Curious case of the doctor and a deathbed shock
BIOGRAPHY DR JAMES BARRY: A WOMAN AHEAD OF HER TIME by Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield (Oneworld £18.99)
Traditional pantomime is not the only place that a girl dresses up as the Principal Boy. on one famous occasion it happened in medicine. dr James Barry, ‘an effeminate-looking young man’, was unmasked on his deathbed, in 1865, as Margaret ann Bulkley.
the undertakers were agog. ‘the genitals, the deflated breasts and the hairless face’ were unmistakably female, yet dr Barry had served a long career as inspector General of Hospitals in the British army, achieving the rank of lieutenant-colonel.
Barry had been known for his intellectual vivacity and prickliness. He was badtempered with nurses and junior staff, handing out ‘shrill scoldings’ for incompetence.
notorious throughout the Empire as ‘this little tyrant’, Barry was nevertheless respected for ‘his clarity of vision and firmness of hand and strength of will’. He (or she) performed one of the first Caesareans in history in which both mother and child survived.
it is an astounding story — of obstinacy, ambition, genius, fearlessness and pioneering feminism. Much more than simply ‘an audacious deception’, Margaret’s decision to become a doctor was a victory over prejudice and parental background.
She was born in Cork in 1790, into a family teetering on the brink of destitution. raped, possibly by a relative, when a teenager (‘Margaret had the hardships of womanhood thrust prematurely upon her’), she was able to escape when, in 1806, she received a legacy from a distant relative, a painter called James Barry — the name she was to adopt.
always ‘a bright and bold girl’, Margaret dreamed of training as a surgeon, a profession ‘firmly closed to women’ — so she went to Edinburgh and disguised herself as a chap.
this didn’t appear to present many difficulties. ‘a slight, stooped figure, narrowshouldered and short’, James Barry must have resembled a young Charles Hawtrey.
She enrolled at the prestigious university, paid the fees and attended lecture courses in anatomy, chemistry, pharmacy, pathology, natural philosophy and Greek.
authors Michael du Preez and Jeremy dronfield enjoy giving gruesome descriptions of the dissection of human subjects in the morgue, when fine-tooth saws, forceps, scissors and wooden-handled scalpels were used to examine the putrefying cadavers of executed murderers and suicides.
the examinations were conducted in latin, and Margaret wrote her thesis on the hernias caused by corsets. Upon graduation as a Md, she worked at St thomas’ in london, ‘where unwashed patients could lie untended for days at a time, with operations carried out on the ward, in sight of other patients’.
Unruly or unco-operative patients could be forcibly subdued — there was a whipping post in the hospital grounds. no one was allowed vegetables, as they were considered bad for you, but two pints of beer a day, brewed on the premises, were compulsory.
Margaret, her male disguise by then ‘thoroughly mastered’, learned about the dislocation of the ankle, gangrene, spinal injuries and amputation.
in 1813, she applied to become an army surgeon, where she was presented with ‘an endless parade of boils, carbuncles, fractures and venereal disease’.
She was to spend the bulk of her career abroad, in South africa, Jamaica, Malta, Corfu and Canada, where she was surrounded by pet dogs, monkeys and parrots.
She organised inoculations against smallpox, attempted to combat cholera epidemics and treated dysentery by merely dousing the patient with cold water ‘from a pail or a
garden watering can’. One of her regular duties was to examine slaves beaten to death by their cruel masters or to attend to troops flogged ‘to within an inch of their lives’ as a punishment.
Another endemic problem in colonial outposts was alcoholism among the officers’ wives — all those well-to-do women bored to death.
Dr Barry was appalled at the low standard of the quacks and so-called doctors permitted to practice, who could ‘hack and slay any or all of His Majesty’s subjects, without being indicted for murder’.
promoted to Colonial Medical Inspector, she made enemies in high places when she attempted to expose ‘corruption and incompetence’.
She was also quick to quash rumours that she was not all that she might seem. When someone dared say ‘You look more like a woman than a man!’ she lashed them across the face with a whip. Another presumptuous person found himself challenged to a duel.
Margaret shot Captain Cloete ‘square in the middle of the forehead’, but luckily the bullet was deflected by his helmet. Afterwards, Margaret and Cloete became firm friends — though when they met in old age Margaret challenged him to a duel again. Her innovations in hospitals she controlled were to insist upon fresh air, ventilation, nutritious diets and cleanliness. Working in Greece during the Crimean War, she was outraged to find Florence Nightingale getting all the credit for these ideas and principles.
When the pair met, they clashed. Unlike Margaret, Florence ‘hadn’t needed to spend years studying medicine or surgery or work her way up the ranks...and she had not been forced to do all this in disguise’. All she did was float about carrying a lamp.
Margaret retired on half-pay in 1859, somewhat disillusioned. She died of diarrhoea in london during a heatwave. After her funeral, word spread about the masquerade and Dickens wrote about it in All The Year round.
It amazed the world that ‘a woman, a seemingly delicate one, could be fully capable not only of studying medicine and training to be a surgeon, but becoming an exemplary practitioner, as able to master the knowledge, wield a blade and stomach the horror as any man’.
The profession remained stubbornly chauvinist, however. The royal College of Surgeons admitted its first woman fellow only in 1911, and the first female president was elected in 2014.