Ireland’s first sanitorium

The St Ann’s Hill Hydro, 1843–1953

Sinéad McSweeney & Ronan Foley

The St Ann’s Hill Hydropathic Establishment, or The Hydro, was Ireland’s first and pre-eminent sanitorium. The Hydro was built in in Co. Cork in 1843 and closed its doors 110 years later. Founded by Dr Richard Barter and run by three generations of his family, only ruins remain on a hill between Tower and Blarney. This book documents the Hydro’s history from a range of sources, alongside two main themes. The first focuses on the social history of the Hydro, a world of its own, reflected in its resident inhabitants, a spectrum of Anglo-Irish society and international visitors. It was additionally a family home and a major employer in the region. The second theme considers the Hydro as a site of medical innovation, initially via a cold-water curative regime driven by a mid-nineteenth-century craze for hydrotherapy and later in the development of a new form of Turkish Bath that spread around the world.