The Secret Life of Dr James Barry: Victorian England's Most Eminent Surgeon

By Rachel Holmes

A reissue of Rachel Holmes's landmark biography of Dr James Barry, one of the most enigmatic figures of the Victorian age.

James Barry was one of the nineteenth century's most exceptional doctors, and one of its great unsung heroes. Famed for his brilliant innovations, Dr Barry influenced the birth of modern medical practice in places as far apart as South Africa, Jamaica and Canada. Barry's skills attracted admirers across the globe, but there were also many detractors of the ostentatious dandy, who caused controversy everywhere he went. Yet unbeknownst to all, the military surgeon concealed a lifelong secret at the heart of his identity: on his death Barry was claimed to be anatomically female and in fact a cross-dresser.

Vividly drawn and meticulously researched, The Secret Life of Dr James Barry brings to life one of the most enigmatic figures of the Victorian age, elevating its subject to a latter-day transgender icon – and is a landmark in the art of biography.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Sep 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781408891568

Rachel Holmes

Rachel Holmes is the author of four biographies; The Secret Life of James Barry, The Hottentot Venus, Eleanor Marx: A Life and Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel. All are published by Bloomsbury. She has also edited collections of political writing, published as a journalist and worked as an academic, activist and literary programmer. Between Two Fires is her second work for the stage. She co-commissioned Sixty Six Books: 21st Century Writers Speak to the King James Bible (Oberon, 2011), with Josie Rourke and Chris Haydon.

Book preview

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Scanty Particulars

also published as

The Secret Life of Dr James Barry

The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Sarah Baartman

Eleanor Marx: A Life

Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel

CONTENTS

Introduction

Preface

1Betwixt-and-Between

2‘An Eagle’s Eye, a Lady’s hand, and a Lion’s Heart’

3An Absolute Phenomenon

4Sieketroost

5Sacrificed to Infamy

6‘My Good Name’

7Doctor Jamaica

8Insular Obsessions

9The Last Post

10 Beyond a Doubt

11 Habeas Corpus

Epilogue

Notes

Acknowledgements

Select Bibliography

List of Illustrations

Index

About the Author

Plates Section

‘There are no pronouns in the English language as complex as I am.’

––Leslie Feinstein

Introduction

Dr James Barry was transgender before the term was invented. This fact is not recent news. Dr William McKinnon, James Barry’s personal physician, knew some hundred and fifty years ago that the claim made on Barry’s death, that ‘he’ was ‘a female’ was a misconception. As McKinnon, like Barry a skilled military surgeon, put it, James was neither simply ‘a male or a female’. Or in other words, if they had existed in the 1860s, Dr Barry was non-binary.

In a world that is currently shy of facts and short on compassion, this is an inconvenient truth to those who continue to assert that Dr James Miranda Barry was by anatomy female, by gender a woman and cross-dressed in pursuit of professional ambition and personal happiness. This charming but harmful myth was long ago dispelled by evidence-based science and medical history.

‘It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass’, wrote John Berger in the introduction to the new edition of one of his works, first published thirty-five years earlier.¹ This, I believe, is what may have happened to The Secret Life of Dr James Barry, first published as Scanty Particulars in 2002. Twenty-five years-ago I set out to write the biography of Dr James Miranda Barry, investigating the true story behind the intriguing and colourful legend about Victorian Britain’s most controversial surgeon, born in Ireland, apparently a girl, named Margaret Bulkley.

I undertook my research in the closing decade of the twentieth century. At that time, the terms non-binary and transgender were confined to the outrider section of what was regarded as a minority queer vocabulary. Today, these descriptions are part of everyday language. It is perhaps a little shocking to remember that even as recently as the twilight of the last century, there was a widespread belief that sex was fixed and gender fluid, rather than the other way around. I have always argued that socially gendered behaviour is far more rigid and culturally ingrained than the constantly evolving human body, altered every generation by medical and scientific interventions.

I was encouraged in this endeavour by Roy Porter, one of Britain’s finest historians, of medicine and psychiatry in particular. For years I liked to think that I owed the discovery of the truth about Barry to my own distrust of cultural myths that work in the interests of conventional and reactionary thinking about sex, gender and human identity and desire. With typical generosity, Porter allowed me to think I had got there on my own, but the fact is that I owe so much to him. Roy urged me to dig deep, dispense with all received opinion, and instead focus forensically on the medical archive and Dr Barry’s own work. This led me to investigate James Barry’s MD thesis at Edinburgh Medical School written in Latin, ‘De merocele vel hernia crurali’ (‘An Inaugural Medical Dissertation on Merocele or Femoral Hernia’). I also explored Barry’s own obsession with gynaecology and obstetrics, and his determination to become a surgeon.

Transgender was a term unavailable to James Barry. Brought up as a girl, because that was how his pre-adolescent body presented, Barry knew, by negative definition, that he was not a woman – society’s shorthand for the half of the species that is anatomically female, reproductive or otherwise. Searching for a positive self-definition and understanding was Dr Barry’s life quest. And following in his footsteps across three continents; it was the journey of this book.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, some still persist in claiming that Dr Barry was female. Moreover, this is done without pause for consideration of the pain and offence this causes to other people. The assertion that Dr Barry was a cross-dressing woman is a seductive cultural fantasy based on the desire for neat solutions and stable sexual objects. Unfortunately for those who like their genders binary and bodies to be one of only two sexes, real life does not always comply. Both many feminists and their patriarchal opponents choose the story of a female would-be medic, driven to subterfuge by ambition and constraint. Whatever the motives behind that ripping yarn, it remains one of pure fiction. I find the true tale even more compelling.

Celebrated actor Charlize Theron gives short shrift to the transgender denialists. Dr James Barry spent many rewarding years of his career posted in South Africa, where he relentlessly fought racial and sexual discrimination. Imagine him opening his daily newspaper to read South African movie star Theron breezing through the questions put to her by the Daily Mail in 2019 about one of her children who identifies as a girl, ‘Yes, I thought she was a boy, too … Until she looked at me when she was three years old and said I am not a boy! … My job as a parent is to celebrate them and to love them and to make sure that they have everything they need in order to be what they want to be.’²

When this book was first published, I encountered laughing dismissal and even outright hostility, from those who pooh-poohed even the suggestion that Margaret Bulkley/James Barry was not born female pure and simple. They were convinced that if only society would allow ‘her’, Dr Barry would have shed the men’s britches and breast bindings at the first opportunity, and rushed back into petticoats and frocks to perform ‘her’ pioneering surgery. Any assertion to the contrary, I was warned, was a betrayal of ‘legitimate’ feminist history. Conversely, I found that medics, scientists and transgender activists engaged very differently. Summoned to give a lecture about Dr Barry at the Royal College of Surgeons, I approached the august entrance in Lincoln’s Inn Square with great trepidation. The event was a revelation. Surgeons, endocrinologists and gynaecologists engaged with Dr Barry’s personal case history, as well as his medical research and scientific innovation. With the greatest patience and enthusiasm, the assembled practitioners explained in some detail, drawing on my own evidence, why, if anything, I had been too modest in stating my findings in the book.

The Friends of Millbank, Royal Army Medical Corps, proved loyal and supportive friends indeed to Dr James Barry, proud of his legacy and membership of their ranks.

To my delight, there is now an entire discipline of James Barry studies, an interconnected global network of academics, historians and scientists who continue to develop our knowledge. Ann Heilmann is the leading expert of this progressive intellectual movement. I urge all with an interest in Dr Barry to read Heilmann’s superb Neo-/Victorian Biographilia and James Miranda Barry: A Study in Transgender and Transgenre³ as a companion to my biography. Heilmann was one of the very first and few to notice at all that I wrote the original Preface to Dr Barry’s story without, as she puts it, ‘pronomial identifiers altogether, thus offering, in the linguistic medium, an illustration of Barry’s resisting gender performance.’⁴ James Barry understood the role of human languages – of voice, of the body and of writing - in creating himself. His brave, adventurous quest for self-discovery beyond the boundaries of given definitions is one of the most exciting and inspirational themes of his life story.

I re-dedicate this book to my mentors Roy Porter and Lisa Jardine, to Tony Lacey who first published it ahead of its time, and to all those entitled to claim Dr James Barry as the great transgender icon of the Victorian age.

PREFACE

‘When I was a boy, I was told that when I began a story, to begin at the beginning and continue to the end.’

Dr James Barry

It is a vexing prospect for any biographer to attempt to write about a subject who appears to have had no childhood. It makes us realize how much we expect the family and upbringing of the child to explain the motivation of the adult. Réné Juta, one of several women novelists entranced by James Miranda Barry’s life, wrote of Barry ‘springing up from the world, born of swords and dragon’s teeth and nothing more human’. Barry must, nevertheless, have been born somewhere. The surviving evidence of the truth concerning Barry’s life and identity is dispersed across the globe - between England, Scotland, South Africa, Canada, the West Indies, the Mediterranean and the United States of America. The jigsaw-puzzle these pieces comprise is incomplete. But although largely invisible for over a century, Barry’s origins have never in fact been completely hidden from history.

James Barry ambushed me when my attention was focused altogether elsewhere. The accidental encounter happened in the course of academic research for my doctorate. I was seduced instantly. A decade of following Barry’s footsteps resulted in many unexpected journeys, and confrontations with seemingly endless conundrums, riddles and, then, spectacular revelations. Sometimes I travelled thousands of miles and found nothing but a grin hung about without the Cheshire cat. At others, long journeys were rewarded by whole bundles of evidence about Barry’s life that came so confidently striding into view I had to run and redouble my efforts to keep up. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you about getting involved with Barry!’ wrote a Royal Army Medical Corps archivist in the early twentieth century. Barry is a complex character with whom we might well warn ourselves not to become embroiled unless we are prepared to turn off the beaten track of conventional categories of character, sex and identity.

In spite of Barry’s advice that a story should ‘begin at the beginning and continue to the end’, it became a convention amongst those who attempted to provide factual accounts of Barry’s life to begin its telling at the end. This was for the very good reason that Barry intentionally covered the tracks of a mysterious childhood so that they remained concealed for over a century. In a very definitive sense, and impossible as it seems, James Barry had no childhood.

There is however another reason why Barry’s story has been told so often with its end as its beginning. James Barry’s death in the hot summer of 1865 occasioned a revelation that sent shockwaves throughout the British medical and military establishment, and delighted scandal-mongers and sensationalist media alike. The story travelled further afield, pulling into its international trajectory newspapers in France, Canada and South Africa. The military establishment balked, and, embarrassed, tried to suppress the story. The press yearned for scandal, and lovingly indulged in the details of Barry’s peculiar lifestyle and high connections, hinting at conspiracy. Those who had met and mingled with Barry were filled with reinvigorated memories of their encounters. Some revealed that they had been privy to Barry’s secret, but kept it quiet for reasons of their own. As the 1860s drew to a close, the enigma of Dr Barry passed from the popular press into debates between medical men in professional journals, and continued on into the twentieth century.

By the 1880s Barry’s story had become the stuff of popular fiction. Colonel Edward Rogers wrote a three-volume potboiler entitled The Modern Sphinx, loosely based on Barry’s life. None other than Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the first feminist thriller writer whose best-selling novels at times outsold those of Charles Dickens, edited this novel down to a more elegant single volume. Havelock Ellis, in his groundbreaking book Sexual Inversion, declared Barry’s life a ‘distinguished instance’ of dissident sexual psychology.

The surprise exposure following Barry’s death has to this day remained a matter of intrigue and debate. The scandal of Barry’s death was of such a magnitude that it has threatened to eclipse the humanitarian and scientific achievement of an extraordinary life. If we start at the end of Barry’s story, we lose the sense of how the public life of one of the nineteenth century’s most innovative and charismatic doctors was lived, and lived to the full. Over a hundred and fifty years Barry’s life has been silted over with conjecture and myth.

Historical biography is the disinterment of the dead. It is a quest for the resurrection of lost lives. It dissects, and where it can, exposes the truths of the bodies and souls whose influence shaped our modern world. But in death, as in life, there are often no reassuring final truths which close the tale with a comfortable full stop. As a student, the young Barry was obsessed by midwifery, obstetrics, anatomy, and morbid dissection. The career of James Barry began with the search for truths about human metamorphoses - the journey of the body into life and death. In 1865 Barry’s own body passed into history as one of the most disputed corpses of the modern age. Yet as James Barry lay dying, this most mercurial of nineteenth-century figures must have known that of all the extraordinary things that would be claimed and reported about the unknown medical student who became one of Britain’s best-known military doctors, none would be so remarkable as the truth of a life as it was actually lived.

The outline of that attempt at an ending in Barry’s case runs as follows: July, 1865. London sweats beneath a heatwave. The central streets of the city are a privileged den of infection. Dr James Miranda Barry, Inspector General of Hospitals and one of the most senior medical officers in the British military, lies dying at Margaret Street. There are no known living relatives to be informed. The doctor is accompanied at death - as in life - by a manservant known only as ‘Black John’, and a dog named Psyche. With a peculiar wit understood only by their owner, all James Barry’s dogs were called Psyche.

James Barry was one of the nineteenth century’s most remarkable doctors and one of its great unsung heroes. Barry campaigned tirelessly for the humanitarian rights of the patient. Famed for opening up the vistas of modern medicine, Britain’s most indefatigable colonial doctor specialized in surgery, tropical diseases, obstetrics, leprosy and venereal diseases. A champion of the socially marginalized and economically dispossessed, Barry prioritized the treatment of women, prostitutes, slaves, the insane, lepers and children. On three continents, Barry implemented new methods of hygiene, sanitation, quarantine, diet and effective treatment of some of the most virulent diseases known to the age. Barry’s medical reforms saved the lives of thousands of people.

Barry’s methods influenced the birth of modern medical practice in places as far apart as South Africa, Jamaica, Malta and Canada. Twenty-one years before the introduction of effective anaesthetics for radical invasive surgery, James Barry performed one of the first successful Caesarian sections known to Western medicine.

Barry’s confidence and ambition as a surgeon went hand in glove with a flamboyant lifestyle. A noted dandy, Barry combined extravagant dress with a love of entertainment and social ritual. The charismatic, peripatetic and irredeemably flirtatious doctor charmed women and men alike. A child of the dreams of radical democracy and the scientific enlightenment of the eighteenth century, Barry grew up uneasily into the more austere venture of Victorianism. Barry’s grudging but valiant attempts at self-reinvention to accommodate the values of the later nineteenth century failed. Deeply influenced by patrons, teachers and mentors who were all dissident radical progressives, Barry’s heretical roots always showed through.

The exotic trajectories of Barry’s career collided with some of the great figures of the day. Francisco Miranda, the outré lady-killing liberator of Venezuela, was patron to two outstanding achievers in his lifetime: Simón Bolívar and James Barry. Lord Buchan, the progressive champion of women’s rights, gave Barry the run of his extensive library and a home during university vacations when the young doctor was a student at Edinburgh. Sir Astley Cooper, the greatest surgeon of the age, was Barry’s teacher at Guy’s and St Thomas’s in London. Mentored by Lord Charles Somerset at the Cape, Barry also met Ngqika, the chief of the Xhosa, at a crucial political summit between the black leaders of Southern Africa and the white colonial settler administration. In a strange twist of ancestral history that the emancipationist doctor would have found most displeasing James Barry Munnik Hertzog, the first Nationalist president of apartheid South Africa, inherited Barry’s moniker.

On the death of Lord Charles Somerset, to whom Barry was intimately connected and utterly devoted, Fitzroy Somerset, Lord Raglan, became Barry’s champion and protector. Sir Josiah Cloete and Lord Lowther were among those who counted Barry as a personal friend. Barry appears in the memoirs of many nineteenth-century naval and army officers whose names, although less familiar today, were prominent in their time, such as George Thomas the Earl of Albermarle and Sir William Henry Dillon.

Florence Nightingale was infuriated by Barry. Napoleon’s closest ally, assistant and friend Count de Las Casas described the youthful doctor as ‘an absolute phenomenon’, and the Hapsburg archduke Maximilian was so impressed with Barry’s skill as a surgeon that he sent a fabulous diamond ring as a gift of thanks. Barry also had many detractors whose fear and envy of the ostentatious, sparkling doctor is expressed in tones ranging from patronizing disdain to venomous hatred. Many of these occupied themselves in conspiring against Barry - resulting in more than one court martial and most famously, a sexual smear campaign. Apart from Florence Nightingale, not one of the names of Barry’s detractors remain significant enough to be recognizable in our own day.

Edward Lear doodled a caricature of Barry, Charles Dickens publicized a heavily embellished version of the life of the ‘Inspector General’ in his best-selling magazine All the Year Round, and Sybil Thorndike revelled in playing the breeches role of James Barry on the London stage.

A great surgeon and scientist, James Barry was remembered also as a rake whose famed relationship with one of the British empire’s most roguish and imperious governors scandalized the government and societies of two nations. The intimate, ambiguous affair between Lord Charles Somerset and his personal physician, Dr James Barry, was whispered around the British colonies. The sodomy libel regarding Barry and Somerset was tried in a notorious court case at the Cape, and became a matter of public debate among parliamentarians at Westminster.

James Barry was never married. Moving though the most important locations on the map of Britain’s colonial empire, Barry’s retinue was made up of the familiar companions of a black manservant and the ubiquitous Psyche, in its several incarnations. Barry loved parties, balls, christenings, weddings, clubhouses and horse riding - and had many friends. But after the death of Somerset, Barry remained a resolute loner in affairs of the heart. The inner dramas of Barry’s life were concealed by a life of unceasing travel and tireless activity.

Laid to rest in a simple grave in Kensal Green cemetery, with its incorrectly recorded date of death, James Barry left behind a lifetime of official correspondence and professional reports that cram the shelves of archives on three continents. A prolific and exacting writer, Dr Barry was known for penning copious and detailed correspondence. Devoid of flummery, concise in their recommendations, Barry’s reports and official letters are characteristically filled also with knowledgeable allusion, irony, tragic touches and considerable wit. But only six letters of personal correspondence survive. Barry left also two scientific papers of considerable significance: a contribution to the Materia Medica on the Arctopus Echinatus, a treatment for syphilis and gonorrhoea, and a university thesis on femoral hernia, De Merocele vel Hernia Crurali. Despite their importance, these essays have barely been mentioned in accounts of Barry’s life. Yet in different ways, each provides significant clues to the inner world of James Barry.

These are the bare bones around which the flesh and blood of Barry’s life must be painstakingly recreated. What follows is James Barry’s story as I have uncovered it, beginning at its unconventional beginning and filling in many previously missing pieces, until we come once more to its uniquely peculiar end.

ONE

Betwixt-and-Between

‘Then I shan’t be exactly a human? Peter asked.

No.

Nor exactly a bird?

No.

What shall I be?

You will be a Betwixt-and-Between, Solomon said, and certainly he was a wise old fellow, for that is exactly how it turned out.’

Sir James Matthew Barrie,

Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

In the frozen heart of winter, a slight figure veered along the pavements of Edinburgh Old Town. With hands thrust deep into the pockets of a man’s greatcoat, the body of the young medical student was concealed completely. Only his head was visible. The night was cold and still. Streetlamps lit his way between the grand monumental portals and pillars of the University of Edinburgh. As if drunk, he lurched with an unsteady gait toward his lodgings in Lothian Street. Self-conscious about staggering on a public street, he tried to regain the more confident comp of his usual strut.

It was the winter of 1810 and James Barry medical and literary student of the University of Edinburgh, had just attended his first lecture in anatomical dissection with his tutor, the famously ‘horrid’ Mr. Fyfe. His sickened body hastened through the streets away from Fyfe’s dissection room as if pursued by death and her grotesque procession. Yet his mind raced back to the scene he had just left, drawn by an intoxicating concoction of horror and curiosity.

He recalled the scene like a demonic dream. A room of instruments and shadows, the temperature of a meat locker, somewhere between an artist’s studio and a butcher’s shop. The air clammy with malodorous condensation. Mr. Fyfe’s three greenhorn students huddled in a group, uncertain of the etiquette for approaching the dissecting table, on which a body was laid out beneath greasy sheeting. Fyfe ushered them forward, stationing each with a clear view—and smell—of the cadaver. This uncomfortably intimate proximity to a corpse not yet three days old and of uncertain origin was the privilege the students paid for in signing up with Fyfe as private pupils. A select audience of young gentlemen, with the best view in an exclusive house, were suddenly and horribly fearful of seeing what their money had paid for.

The terrifying experience was optional. Practical dissection was not a compulsory part of the medical degree for which Barry had registered. While required to be proficient in written and spoken Latin, classics, and philosophy, he did not have to do applied dissection. He could have qualified by learning his anatomy from lavishly printed textbooks. But James Barry had a particular fascination with the study of anatomy, with the folds and secrets of the flesh. He breathed hard through his mouth, fighting back panic as Fyfe lifted the sheet, revealing a loose architecture of bones held together with a worn tarpaulin of skin, like an old, patched sail clinging respectfully to the mainmast in memory of prouder times. Age and the shrunken size of the body in death composed Barry’s first impressions. He struggled to translate the clean and figuratively precise lines of his anatomical textbooks into the irregular landscape of the purplish swollen body laid out before him. These and his childhood imaginings, swathed in Catholicism, had left him vaguely expecting that a dissection corpse would be luminous and sepulchral, modest even. In reality, the raw material for the surgeon’s knives and saws was grey, graceless, and lumpen.

Heart thumping, temperature rising with the bile in his throat, in this claustrophobic space the only heat he could feel was his own. Yet in Fyfe’s chilly, candlelit rooms, James Barry’s cold sweat of dread turned to the heated flush of fascination. The lamplit faces of the students began to shine with curiosity, bravado, and fear as Fyfe cauterised the body He spoke in a clear, neutral tone aimed at reassurance as he made his first incision, along the clavicum and sternum, in order to demonstrate the anatomy of the neck and throat. As he made another incision from the top of the sternum to the chin, Barry’s startled attention was drawn to the face of the corpse. Stripped of the animation of everyday life, it was a face unsexed.

The blade sank into the flesh, and blood seeped up against the knife. Fyfe drew up the tough fascia with his forceps and began to describe the anatomical map of muscle and glands within. Barry’s fascination deepened as the body was opened and splayed out into a three-dimensional space under his gaze. Fyfe lifted skin and fascia. Inky blood welled over the slashed binding of heavy skin; the body disclosed its interior. The external body disappeared. It was confusing to Barry. Without the boundary of the skin to navigate by, the eye lost its bearings. A chaotic topography reigned within. Barry wondered how he would ever learn to distinguish the fibres, membranes, tendons, tissues, arteries, nerves, and vessels sketched by Fyfe’s knife. The organs that make so much difference to life were grey and indistinguishable in death.

The flint slish of his tutor’s knife was hypnotic. Barry could not take his eyes from the complicated, messy, and stinking body stretched before him. The foul stench saturated the air. As Fyfe wiped fluids from his hand and reached for a saw, Barry became conscious of a curious new emotion—the absence of any appropriate feeling of horror. This, then, was the state of ‘necessary inhumanity’ required to attain this knowledge.

Keen to make the fullest use of the body, Fyfe offered a dissection of the lower torso and pelvis. He decided to leave the legs for another session, since the night was drawing on. Fyfe eviscerated the pelvis, revealing the shadowed cavity of the cervix and the muscular coat of the uterus, greyish in colour. Superfluous membrane slipped back to reveal the subcutaneous folds of the groin. He pointed to the anomaly of some thick flesh-coloured tubercles.

Fyfe’s knife made shapes out of the grey matter of the anonymous body like a painter picking out an invisible line with a fine sable brush.

Barry was looking at the inverted mirror of a woman’s body. A life anatomised. The scalpel cut a swath through the history of the corpse, revealing its physiological secrets to the students. Barry discovered things unknown to the woman during her recently ended life. Yet for all this revelation of the messy flesh, the body was stubborn in its silence. A female body devoid of inhibition in front of an uninvited group of closely observing male strangers.

Mr. Fyfe concluded his demonstration by asking the students if they would like to take a little commemorative souvenir before he covered the leavings. John Jobson, Barry’s friend, gamely chose an ear. Barry demurred. He already had everything he needed to take away from the experience. He was determined to become an anatomical explorer, adept at navigating the body through the secrets of surgery.

The young student approached the lodgings where he stayed with his guardian, Mrs Mary Anne Bulkley. He was relieved that the ordeal was over, yet scintillated and invigorated. He wanted to experience it again. He paused briefly, inhaling a final sharp intake of air to clear away the miasma. Then, turning his back to the street, he disappeared through the door of 6 Lothian Street, closing it behind him with a firmness that echoed into the night.

Narrow and crowded, the tall old tenement houses of Edinburgh Old Town where Barry lodged were subdivided and sublet to writers, intellectuals, artists, and students, who lived and worked beside the cobbled streets thronging with the city’s swiftly expanding urban populace. The city Tobias Smollett described as ‘a hotbed of genius’ had been the home of the key thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, including Adam Smith and David Hume. Robert Burns first came to Edinburgh in 1786 in search of a printer who would produce another edition of his poems. He discovered William Smellie, who had produced the first Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1768. The unfortunately named Smellie was not related to William Smellie, M.D., the great surgeon-anatomist who had worked in London alongside Cheselden and the Hunters. Described by Roy Porter as ‘a great horse godmother of a he-midwife,’ this Smellie was regarded as the founding father of modern male obstetrical surgery. He had printed a famous obstetrical atlas in 1754: A Sett ofAnatomical Tables, with Explanations, and an Abridgement of the Practice of Midwifery. It was a practical guide to midwifery that quickly became a standard textbook of its time, a bible of creation consulted by medical students, fellow practitioners, and artists. Lavishly printed, Smellie’s obstetrical atlas was highly collectible, a coveted acquisition for the private libraries of noblemen and gentlemen. There is no doubt that Barry encountered this textbook in the private libraries of Lord Buchan and General Francisco de Miranda.

The University of Edinburgh was at the zenith of its reputation between 1760 and 1820. Founded in 1726, the medical school in particular had immense prestige and an international reputation by the time Barry enrolled. It was a place where a person reticent about his true origins might reinvent himself. Some were the sons of squires, some of prosperous merchants. All were intent upon proving themselves to be gentlemen of learning. As documented by the university register, Barry’s classmates included students from England, Scotland, Ireland, the United States, Canada, India, and the West Indies.

Students from outside the city either took lodgings—preferably at the homes of professors—or found accommodation with their parents in a house. So there was nothing unusual about Mrs Bulkley accompanying James Barry when he went from London up to Edinburgh. It may be significant that, unlike at Oxford and Cambridge, the Test Act—which stipulated that students had to be practicing members of the Church of England—did not apply to the University of Edinburgh. Mrs Bulkley was an Irish Catholic, so the young Barry’s religion could have been a factor that made Edinburgh a suitable choice.

The medical degree for which James Barry enrolled was a three-year course comprising anatomy, surgery, chemistry; botany, materia medica, theory and practice of medicine, and lectures in clinical medicine at the Royal Infirmary. The Edinburgh teaching system was regarded as exemplary for offering a combination of practical and theoretical study. At the end of three years the students undertook an oral examination in Latin, conducted by a panel of professors, in which they were asked how they would treat two specimen cases, and to submit a thesis in Latin.

Of the utmost importance to the ambitious young Barry was the fact that the Edinburgh medical school offered exceptional opportunities for those who wanted to develop their skills in the arts of anatomy and surgery combined with clinical practice. The flourishing state of the medical school was largely due to this combined clinical training. Barry duly signed up for all the regular compulsory courses. The medical school allowed its most prominent faculty members to teach at bedside, in the surgical amphitheatre, and in the clinical lecture room, an arrangement that conferred importance and prestige on the value of empirical observation and practical activities.

It was not an age of donnish decorum. Gentility and gore combined not only in the dissection room and operating theatre, but in the politicking that took place in institutional corridors. Many of these medics were flamboyant, argumentative men. The traditionalists pitched themselves against the intellectual renegades, and the students watched their squabbles with glee. All were regarded with suspicion by the general public.

The names of Barry’s tutors were a roll call of the greatest teachers of the age, men who combined practice with extensive publication. He studied physic with Dr James Gregory, who wore a cocked hat when he lectured. A rigorous sceptic and a challenging lecturer, Gregory had a notorious temper. He famously struck his colleague James Hamilton—also one of Barry’s tutors—with his walking stick in a public argument. When forced to pay damages of £100 to Hamilton for the insult, Gregory declared that the pleasure of beating his rival was worth every penny. Dr Andrew Duncan taught Barry the theory of medicine and medical jurisprudence. An author and private teacher, Duncan founded several Edinburgh medical clubs and was a great champion of the mentally ill. His work in this field led ultimately to the opening of the Edinburgh Lunatic Asylum in 1813. Barry’s compassion for the mentally ill—who in this period were still treated more like criminals and entertainers than patients—became a hallmark of his subsequent career, and Duncan clearly helped shape this understanding.

Barry studied chemistry with Dr.Thomas Hope, described as one of the most popular science teachers in Britain, and pharmacy with Dr Francis Home. Originally an army surgeon, Home held the first chair in materia medica and was a pioneer in the study of drugs. Dr. aniel Rutherford taught Barry botany, and he took his clinical surgical lectures with Mr James Russell. A course on military surgery with Dr Thompson was to be of great use to the young medic in his future career.

The opportunity to study human anatomy was central to the appeal of the Edinburgh medical school. Until 1846, three Alexander Monros in succession occupied the chair of anatomy, in a line of decreasing ability. Barry landed with the third, hapless Monro, with whom he took five courses: three on anatomy, two on morbid anatomy. This was the same Professor Monro who was to deliver a lecture on the brain of the infamous body snatcher Burke—the top of the cranium having been sawn off—after his conviction, confession, and hanging in 1829. Monro was an uninspiring teacher, apathetically delivering lectures from his grandfather’s unrevised notes. His incompetence was a cause for hilarity and frustration among the students, who would jeer at him in lectures and on one occasion accompanied their rowdy protests with a hail of peas. Unlike the better-organised private tutors, Monro also experienced acute problems finding sufficient bodies for dissection to enliven the students’ studies.

The shortcomings of Monro, and his increasing difficulties in supplying fresh bodies for first-year students to practice on, led to a rapid development of extramural teaching during this period. Hungry for anatomical knowledge, Barry and his more intrepid peers took courses in dissection with private tutors in order to expand and consolidate their knowledge. Barry’s record of his professional education refers rather coyly to his having attended ‘Barclay and Murray’s private lectures in 1810, 1811 and 1812.’ Dr John Barclay ran an independent school in Surgeon’s Square, adjacent to the College of Surgeons, where he employed six teachers. Barclay’s ‘private lectures’ were so popular he had to lecture twice daily, as his classroom was not large enough. Barclay made his own clandestine arrangements to deal with the problem of finding corpses for dissection. The fees paid by the students often found their way into the hands of the Edinburgh ‘resurrection men,’ who provided a supply of bodies that the students could practice on without soiling their own hands with grave-robbing.

In addition to his practical work in Barclay’s dissection rooms, Barry was also enrolled as a private student with Mr Fyfe, with whom he took three courses in dissection. For the students with stomachs strong enough and pockets deep enough to afford the additional fees, Fyfe was an invaluable guide around the mysteries of the human body. The pursuit of anatomical knowledge was in its infancy. Even in the context of this growing scientific fashion, Barry’s preoccupation with the subject was distinctive.

Barry also took three courses in midwifery with Dr James Hamilton. Hamilton, professor of midwifery since inheriting the chair from his father in 1800, was

Reviews for The Secret Life of Dr James Barry

[gailnyoka · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A thoroughly researched and highly readable history of the life and times of Dr. James Barry, whose death revealed a secret of the accomplished army surgeon in an age where women were barred from universities, the medical profession and the army.

[alexthehunn · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A well-told account of Dr. Barry, definitely worth the read for the details of Barry's secret. An interesting look into details of Victorian colonial medicine.