Rachel Holmes

Rachel Holmes' Scanty Particulars is a compelling story of medicine, sexuality and Victorian imperialism. It deals with, and maybe solves, a wonderful nineteenth-century puzzle: what was the secret that the great Victorian surgeon Dr James Barry took to the grave? Here, Rachel Holmes tells us about her meeting with the ghost of Dr James Barry, his astonishing life and the unexpected secret she revealed while researching his untold story.

Dr James Barry ambushed me when my attention was focussed altogether elsewhere. The accidental encounter happened when I was on an academic research trip in Cape Town in 1991, guest lecturing at the University of the Western Cape and working on my PhD. This was the period of the Mass Action Campaigns, and a time of great political change and intellectual liberalisation in South Africa. Stories hidden from history by apartheid demanded reconsideration. Traces of the unusual life of this extraordinary nineteenth-century military surgeon kept winking at me in popular myths, from computer screens, in manuscript archives, on the forgotten shelves of second-hand bookshops. I quickly felt that Barry was actively pursuing me.

When finally I felt sure that I had encountered Barry’s ghost kitted out in Georgian military uniform at dusk on a beach at the foot of Table Mountain, it became clear that I had to give him my undivided attention. So began a journey that would last over a decade, and result in the biography Scanty Particulars.

Barry’s life, death and afterlife are astonishing. Born in mysterious circumstances around 1795, the young James Barry was supported by a group of radical Romantic mentors, including the revolutionary Francisco Miranda, the colourful liberator of Venezuela and proto-feminist Lord Buchan. He studied medicine at the prestigious Edinburgh medical school, and was hand picked by Sir Astley Cooper to work with him as a Pupil Dresser at Guy’s and St. Thomas’s. Barry was obsessively interested in human anatomy, dissection, gynaecology and obstetrics—all modern cutting-edge subjects regarded with suspicion by the medical establishment.

Barry joined the army as a military surgeon in 1813. In 1816 he was posted to the new British colony of the Cape of Good Hope, where he became personal physician to the Governor, Lord Charles Somerset. In the Cape—as elsewhere in his manifold foreign postings—he undertook intense programmes of unprecedented humanitarian medical reforms, including overhauling the leper colony and the treatment of slaves and women in the colony. Barry was constantly in trouble with the authorities over challenging the treatment of black people and women. Whilst in Cape Town Barry performed one of what is believed to be the first successful caesarean section known to western medicine, without anaesthetic or any practical instruction in the operation.

In 1824 Barry was infamously embroiled in a sodomy scandal with Somerset, a controversy hotly debated in the House of Commons. During this period, Barry also undertook significant research into the treatment of STDs, and produced a groundbreaking report on the modern treatment of syphilis and gonorrhoea. Barry left the Cape to pursue an exotic career across the British Empire; in Mauritius, Jamaica (he was there during the 1831-32 slave uprising and here experienced his first active service, St Helena (where he was court martialled, twice), and a range of further postings in the West Indies, Corfu, Malta, and the Crimea where he famously collided with Florence Nightingale.

His last posting was to Canada, which he resented due to the cold climate, but where he continued with his signature reforming zeal. Everywhere Barry went he was accompanied by a black servant known as Dantzen, and a succession of white poodles, always called Psyche. This perpetual globetrotting presented a practical research challenge. In researching every facet of Barry’s story, I needed to visit as many of his numerous posts as I could. So began my Barry World Tour. It was enormous fun. There is much to be learned by following in the geographical footsteps of intrepid, perpetual travellers like Barry, in places where there are no formal archives, there remain obscure and unexpected traces—in folklore, written in the landscape and in buildings and sometimes in small, dusty one-room museums. I remain awed by the fortitude and energy Barry’s lifestyle and beliefs required.

When Barry died in London in 1865, he had reached the highest rank attainable for a military surgeon, Inspector General of Hospitals. Within two weeks of his death and despite the efforts of the military authorities to quash the rumours, a national scandal erupted in the press. Sophia Bishop, the maidservant who laid Barry out claimed that the celebrated Doctor was in fact a woman. So began a debate about Barry’s identity that has continued to the present day. Obsessed by Barry, I wrung the facts out of every source I could find and found the evidence of Barry’s untold story. Over two centuries a thousand legends had built up around his name. I wanted to see what happened when Barry was put back into historical context and his story told in all its irreducible complexity. Over ten years I traced the mysterious genealogy of Barry’s life and career, and found an even more unexpected secret. Scanty Particulars is the story of the discovery of this secret.

What are your top 5 biographies?

Ruth First and Ann Scott Olive Schreiner
Janet Malcolm The Silent Woman
Gertrude Stein The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas
Diana Souhami Gluck
Peter Alexander William Plomer

(If I could have 6, I would include Ackroyd’s Dickens)

Which writers did you most admire growing up?

Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde, Katherine Mansfield, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Dambudzo Marechera, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Olive Schreiner, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Jean Rhys, Mary Renault, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Buchan, Emily Dickinson.

What are you reading now, or looking forward to reading?

Adam Hochschild King Leopold's Ghost
Roy Richard Grinker In the Arms of Africa : The Life of Colin M. Turnbull
Margaret Atwood Negotiating With The Dead
Achmat Dangor Bitter Fruit
William Boyd Any Human Heart
Jaroslav Hasek The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War

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