On Inns Quay, close to where the Four Courts now dominates the riverbank, a purpose-built infirmary once stood, serving the sick poor of a rapidly expanding Georgian city. The building is long gone, but its outline survives in an unlikely place: John Rocque's detailed plan of Dublin, surveyed and published in 1756, which plots the city's streets and institutions with a cartographic precision that still rewards close study.

The story begins further from the river. In 1718, according to historian De Courcy, six Dublin doctors came together to establish a charitable infirmary in Cook Street, in the old medieval core of the city, with the stated aim of healing and curing, in their own words, "poor and distressed objects of this city." The phrase has a particular eighteenth-century quality to it, formal and unsentimental, but the ambition was genuine. Within a decade the institution had outgrown its original premises, and in 1728 the doctors moved into a new house on Inns Quay, one apparently designed specifically for their purposes, which made it relatively unusual for the period. The infirmary remained there for nearly seventy years before relocating once more, in 1796, to Jervis Street, a site that would go on to have a long and significant place in Dublin's medical history.

There is nothing to see on the ground today at the Inns Quay site; the physical fabric of the infirmary has been entirely absorbed into the later development of the quays. The interest lies instead in tracing it through documentary sources, particularly Rocque's 1756 map, which is widely available in reproduced and digitised form and repays careful comparison with a modern street plan of the same area. For anyone interested in the layers of the city that have been built over and forgotten, this kind of map-reading exercise, matching an eighteenth-century survey against the present-day quayside, can be a rewarding way to recover a sense of how different Dublin once looked and what purposes its buildings once served.