Dr. James Barry was born in 1795 and died in 1865, having risen to the rank of Inspector General of the Army Medical Department. When the doctor's death took place, in London, it was officially reported that the body was that of a woman. Throughout a long and distinguished medical career, a great part of which was passed in the Colonies, she had kept up this deception. She had been a medical student in hard-drinking Edinburgh, had shared cabins with men in sailing ships, had fought at least one duel. She is known to have assisted into the world, according to the authors' statement, by means of a Caesarian operation, a boy who was given her name, James Barry Munnik; and that boy's grandson is James Barry Hertzog, Prime Minister of South Africa. But these and a few other comparatively small incidents are all that is definitely known about her.
The authors of this book have set out to make an imaginative reconstruction of her life. In a sense, therefore, their work is of the same nature as Miss Margaret Irwin's "Royal Flush", except that they have not a tithe of her material to go upon. It cannot be said that their story rivals hers in charm or brilliance, yet it is good work. Many of the characters live, and the chief one becomes almost a familiar friend by the time the tale is told. Lord Charles Somerset, Governor at the Cape during the period of Dr. Barry's appointment, is also admirably drawn. The version here given is that Dr. Barry was a married woman, wife of a man of importance but a brute, and that Lord Charles, the only person in the world who knew her secret, was her patron and backer. It was he who obtained for her the appointment of Army Surgeon at the Cape and supported her in her attempts to reform medical administration there. She tells her story herself in an imaginary journal, which is extremely natural and might almost be taken to be authentic. A bustling, fiery character she must have been, if Miss Racster and Miss Grove have correctly interpreted her. At all events they take care to make it plain that, though all her actions were inspired by high motives, she was difficult to have to do with. A complication, which they may or may not have invented, was that all the young women, from the Governor's daughters downwards, fell in love with the dapper and handsome little doctor, who had a reputation as a breaker of hearts. The "journal" covers only a very few years of Dr. Barry's life, a few months in Edinburgh and the short period of her appointment at the Cape; but her death, nearly fifty years afterwards, is described by an old friend of South African days, General Sir Joshua Cloete.
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