This is Dr. James Barry, (1789-99- 25 July 1865), military surgeon with the British Army, who is also thought to be the first British person female assigned at birth to become a qualified medical doctor.
Evidence points to him having been born Margaret Ann Bulkley in Ireland, probably in 1789, the niece of James Barry the Irish artist. Under financial pressure, and with no male relatives to support them, Margaret Ann’s mother appears to have hatched a plan with some of her brother’s influential and liberal-minded friends, to get the her child into medical school. They boarded a ship to Edinburgh in 1809 when Margaret-Ann was still known as a girl, and during the trip, the teenager assumed a new male identity.
Once in Edinburgh, Barry qualified with a medical doctorate in 1812, then moved to London, where he passed the exam for the Royal College of Surgeons and became a Regimental Assistant.
After becoming a hospital assistant for the army, Barry took posts in India, South Africa, Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago, Saint Helena, Malta, Corfu, the Crimea, Jamaica and Canada over the course of his career, working up to the rank of principal medical officer and, later, Inspector-General of hospitals (in Canada). Back at the beginning of this career, he may have served during the battle of Waterloo.
While in Cape Town, Barry arranged a better water system for the people and performed one of the first Caesarean Sections which both mother and child survived. Throughout his career, he worked to improve the healthcare of both troops and locals. In his position as Inspector-General in Canada, he fought for better food, sanitation and medical care for prisoners and lepers, as well as soldiers and their families.
While not always easy to get along with, having a reputation for being difficult (he got into a fight with Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, and reputedly fought a couple of duels when his voice, features or professionalism were commented on), Barry also had a reputation for his good bedside manner and his indignant reaction to people’s unnecessary suffering.
Barry died from dysentery, in England, in 1865. It was only then that the charwoman who took care of the body discovered his female anatomy and revealed this information after the funeral, though many claimed that they had known it all along. The British Army sealed all records for 100 years, and it was only in the 1950s that historian Isobel Rae gained access to the records and concluded that Barry had started out life as the niece of the painter James Barry.
