ALTHOUGH THE NOTION of a female Pope has no foundation (see here), some women have mounted spectacular cross-dressing frauds of considerable endurance, and none more so than the girl who rose to high rank in the nineteenth-century British Army.
With her name, date of birth and parentage still debated to this day, the girl who was to become Dr James Barry was born in Cork, perhaps in 1789 or 1792, and raised in the London-based artistic commune presided over by the influential Irish artist James Barry. Also in that group was Mary Ann Bulkley, the artist’s sister, referred to by the young Barry as her aunt although some suspect she was in fact her mother. Also in the coterie were the exiled Venezuelan revolutionary General Francisco de Miranda and David Steuart Erskine, the 11th Earl of Buchan. Peripheral to the group were more stable and powerful figures such as Fitzroy Somerset, better known as Lord Raglan, and his brother, Lord Charles Somerset, later Governor of the Cape Colony in South Africa. In short, the girl, then going by the name of Margaret, was raised with some extremely well-connected strings to pull in later life.
At some later point she abandoned the use of Margaret, choosing instead to be known as Miranda after the general who, along with Erskine, a dedicated if slightly eccentric proponent of women’s rights to education, strongly advised his namesake that if she really wanted to study medicine, as was her avowed intention, then she would only succeed if she adopted a male persona. At the time this ruse was mooted, it would be another fifty-odd years before women were allowed to study and practise medicine: the UK’s first openly female doctor, Elizabeth Garrett, qualified in 1865. Either way, whether the ‘game’ started as a joke or as some misguided sociological experiment by Erskine, this now set the pattern for Miranda’s life. Cram-tutored by Dr Edward Fryer, who had attended the artist James Barry in his last and fatal illness, Miranda soaked up medical knowledge at such an alarming rate that, under the name of James Miranda Steuart Barry, she entered the Medical School of Edinburgh University in November 1809. Short of stature, slight of build and delicate of features, some in the faculty smelled a rat – but the wrong rat. They thought the sylph-like Barry to be but a boy and thus too young to take the final exams in 1812. But Erskine, claiming to know for sure that Barry was of age, browbeat the faculty into relenting. Barry sat her finals to pass out top of class with a thesis on femoral hernias which, dedicated to Erskine, she wrote entirely in Latin, just to prove her point.
Returning to London for further training at Guy’s and St Thomas’, Barry, still in her late teens or early twenties, was admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1813 before joining the Army Medical Department, where she proved extremely able but also extremely unpopular. Foulmouthed and given to a candour bordering on callous indifference, Barry felt no restraint in criticizing others for their error or inefficiency – whatever their rank – but those upon whom she unleashed her spleen felt they had no choice but to endure such humiliations because of the influence Barry so obviously wielded throughout Whitehall in particular and London in general. In 1816, by which time Barry held the rank of Lieutenant-Surgeon, she was posted to Cape Town in South Africa for attachment to the Table Bay Military Hospital as an assistant surgeon. Wasting no time on pleasantries, on arrival she immediately informed her senior officer, Surgeon-Major McNab, that she would not be needing the meagre quarters assigned her as she would be staying at the Governor’s residence.
Over the following decade, Barry and the Governor, Lord Charles Somerset, grew close, so close in fact that Cape Town gossip was soon buzzing with speculation of a homosexual affair. And that gossip kicked into overdrive after Somerset appointed the junior Barry to the position of Inspector General of all medical facilities in the province. Perhaps their relationship did extend to the physical; upon her death Barry was discovered to have stretch marks and, in 1819, she suddenly quit Cape Town for Britain and went into hiding for several months, both suggestive of pregnancy. She also went AWOL in 1829 to return to England to tend to the stricken Lord Charles Somerset, who had quit the governorship in 1826 due to ill health. These were not her only bouts of absenteeism, any one of which would have seen another officer facing court martial. Yet not once was Barry so much as questioned over her abandonments of post.
Her high-handed approach to military life aside, her work in South Africa was exemplary. Years ahead of her time, she instituted stringent hygiene regimes in all military hospitals as well as a healthcare plan for the families of all serving soldiers. On 25 July 1826, in a rushed operation on a kitchen table, she performed the first documented successful Caesarean section by a European, on Wilhelmina Munnik, the wife of Thomas Munnik, a local merchant. This was one of the first such procedures in which both mother and child survived, and the grateful couple named the child James Barry Munnik. That boy’s descendant, James Barry Munnik Hertzog, would later serve as Prime Minister of South Africa between 1924–39. As to Barry’s personal life, this was at best contradictory. She was always extremely popular with the ladies who found ‘him’ easy to talk to; no surprise there! She was also an outrageous flirt and once had to fight a pistol duel with Captain Josias Cloete, aide-de-camp to the Governor, after being over-familiar with the Captain’s lady friend. Both survived to become the best of friends.
CLASHES WITH FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
In 1854, during the Crimean War, Dr Barry instituted her stringent hygiene regimes to such an extent that the wounded treated in facilities under her direct control enjoyed the highest survival rates of the war. Her advanced thinking on how a hospital should be run caused repeated and hostile clashes with Florence Nightingale. Nightingale was an adherent of the Miasma theory, holding that all diseases and infections were caused by foul vapours; she would later lampoon Louis Pasteur for his suggestion that disease was caused by germs. Barry and Nightingale, whose unit had one of the highest death rates in the Crimea, frequently came to loggerheads with the latter describing ‘him’ as ‘the most brutish person I have ever met’.
After a brief tour of duty in Canada, and having reached the rank of Inspector General of Military Hospitals, the equivalent of Brigadier General, Barry was invalided back to London where, on 25 July 1865, she died. She had left explicit instructions that she was to be buried immediately in the clothes in which she expired but a charwoman, Sophia Bishop, decided to ignore this and lay her out properly. She had already seen more than enough by the time Surgeon-Major D. R. McKinnon arrived to bundle her out of the room before issuing a death certificate stating Barry to have been a male deceased of dysentery. Hot on McKinnon’s heels came a squad of the Victorian era’s equivalent of the Special Branch, who arrived in unmarked carriages to remove every last scrap of paper from Barry’s Marylebone home, and most of her personal items. Barry’s Jamaican manservant, John, was cautioned in the strongest possible terms to forget anything he had heard or seen before being handed an envelope of money and a one-way ticket home, and being taken straight to the docks in one of the carriages. Held under virtual arrest in his cabin by three black-clad Victorian heavies until his ship was due to depart, he was never heard from again.
A few days later, Sophia Bishop visited McKinnon to demand payment for her own silence and, when he threw her out on her ear, she went straight to the newspapers to tell her story. But by this time Barry had been buried with full military honours in London’s Kensal Green Cemetery and all her records mysteriously disappeared from the War Office; it was as if the good Doctor Barry never existed. As one might imagine, there has been much lurid speculation as to the real identity of James Miranda Steuart Barry; was she the product of some illicit royal dalliance? She certainly had some seriously powerful people watching over her life.