Dr. James Barry stands out in the annals of medical history. A surgeon in the British army, with a career that spanned the Napoleonic Wars to the Crimean War, the doctor was a tireless champion of the common soldier, fighting for good food, clean shelter, and trustworthy medications before Florence Nightingale ever arrived on the scene. In a time when abdominal surgery was risky and fairly uncommon, Dr. Barry won over the hearts of civilians in Cape Town by performing successful Cesarean sections. All of that should be enough for a claim to fame, but Dr. Barry's fame rests not so much in medical glory as it does in the fact that she was a woman.

To be sure, a woman masquerading as a man is an oddity, especially today. So, it's not altogether surprising that it's this aspect of Dr. Barry's life that has both made her famous and resulted in a lot of speculation about her. Judging from a quick Google search, she's been embraced by lesbians as one of their own. Now, comes a new biography by Rachel Holmes, Scanty Particulars: The Scandalous Life and Astonishing Secret of James Barry, Queen Victoria's Most Eminent Military Doctor which argues that she was a hermaphrodite.

But, to assume that she lived as she did because of sexual orientation or her biology is to ignore the circumstances of her times and of her life. After all, she lived in a time when the education of women was limited to such niceties as painting, music, and needlework; when women without fortunes or respectable families were virtually unmarriageable, at least in Dr. Barry's social circle, and when unmarriageable women without fortunes were impoverished women. Given the circumstances, it isn't too suprising that an uncommonly intelligent young girl of diminished means would be willing to live the life of a man for the chance to support herself doing something that she loved.

The particulars of Dr. Barry's early life are shrouded in mystery, and need a better historian than Rachel Holmes to unveil them. The author makes her first historical mistake with her subject's date of birth. Throwing out all evidence that Dr. Barry herself placed her birth around 1799, that boys in the 18th and early 19th century were sent to learn their chosen professions at early ages, and that those who knew James Barry early in her career often commented on her youth, she assigns her subject an age that is ten years older than most estimates. She also assigns to her the identity of Margaret Bulkley (who was most likely her older sister) on the basis of a handwriting comparison between a letter of Margaret's and the entry for James Barry in the ledger of St. Thomas Hospital. The problem is, the photograph of the ledger makes it clear that all its names are in the same handwriting. Either Margaret Bulkley/James Barry was able to assume several identities at once, or the entries in the ledger were made by a clerk, as was the custom for official records of the time.