ghosts

I have been thinking a lot about ghosts and words this week.

Well not ghosts per say, but imprints. The scratches and layers of births and babies and lives that the walls of this building have held.

palimpsest
a manuscript or piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing

I think of Judith Rochford, the first woman to deliver (a baby boy) at the Dublin Lying-In Hospital in March 1745. I wonder whether she was one of the many who were evicted from her home and travelled to Dublin in search of help, eating berries and drinking cow’s blood to survive along the way. Did she walk in to the city and through these doors with her belly full, ready to give birth?

I think of the midwife Mary McDonald looking out of my window in April 1916. I can see the top of O’Connell Street from here. She wrote that during the Rising ‘we could not keep away from the window in spite of the warnings. We saw several people shot, they were dragged off the street and put into our morgue’.

This is a picture of my ward – I don’t know when. The 1950’s maybe? That’s my window on the left. I look at the ladies sitting on the bed on the right and think of Claire, who spent 8 weeks in that very spot opposite me before they delivered her baby girl with a 7 hour operation. And of Julia who spent another 2 weeks there before her tiny little fighter of a girl was born. And the 5, 6, 7, 8, I’ve lost count since, who have lain opposite me before going home or giving birth.

I think of the 300,000 of us who have given birth to 300,000 babies behind these walls since 1757. Quite the army.

On my nighttime walks I look out for the cast iron grates and slats in the doors installed in the 1860’s to try and combat the viscious outbreaks of puerperal fever with which the hospital fought.

I look out the back at the carpark and imagine the Pleasure Garden, the croquet lawn, the tennis courts that used to attract the rich ladies and gents to come and play and parade and raise funds for the hospital. I see parasols and skirts that sweep the floor.

I watch as the midwife listens to my baby’s heartbeat with a wooden pinard. Midwives have been listening to heartbeats with these since the 1800’s. They tell me that it is more the vibration of the heart that they feel against their ear than the sound. I like that. As she listens, one midwife taps my belly with a kind of morse code every time the baby kicks. ‘I hear ya’ I think she is saying.

… continues to words