next-door neighbour was Hanna Sheehy Skeffington). She did her postgraduate degree in the USA and, in 1909, became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. Her style was brisk: she was a no-nonsense doctor who believed in fresh air, cold drinks and long cycle rides.
Through her struggle to establish her medical career, Kathleen became first a suffragist, then a labour rights activist and finally a nationalist. The fact that she was interested in women’s rights was in no way surprising considering the treatment she had received professionally. Although she was not an ‘extreme militant’, according to Andrée Sheehy Skeffington, daughter-in-law of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, her feminism ‘inspired her political activities’. She tended hunger-striking suffragists in 1912 at the beginning of a combative phase of their fight for the vote.
Similarly, she treated starving workers in 1913 during Dublin’s Great Lock-Out, and once she saw that the malnutrition and disease suffered by the majority of Dublin’s workers and their children were even worse than at home in Mayo, she became a staunch supporter of Jim Larkin’s and James Connolly’s Irish Trades and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU). These interests dovetailed naturally into nationalism: to Kathleen, Irish independence was a necessity if there were ever going to be equal opportunities for women and workers. A good friend of Connolly’s, she joined his Irish Citizen Army (ICA) in 1913.
By the early months of 1916, Kathleen had been made a captain and chief medical officer of the ICA. She gave first-aid lectures and workshops to ICA and Cumann na mBan members, and she also collected and transported weapons in her car. During the Easter Rising of 1916 she was initially in charge of delivering medical supplies to the various stations. She was then ordered to go to City Hall, on Dame Street, with a regiment of about twenty-five men and women who were meant to be attacking Dublin Castle. Kathleen had found several insurgents at Christ Church Place and they all had to climb over the locked iron gates to get into City Hall. Heavy casualties were expected, so Kathleen set up a casualty station inside. After Seán Connolly, the officer in charge, was shot and killed on the roof of City Hall, she and Seán’s fiancée, the labour rights activist Helena Moloney, took over as senior officers.
Kathleen, Helena and their comrades held City Hall throughout the night under a heavy bombardment, until eventually the British managed to break through a wall with grenades and machine guns and overpower them. As the senior officer present, Kathleen surrendered at bayonet-point and handed over the revolver she kept in her medical bag. She and the survivors were marched to Ship Street Barracks, and then she and Helena went on to Dublin Castle. From there she was sent on to Kilmainham, where she was jailed along with Countess Constance Markievicz.
Released in 1917 under the General Amnesty, the government continued to regard Kathleen as a subversive and she was ‘on the run’ for some of 1918 because she was on Sinn Féin’s executive. Government forces raided her clinic and house continually. At the height of the worldwide ’flu epidemic of 1918 she was arrested and detained. A public outcry orchestrated by the lord mayor of Dublin ensured her release, so that she could go about her medical business. But she was watched.
As a result of the epidemic and soldiers returning from the war in Europe, Dublin’s hospitals were severely overcrowded. Kathleen and her friend and ICA comrade, Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, developed a plan to open a new hospital. Originally intended for adults, Kathleen and Madeleine changed the idea to a children’s hospital because of the horrifically high infant mortality rate in Dublin’s slums; about 165 per 1,000 children died of preventable diseases. They borrowed money, bought 37 Charlemont Street and officially opened with just two cots in May 1919. The hospital was named St Ultan’s (or Teach Ultan – the house of Ultan) after an early bishop of Meath who was also a famous healer.
St Ultan’s grew and prospered under the women’s guidance and it had sixty cots by 1937. One of its aims was to provide classes for mothers to combat the ignorance that was the cause of so many infant deaths. In 1934 they incorporated a Montessori school for the little patients. St Ultan’s employed an all-female staff, partly to provide employment opportunities for women graduates. One staff member there was Dr Dorothy Stopford Price, a pioneer of the BCG vaccine, which eventually wiped out the common and deadly infectious disease, tuberculosis (TB).
Kathleen was on the board of the Irish White Cross (founded in 1920 for the relief of those affected by the War of Independence), which changed into the Children’s Relief Association in 1922; she stayed on the board until it was disbanded in 1936.
In 1923 Kathleen was elected to the Dáil as TD for north Dublin. As an opposer of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, she refused to take her seat in Leinster House in support of Eamon de Valera and the republicans. Then, in the late 1920s, when de Valera’s Fianna Fáil failed to embrace the social reform Kathleen had been looking for, she dropped politics altogether. Instead, she devoted the next thirty years of her life to the running of St Ultan’s, which, at the end of her life, Kathleen was to regard as her greatest achievement. She gave up holding clinics just six months before her death in 1955, at the age of eighty-one.
At Dr Kathleen Lynn’s funeral, three volleys were fired over her grave as a military honour in recognition of the part she played in the Easter Rising.