A Surgeon With A Secret

As part of our occasional series profiling remarkable yet unheralded characters from history, Jeremy Dronfield 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’

- Jeremy Dronfield

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 “fairfaced 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

Her real name was Margaret Anne Bulkley, born in Cork, Ireland, in c1789, the daughter of a hapless shopkeeper who ended up in a debtors’ jail. Margaret was a brilliantly intelligent and bold girl. At the age of 19, having borne a child (the result of a rape at the hands of a dissolute uncle) and with no prospect other than a bleak life as a governess, she audaciously disguised herself as a man in order to study medicine.