In 1775, the last leper in Ireland was recorded at St Stephen's in Waterford City, a detail that quietly marks the end of a medical and social institution that had endured for centuries. The hospital attached to St Stephen's church was not a peripheral curiosity but a functioning part of medieval urban life, one of several charitable establishments clustered around the church and serving a city that took such provision seriously enough to maintain it long after leprosy had largely vanished elsewhere in the country.

The foundation is traditionally attributed to King John, placing its origins in the late twelfth century, though the earliest documentary evidence dates to 1468. Leper hospitals of this kind, sometimes called lazar houses after the biblical Lazarus, were typically sited just outside town boundaries, reflecting the social and religious logic that kept sufferers both visible enough to receive alms and separated enough to limit contagion. A 1661 inquisition into the lazar house describes a building then considered new, and by 1670 it held five patients, two men and three women, in a stone house with a slate roof. That structure may still survive at the site. St Stephen's was also connected to a second institution, St Mary Magdalen Hospital, and when the leper hospital finally ceased to function towards the end of the eighteenth century, its accumulated resources were redirected to build the City and County Infirmary in 1824, ensuring that the welfare purposes of the medieval foundation continued in a different form even after the last of its patients was long gone.