Mullingar st lomans

St. Loman's Hospital (Irish: Ospidéal Naomh Loman) was a psychiatric hospital located in Mullingar, County Westmeath in the Midlands of Ireland. The hospital closed on 5 December 2013 following the relocation of St Edna's Ward, which was the only remaining ward in the original Gothic building, to a new building on campus

The building is a freestanding 41 bay, 3 storeyed psychiatric hospital built on twenty-five acres of land purchased in 1848 for £829 which eventually opened as the Mullingar District Lunatic Asylum on 23 August 1855. It was extended c. 1895 following the construction of a gate house and a red chimneystack. The hospital is a well-detailed Victorian institutional complex with its extensive Tudor Gothic detailing. The structure was built to designs by John Skipton Mulvany, possibly the most celebrated architect operating in Ireland at the time. It cost some £35,430 (equivalent to €3.2 million in today's money) to build, and was built to accommodate 300 patients. The first patients were transferred from the Richmond Surgical Hospital in Dublin, and all of them were female. In the grounds of the hospital, there are various buildings including a chapel which was constructed c. 1886,[6] a nurses' home and an infirmary which were built c. 1940.

Incarceration, and past treatment of patients
Julia Caffrey Leonard, a housekeeper from nearby Trim, County Meath, was admitted into the hospital after she threw hot tea on her husband during an argument as she suspected him of adultery. She spent 22 years in the institution and protested as she knew she did not belong in such a place, neither did most of those who were confined in its walls. She died in the hospital on 10 February 1919, aged 54 due to myocardial degeneration.

Hanna Greally was born in Athlone on 21 April 1924, and was admitted to the hospital in 1943 at the age of 19 by the advice of her mother after Greally had just returned home from London where she had witnessed the horrors of the London Blitz while training to be a nurse. Bird's Nest Soup, a book written by Hanna and published in 1971, captured the haunting detail of other's lives stripped of human rights of "the unloved, social outcasts, the incurably embittered and the dispirited". Greally died at her home in County Roscommon in 1987, aged 62