[Review] Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield: 'Dr James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time'

Only at his/her deathbed in 1865 was Dr James Barry unmasked as being Margaret Ann Bulkley (born probably in 1789). The undertakers were in shock. ‘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 was respected for ‘his clarity of vision and firmness of hand and strength of will’. He/she performed one of the first Caesareans in history in which both mother and child survived.

Born into a desperately poor Irish family, Margaret Ann Bulkley 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[1]. Margaret dreamed of training as a surgeon, at the time a profession ‘firmly closed to women’. So, she disguised herself as a young man and traveled to Edinburgh. She enrolled in the prestigious Scottish university and attended courses in anatomy, chemistry, pharmacy, pathology, natural philosophy and Greek[2]. Barry proved a brilliant student and qualified as a Doctor in 1812 – the first woman to ever do so in Britain. Her dissertation 'Disputatio medica inauguralis de merocele, vel hernia crurali' was defended in flawless Latin after not even three years of study.

[Dr James Barry]

Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield happily paint a gruesome picture about the vile conditions in hospitals in those early days of modern medicine. Patients could lie untended for days at a time, with operations carried out on the ward in sight of other patients.

In 1813, James Barry casu quo Margaret Ann Bulkley applied to become an Army surgeon and was to spend most of her career abroad, in South Africa, Jamaica, Malta, Corfu, and Canada. She organised inoculations against smallpox, attempted to combat cholera epidemics, and to fight alcoholism among the officers’ wives, who were bored to death in those faraway places.

When she died, people were truly astonished that a woman could have been as good as a man in a medical profession. However, that profession remained stubbornly chauvinist. The Royal College of Surgeons admitted its first woman fellow only in 1911.

It's a book about an interesting subject. Certainly worth your time.

However, I have the nagging feeling that Jeremy Dronfield, a 'journalist', has managed to needlessly embellish the story here and there with all sorts of gossip and innuendo. For instance: claiming that James Barry once had a baby is not evidenced by objective facts. I suspect Du Preez did not agree with that because his scientific papers were impeccably researched.

But I can clearly see that Elaine Thomson's protagonist Jem Flockhart is based on Dr. James Barry.

[1] Du Preez: Dr James Barry: The early years revealed in South African Medical Journal - 2008. See here.
[1] Du Preez: Dr James Barry (1789–1865): the Edinburgh years in Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh - 2012. See here.