James Barry (born Margaret Anne Bulkley, or Bulkeley; – 25 July 1865) was a military surgeon in the British Army. Originally from the city of Cork in Ireland, Barry obtained a medical degree from the University of Edinburgh Medical School, then served first in Cape Town, South Africa, and subsequently in many parts of the British Empire. Before retirement, Barry had risen to the rank of Inspector General (equivalent to Brigadier) in charge of military hospitals, the second-highest medical office in the British Army. Barry not only improved conditions for wounded soldiers, but also the conditions of the native inhabitants, and performed the first recorded caesarean section by a European in Africa in which both the mother and child survived the operation.
Although Barry's entire adult life was lived as a man, Barry was named Margaret Anne at birth and was known as female in childhood. Barry lived as a man in both public and private life, at least in part in order to be accepted as a university student, and to pursue a career as a surgeon. Barry's anatomy became known to the public and to military colleagues only after a post-mortem examination.
Early life
Other than some personal correspondence, there are few sources of information about the non-military parts of Barry's life. The scant available evidence provides a skeleton onto which a great deal of myth and speculation has been added by various commentators. In his detailed research into Barry's early life, Michael du Preez states that Barry was born in Cork in 1789, a birth date based on Mrs Bulkley's description of her child being fifteen years old in a letter dated 14 January 1805. Various other sources give birth dates of 1792, 1795, and 1799, but these dates are almost certainly the result of Barry later lying on official documents to aid passing as a man.
Barry was the second child born to Jeremiah and Mary Anne Bulkley, and was given the name Margaret Anne. Mary Anne Bulkley was the sister of James Barry, a celebrated Irish artist and professor of painting at London's Royal Academy. Jeremiah Bulkley ran the weigh house in Merchant's Quay, Cork. However, anti-Catholic sentiment led to his dismissal from this post. This and subsequent financial mismanagement left Mary Anne and Barry without the support of either Jeremiah Bulkley (whose debts led to him spending time in the Marshalsea debtors' prison in Dublin) or later the Bulkleys' married son John.
A third child appeared in the Bulkley family and was named Juliana. Although presented as being Barry's sister, it has been speculated that Juliana Bulkley was Barry's daughter as a result of childhood sexual assault, as after Barry's death the charwoman who discovered Barry's sex when laying out the body reported that pregnancy stretch marks were present. However, there is no tangible historical evidence to support this theory of childhood sexual assault, and a number of circumstances – such as Barry's father ejecting his wife and child from their home around the period in question, and a later letter informing his wife that he had "made up [his] mind to forgive" – make this appear unlikely. Given these circumstances, it has been suggested that, if anything, Juliana may have been the result of an affair on the part of Barry's mother.
Mother and child left Ireland for London in 1804, when Barry would have been about fifteen years old, to apply to Mary Anne Bulkley's brother, James Barry RA, for help. Professor Barry rejected them, having been estranged from his sister for more than thirty years. However, his death in 1806 and the resulting inheritance, as well as assistance from some of the artist's former friends, allowed Mrs Bulkley and her teenager a degree of comfort.
The teenage Barry was educated with the prospect of becoming a tutor, but given a lack of evidence of any work history, the Bulkleys appear to have struggled to find Barry any suitable tutoring positions. A plan appears to have developed between Barry, Mary Anne Bulkley, and her late brother's influential, liberal-minded friends (General Francisco de Miranda, Edward Fryer, who had become young Barry's personal tutor, and Daniel Reardon, the family's solicitor) to enable Barry to enter medical school. The University of Edinburgh was chosen and Mary Anne and Barry boarded a Leith smack on 30 November 1809.