1870: The Late Dr. James Barry
I have lately been reminded—by the most astonishing obituary—that the late Dr. James Barry, that paragon of surgical proportion and military temper, has been discovered, posthumously, to have been a woman all along. A woman! The newspapers, bless them, have taken to printing the word in italics, as if it were a contagion.
Well, of course. We all knew. Or at least, we suspected—with the same quiet conviction with which one suspects one’s second husband of collecting one’s pearls. Indeed, I faintly recall a discreet subscription fund some twenty years ago—“for the Doctor’s peculiar wardrobe requirements.” The note was undated, the ink perfumed, the handwriting distinctly governessy. We all participated, naturally. It was what one did when the matter was too scandalous to ignore, yet too admirable to condemn.
Allow me a small confession: I admired Dr. Barry thoroughly. Energetic, impertinent, tireless. I once saw the Doctor cross a ballroom as if wading through his own battlefield of supplicants—officers sweating, widows fluttering, a colonel’s wife attempting to look faint. That was before anyone considered searching the good man’s form. The word “form,” one notices, is used by medics and hostesses alike when prying.
The Morning Post this week—perhaps misprinted, perhaps prophetic—remarked that “The discovery constitutes a singular insult to masculine merit.” Quite so. What an embarrassment that a woman must feign virility merely to be judged competent. Although, between ourselves, most men feign it also—they simply never have the discipline to keep the secret tidy.
Such polish, such finish—ah, that word again; it follows me through every discourse. The Doctor’s self-concealment was not deceit; it was refinement of the deepest order. Entire lives are polished into illusions, generally by men who call it empire. Dr. Barry polished a body into authority and succeeded, which is, I grant you, almost indecently artistic.
I found a scrap yesterday from The Gazette of Hospital Affairs (August, 1865), noting “Dr. Barry, Inspector of Military Hospitals, conducted operations in the Crimea with unequalled vigour, his temper approaching combustion.” We called it choleric then; now we would call it inconvenient. There is no greater sin in a woman than energy directed outward. Had anyone suspected, they’d have prescribed rest and morphia upon the instant. Instead, they saluted.
A retired bishop’s wife—whom I shall not name, out of charity—declared to me at tea, “It is monstrous… an inversion of Creation.” I replied that the Creation was already inverted; only the actors refuse to notice. My remark was received coolly, so I offered her cream. She declined.
Of course, Parliament trembled briefly, then moved on to railway subsidies. Public shock is such a fragile material; it wrinkles, repairs, and by luncheon fades into curiosity. The periodicals, eager to appear both virtuous and informed, publish contradictory treatises: Physiological Anomalies and Their Moral Bearings by a Mr. Trutch (a man, naturally, never anomalous himself), claims that the “Barry business” proves women’s bodies are inherently deceptive; while an unsigned article in The Lancet performed the opposite absurdity, proclaiming Barry a “miracle of masculine imitativeness.” They cannot bear to imagine competence without whiskers.
A curious footnote: a pamphlet from Edinburgh—Notes on the Late Dr. Barry and the Question of Natural Hermaphroditism—suggests that perhaps the body discovered was “ambiguous.” How dutifully the age uses ambiguity to avert reflection. Heaven forbid the case merely demonstrate that identity is not conferred by decree, but by endurance.
More entertaining still, the servants. The charwoman who made the discovery (Mrs. D—, of Pimlico; she is now quite famous among the lower orders) reportedly swooned, revived, and demanded “a biblical explanation.” When none appeared, she sold her statement to Reynolds’s Weekly News for five guineas. It was later abridged to remove the phrase “neatly kept and evidently trained.” Decorum, it seems, still edits anatomy.
I have heard whispers—unsubstantiated, though delicious—that Her Majesty herself remarked: “I would not have the thing spoken of.” Admirable economy of language. I rather wish she had been so efficient during the Mutiny.
Whatever the opinion of princes, one must acknowledge that Dr. Barry performed, with ruthless elegance, what a thousand sermons fail to achieve: the reconciliation of power and grace. She delighted in contradiction; he was contradiction perfectly rehearsed. What, after all, distinguishes soldier from actress? The costume budget.
Should one be disturbed that the profession was deceived? Hardly. The profession deceives us daily. These gentlemen “of medicine” who condemn their protean colleague would diagnose hysteria in the Medusa herself if it reassured them she was sterile. Yet one of their own marched, commanded, bullied, and healed—without permission—and they address this now as if morality were a surgical instrument.
I find the mania delicious. The Reverend Pottle of Thorpe has declared from his pulpit that “Gender inversion will doom the soul.” Which suggests to me that the soul is bound to its wardrobe. No surprise from a man whose entire vocation depends on robes.
Let us not pretend to astonishment. History overflows with such deceptions. In my aunt’s youth there was Captain Brewer, who turned out to be a dairymaid, and Drusilla Price, who kept a successful school under the name of Mr. Pryce until one of her pupils proposed to her. Why, even my grandmother claimed the Duc de L—— was “two-thirds illusion.” It is the only reliable arithmetic in politics.
I tell you, my friends, one almost wonders whether men exist at all, or only a succession of determined women in borrowed trousers. A lady in disguise, at least, knows her seams. A man, concealed from himself, stumbles forever in his own garment.
A final curiosity: a circular issued by the Army Medical Board in 1866 politely requested that “no correspondence concerning the late Dr. Barry be entertained.” Which is precisely how the English commemorate greatness—by filing it away between regulations. I propose, instead, that we toast it. Barry merits not silence, but style.
And so, this evening, after prayers and whatever passes for supper, raise your glasses (crystal, naturally; the vulgar use tumbler) and drink to the finest deception of the Empire—one conducted not to defraud, but to achieve. For the truth, as we see, must sometimes be dressed to attend dinner.
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