The site now occupied by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, on the west side of St Stephen's Green, was once a Quaker burial ground, a place whose very existence reflects the particular circumstances of religious nonconformity in eighteenth-century Ireland.

The ground is recorded on John Rocque's 1756 map of Dublin, which labels it plainly as a "Quakers Burying ground". Rocque's map, one of the most detailed surveys of the city produced in that era, is a reliable guide to how Dublin was organised before the great Georgian rebuilding projects reshaped it, and its inclusion of this site confirms the burial ground was a recognised, established feature of the city by the mid-eighteenth century. The Quakers, formally known as the Religious Society of Friends, rejected elaborate funerary rites and marked their graves simply, often with small plain stones or none at all. Their burial grounds tended to be modest, separate from Church of Ireland or Catholic cemeteries, reflecting their standing outside the established religious order. At some point after Rocque mapped it, the ground was cleared and built over, and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland eventually came to occupy the site.

The college's well-known neoclassical facade on St Stephen's Green gives little indication of what preceded it. There is no visible memorial or marker on the exterior of the building to indicate the earlier use of the ground, and the burial records, if they survive at all, would need to be sought through Quaker archival sources rather than anything on site. For anyone tracing the pre-Georgian layers of Dublin, Rocque's 1756 map remains the most useful tool, available in various reproductions and digitised versions through Irish libraries and archives. The juxtaposition is a quietly telling one: a place once given over to the plainest possible farewell to the dead, now home to an institution devoted to the science of keeping people alive.