Charitable trust seeks to change name of Beaumont Hospital

Name change: A charitable trust which has donated millions of euro to Beaumont Hospital in recent years has sought to have the institution renamed in honour of the distinguished 19th century Irish doctor, Sir Dominic Corrigan.

The Charitable Infirmary Charitable Trust (CICT) has written to the board of Beaumont in recent months and proposed that the name of the hospital should be changed to the "Corrigan University Hospital at Beaumont".

In the letter, released by Beaumont Hospital, the chairman of the trust, Denis McCarthy, said some of its management committee were "not fully happy" with the name Beaumont Hospital. They had suggested that it would be more suitable to rebrand the hospital as the Corrigan Hospital at Beaumont, he said.

In the letter to Beaumont chairman Donal O'Shea, Mr McCarthy said the CICT had been involved with Beaumont Hospital since its establishment in 1987. In the intervening years, it had donated over €3 million towards medical, nursing and housekeeping projects.

Mr McCarthy said the charitable trust continued to be involved in the funding of medical research at the hospital.

It is understood that the board of Beaumont considered the letter from the trust at a recent meeting, but agreed that it would not be appropriate to rename the hospital at this stage.

However, the board agreed that the matter would be reconsidered in light of any potential developments on the hospital site. It noted that the cardiology ward at the hospital was already named after Sir Dominic Corrigan.

Corrigan, the son of a shopkeeper, was born in Dublin in 1802. He was educated at Maynooth and later received his MD degree in Edinburgh. He won international recognition for pioneering observations in relation to heart disease and a type of pulse was named after him. Corrigan carried out many of his studies into heart disease while working as a physician at the Charitable Infirmary, the former Jervis Street Hospital in Dublin.

Jervis Street was one of two Dublin hospitals which transferred to Beaumont when it opened in 1987.

Corrigan served as a member of Parliament for Dublin city for a period in the 1870s. His defeat in the election in 1874 was attributed by some to opposition from liquor interests, whom he had antagonised by supporting the Sunday Closing Bill.

The Charitable Infirmary Charitable Trust was established with the proceeds of the sale of Jervis Street Hospital after its closure in 1987.

It has sponsored the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland/Charitable Infirmary Trust molecular medical laboratories, which were opened in 2002 and are based at the Smurfit Building, education and reserch centre at Beaumont Hospital. The Charitable Infirmary Trust could not be contacted yesterday.