9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Dandy Medical Reformer with a Secret, February 17, 2003
This review is from: Scanty Particulars: The Scandalous Life and Astonishing Secret of James Barry, Queen Victoria's Most Eminent Military Doctor (Hardcover)
With the attention that we pay these days to sexual issues, and sexual inclinations, and with the increasing realization that there are anatomical and psychological gradations in the spectrum between strictly male and strictly female, it was a sure thing that someone would be retelling the story of Dr. James Barry, one of the truly unique characters of the Victorian era. Rachel Holmes has done so in _Scanty Particulars: The Scandalous Life and Astonishing Secret of Queen Victoria's Most Eminent Military Doctor_ (Random House). Barry's story would have been worth retelling anyway; he was a crusading medical reformer who insisted on novel ideas about health and the running of hospitals that we now take for granted. He made plenty of friends and enemies, many highly placed, and no one seems to have known his secret when he died, although there were those who came out afterwards to say they had known all along. Holmes hints at it throughout her fully researched biography, but does not reveal it until after she has told all that can be known of Barry's eventful life; there will be no explicit spoiler in this review.
Barry was born about 1790 in Edinburgh, the "about" being necessary because his origins are murky and part of his secret. He was a precocious medical student at the University of Edinburgh, which was then at the height of its international prestige for its practical and academic study of diseases. He graduated from the university in 1812, and then served his apprenticeship in London. He was a fashionable dandy, dying his hair red, sporting the longest dress sword he could find, and wearing boots with the highest heels. He was a flirt with all the ladies, and he never seems to have courted any of them. He never married. He was posted as an army doctor in a series of far-flung outposts of the British Empire. He eventually became a medical inspector, with the power to report on the treatment of prisoners and lepers; he refused to accept the hellish accommodations offered such outcasts and would not back down in his reports. His reforms included an insistence on fresh air, good diet (he advocated vegetables especially, as he was a vegetarian), and cleanliness. He extended his protection to slaves, prostitutes, children, and the mentally ill. Holmes says that he was "a radical and progressive modernizer in an age of quacks and mountebanks."
In 1865, afflicted by diseases he had himself picked up during his long battles against them, he died in retirement in England. His tutors before him had decreed that their bodies be given up for autopsy and dissection, and Barry would have been expected to have done the same. However, he repeatedly had insisted that he simply be wrapped in whatever sheets he died upon and buried with no ceremony. (A maidservant, however, saw the body, and her report led to sensational, and naturally erroneous, claims in the press.) He had also been reluctant to be examined by any medical men, and had been fussy about being seen while dressing. Holmes's findings on the truth about Barry are consistent with his life devoted to science and anatomy. There will be no sure answers to the sexual riddle Barry poses, Holmes admits, but her speculations based on Barry's writings, especially his medical writings, are satisfying. _Scanty Particulars_ gives an eventual answer to the puzzle of Barry's "astonishing secret," but even without this key, it is an entertaining biography that includes fascinating details of colony life and of medical practice of the time.
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0 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dandies!!!, December 15, 2003
This review is from: Scanty Particulars: The Scandalous Life and Astonishing Secret of James Barry, Queen Victoria's Most Eminent Military Doctor (Hardcover)
Nothing like a good "dandy" scandal to heat one's blood!!!!
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