As part of our occasional series profiling remarkable yet unheralded characters from history, introduces Dr James Barry, the medical pioneer and eminent surgeon to aristocracy, who was forced to conceal a fundamental fact – that ‘he’ was in fact a ‘she’.
On 25 July 1826, Dr James Barry was faced with a terrible decision – one that no surgeon ever wanted to make. In the middle of a lashing rainstorm, he’d been called out from Cape Town, where he was a surgeon with the British garrison, to attend to a Wilhelmina Munnik’s labour. The midwife had admitted defeat. A brief examination confirmed to Dr Barry that this baby would not be born in the normal way. A caesarean operation would have to be performed – a procedure invariably fatal to the mother, done only as a last resort to save the baby. Mrs Munnik, in an extremity of anguish, consented, and Dr Barry prepared his instruments. There was no anaesthetic; Mrs Munnik was held down firmly on the bed. With his renowned deftness, Dr Barry made the first incision – a long vertical cut from below the navel.
Nobody present knew that James Barry – described by Charles Dickens as a “fair faced slender youth”, who was “as clever as he was impudent” – was the only qualified surgeon in the world who knew from personal experience what childbirth was like. Beneath his military attire, this strangely small and smooth-skinned gentleman was in fact a woman. Through deceit and disguise she had become the first – and, for many decades, the only – woman to qualify and practise as a physician and surgeon.
Going undercover
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة February 2017 من BBC History Magazine.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة February 2017 من BBC History Magazine.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
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