Stones & Bones: Containing Typhoid in 'Dear Dirty Dublin'

Dive into Dublin’s contagious past in our new online exhibition!

Typhoid was a major killer in Edwardian Dublin. An immersive, multimedia exhibition, 'Stones & Bones: Containing Typhoid in Dear Dirty Dublin' draws on the important civic records held by Dublin City Archive to illuminate the turbulent history of Dublin’s disease control efforts in the 19th and 20th centuries - and particularly its struggle with typhoid. Public health records, contemporary press responses, and photographic surveys tell a story of precarity and unequal disease burdens in ‘Dear Dirty Dublin’. The exhibition also explores how imperial influences and one-size-fits-all thinking failed to provide solutions for Dublin’s sanitary crisis: constructed between 1870 and 1906, Dublin’s London-inspired sewer system ended up impeding navigation in Dublin Bay and spreading typhoid amongst Dublin’s poor and working-classes by polluting local shellfish beds.

Explore this three part exhibition to discover how local ecologies, imperial ideals, and urban inequality influenced disease control. In Part One, learn how Dublin’s geography and coastal environment helped typhoid spread. In Part Two, find out more about what Dublin officials did to contain typhoid – including solutions that backfired. Finally, in Part Three discover how improved sanitation, housing, and welfare helped reduce typhoid – but how climate change and population growth pose new challenges for 21st century planners.

'Stones & Bones: Containing Typhoid in Dear, Dirty Dublin' has been created by the critically-acclaimed Typhoidland research and public engagement project for Dublin City Library and Archive, our heritage partner.