Medieval leper hospitals, known as leprosaria, were typically sited at the edges of towns and cities, reflecting both the practical desire to separate those with the disease from the general population and the ambiguous spiritual status assigned to leprosy in medieval Europe. Sufferers were considered simultaneously cursed and sanctified, and the institutions built to house them were often administered by religious orders, occupying a strange middle ground between a house of care and a place of quarantine.

The existence of such a hospital in Cork points to a pattern common across medieval Irish and European towns of any significance. Leprosy, now understood to be caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae, was widespread in Europe from roughly the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, after which its prevalence declined sharply, possibly due to the spread of tuberculosis conferring some cross-immunity in the population. A town like Cork, with its trading connections and growing population during the medieval period, would have had both the need and the means to establish some form of institutional response to the disease. Beyond its recorded existence as a monument, the specific history of this particular site, its founding, its patrons, its location within or at the margins of the medieval city, and its eventual fate, remains to be fully documented.