That detail alone is enough to stop a reader short. Courts within a hospital suggest a world in which law and medicine operated in far closer proximity than they do today, and the institution in question, known as Carey's Hospital, seems to have been exactly that kind of hybrid, its function not quite reducible to any single category we would recognise now.

The hospital was opened in 1605, a period when Dublin was undergoing significant administrative expansion under English colonial governance. The presence of four courts within such a building points to a medieval or early modern tradition of institutional complexity, in which a single foundation might serve civic, legal, and charitable purposes simultaneously. A "four courts" arrangement typically referred to a space, often a courtyard or set of rooms, where different branches of legal proceedings could be held, though in this case the precise configuration is unknown. The historian Clarke, writing in 2002, records Carey's Hospital and its courts but cannot pin down its exact location, which means the building has effectively vanished from the map, absorbed into whatever later development reshaped that part of the city.

Because the site has not been precisely located, there is no specific address to head for and no surviving structure to examine. What remains is a documentary trace, the kind of historical residue that sometimes surfaces through archival research rather than a walk through the streets. Anyone with a serious interest in early modern Dublin might find it worth consulting Clarke's 2002 work directly, which appears to draw on sources that preserve at least the name and the date. The south city area around which this institution presumably stood has been heavily built over across several centuries, and the chances of any physical remnant persisting above ground are slim. The interest here lies less in the place itself than in what its brief description reveals about how early seventeenth-century Dublin organised its civic life.