QI The Book of the Dead

wombats were never likely to survive expert scrutiny.

     
    One who did survive expert scrutiny, unsuspected, and for an entire lifetime, was James Barry (1792–1865). Even without the concealment at its heart, Barry’s life would rank as extraordinary. Graduating as a doctor at thirteen, he joined the army and wasappointed assistant surgeon before his fifteenth birthday. His first posting was to Cape Town, where he became personal physician to the Governor, Sir Charles Somerset. In 1826 he found fame as the first British doctor to perform a successful caesarean section. Slightly built, and just above five feet tall, James Barry was also famous for his sharp tongue and quick temper, challenging several men to duels (though he never killed anyone). After tours of duty in Mauritius and Jamaica, he was posted to St Helena as resident surgeon. Here his argumentative streak led to a court martial for ‘conduct unbecoming’ and, although he was exonerated, he was sent home to England. In 1851 he was appointed deputy inspector-general of hospitals in Corfu, where his innovations in the hygiene and diet of patients set new standards that were to inspire Florence Nightingale. Barry was considered too senior to serve in the Crimea, but he nevertheless visited it and met the Lady with the Lamp, giving her the worst dressing down of her life. She was later to write: ‘I should say [he] was the most hardened creature I ever met throughout the army.’ After many more medical reforms and other successes, Barry was retired (against his wishes), settling in Marylebone, London, where he died of diarrhoea during an epidemic in 1865.
    He had left strict instructions that his body was to be left in the clothes he died in and sewn up in a sheet before his burial. Although the senior doctor had already examined him and signed his death certificate, as his corpse was being laid out, a female attendant noticed something unusual. It was the body of a woman – and one that had, at some point, borne a child. The funeral at St Paul’s went ahead regardless and Barry was buried (as a man) in Kensal Green cemetery, but the scandalous news soon leaked out. Some said Barry was a hermaphrodite, others that she was awoman; many refused to believe any such thing. But as there was no post-mortem, no definitive judgement could be made and the army decided to lock Barry’s records away for a century.
    Thanks to some heroic research in the 1950s by the historian Isobel Rae, we now know that James Barry was born Margaret Ann Bulkley, the daughter of a Cork grocer. She had started dressing as a boy from the age of ten. Her mother, Mary-Ann, was the sister of a real James Barry, a professor of painting at the Royal Academy. The family fell on hard times after Margaret’s father was gaoled for debt in 1803, so her mother and some influential friends of her uncle James conspired to smuggle her into medical school.
    The disappearance of Margaret Bulkley and the appearance of James Barry were carefully orchestrated. Mrs Bulkley and ‘James’ travelled up to Edinburgh posing as aunt and nephew, and the new ‘James Barry’ enrolled at university. To protect the secret, they cut themselves off from friends and family. Only the conspirators knew who they were. From then on, Margaret always wore an overcoat and lied about her age to avoid questions about her smooth chin and high voice. Her graduation in 1812, though no one suspected it at the time, made her the first woman to qualify as a doctor in Britain.
    As for the question of her baby, it seems likely that it was conceived as a result of her relationship with Lord Charles Somerset, governor of the Cape Colony. Their close friendship had given rise to rumours of a gay affair at the time, and Barry made an unexplained excursion to Mauritius for several months where it is possible she gave birth. No record of the fate of the child has survived and her mother, of course, never even so much as hinted at its existence.

    It’s barely credible that such a successful and public individual managed to conceal the secret of her sex for more than sixty years. The pressure to keep up appearances must have been extraordinary, and her aggressive demeanour part of that front. Once dismissed as a transvestite, or some sort of inter-sexual freak, neither description does justice to this astonishing person. Man enough to flirt with women, and feminine enough to give birth to her lover’s child, James Barry must rank