Mater hospital
Mater hospital
In Brief
"The Mater," referred to several times in the novel, is the Mater Misericordiae ("Mother of Mercy"), a large hospital run by the Catholic Sisters of Mercy. It lies on the west end of Eccles Street, not far away from Bloom's house near the east end of the street. Since the hospital contained a hospice ward in 1904, characters in the novel associate it with death and dying.
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When Mulligan, a medical student, says in Telemachus that he sees people "pop off every day in the Mater and Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissectingroom," he is referring to two different hospitals: the Richmond Lunatic Asylum (now known as St. Brendan's Hospital) which he has already snidely characterized as “Dottyville," and the Mater Misericordiae, a large and distinguished teaching hospital.
In Hades Bloom passes by the hospital when the
funeral procession travels up Berkeley Street (the western end
of Eccles terminates at Berkeley). He thinks of the day
several weeks earlier (May 23) when a bee stung him in his
garden and a young doctor named Dixon treated his wound: "The Mater
Misericordiae. Eccles street. My house down there.
Big place. Ward for incurables there. Very encouraging. Our
Lady's Hospice for the dying. Deadhouse handy underneath. Where
old Mrs Riordan died. . . .
Nice young student that was dressed that bite the bee gave me.
He's gone over to the lying-in
hospital they told me. From one extreme to the other."
He thinks the same thoughts in Lestrygonians: "Still
I got to know that young Dixon who dressed that sting for me
in the Mater and now he's in Holles street where Mrs Purefoy."
When Bloom arrives at the maternity hospital in Oxen of the Sun and sees the common-hall where medical students and their friends are drinking, one of them is known to him: "a young learningknight yclept Dixon" whom he has met "in the house of misericord." Several pages later the intern is called "Master Dixon of Mary in Eccles," the narrative now using the proper name of the Mother of Mercy and her street address. Later still in that chapter Lynch says that "The bedside manner it is that they use in the Mater hospice"—presumably because bedside manner is about all that can be done for the incurables. When Bloom thinks, in Ithaca, of friends who have passed on, he remembers one who died there: "Michael Hart (phthisis, Mater Misericordiae hospital)."
