What Killed Jane Austen?: And Other Medical Mysteries Read Online Free PDF Page A

think the latter. Pity!
    (JL)

2
Eccentrics, Reformers and Pioneers
The bizarre affair of James Barry
    For a woman to succeed in a man’s world, she has to be twice as good as a man. Luckily, this is not too hard! (Anonymous)
    About 1795, a daughter was born to the Barry family in London. For some reason, it was an aunt and uncle who raised her. The latter, a well-known painter, James Barry, believed in encouraging both males and females to achieve their potential. But this gem of an uncle died when the girl was only 11. She took her love of learning from him, and also his given name.
    At 15, ‘James’ and the aunt moved to Edinburgh, where she passed herself off as a male to join the University Medical School. No way could she have done so as a female; that milestone was still over half a century away.
    Though fellow-students teased her about her slight build and hairless chin, she kept her secret safe. Her only close friend wanted to teach James to box, but she learnt the rapier instead.
    At 17, she completed a brilliant thesis on hernias. At the early age of 20, she gained her MD by defending this thesis against interrogation by the whole faculty, and by discussing two of Hippocrates’ Aphorisms. Much of this, of course, was in Latin!
    In 1813, she somehow avoided the usual physical examination, satisfied the Army Medical Board, and started on her lifetime career in military medicine.
    Soon she distinguished herself at the Battle of Waterloo.
    Next she coped well with a cholera epidemic at Cape Town. There she also saved a mother and child by performing a Caesarean delivery. Well before the time of antiseptics and anaesthetics, this was an exceptional outcome. Soon she rose to become private physician to the governor of Cape Town.
    Wearing high-heeled boots and satin waistcoats with padded shoulders, James won the favour of many ladies. Since she excelled at duels, the men didn’t dare rib her about her high voice or the little dog she always kept with her.
    By 1821, as colonial medical inspector, James was able to raise the level of medical care. For example, she decreed that only physicians or apothecaries should prescribe drugs, saying: ‘Pedlars and hawkers of drugs … do more real injury … than the most virulent diseases.’ She also drafted the enlightened Rules for the General Treatment of Lepers and complained to the governor about floggings at the prison.
    Naturally such a stirrer made enemies. Headstrong and quarrelsome, James herself often went to prison for breaches of discipline, but never for long.
    In 1845, aged 50, she got the dreaded yellow fever. James forbade her colleagues from calling on her, and asked that if she did die, she should be buried fully dressed. But her assistant did visit while she was delirious and saw that James was no man. When James came to, she swore her assistant to secrecy.
    After a year’s sick leave she returned to duty. During the Crimean War, 400 of the 500 wounded in her hospital recovered; another exceptional result. At 62, as inspector general of all British Army Hospitals in Canada, she worked to improve the food, water and hygiene in her camps.
    When she died at 71, they found on the bedpost the sheet she had worn to flatten her breasts. Her unsuspecting valet had served her for 40 years.
    Had the army followed her request for instant burial in a sack, James would have taken her secret with her to the grave. But they called in a charwoman to lay out the body. She was furious: ‘What do you mean by calling me to lay out a general, and the corpse is a woman’s, and one who has borne a child?’
    The army authorities continued the deception; both her death certificate and her tombstone show her as a male. But there were many red faces at the War Office when her obituary appeared in the Manchester Guardian :
    Officers … may remember … Dr Barry … enjoy[ed] a reputation for Considerable skill … in difficult operations. This gentleman had entered the army in