On St John's Hill, just south of Waterford city, a patch of ground once known as the 'Leper's Meadow' carries several centuries of medical and charitable history within a fairly compact area. The name alone signals what this place once was: a site set apart from the urban centre, where the sick and marginalised were housed at a cautious remove from their neighbours.

The medieval complex here comprised St Stephen's hospital and an attached chapel or hospital dedicated to Mary Magdalen, a pairing that was typical of the period. Hospitals in the medieval sense were not primarily surgical institutions but places of refuge, combining care for the sick, the poor, and travellers under a broadly religious framework. The dedication to Mary Magdalen is notable; she was a frequent patron of institutions caring for lepers and the socially outcast. By 1661, the site had been converted into private housing, ending its centuries-long charitable function. Then, in 1824, the City and County Infirmary was constructed on what is believed to be the same ground, drawing the site back into medical use under the rather different conventions of nineteenth-century institutional medicine. That infirmary building is now derelict, leaving a layered ruin of sorts: a Georgian structure slowly declining on top of a medieval memory.