An Excellent Surgeon

While serving in Africa, Dr. Barry was responsible for improving quality of care for soldiers wounded in battle as well as for the area’s domestic population, even performing the first successful caesarean section in which both the mother and her baby survived.

Despite living as a man in adulthood, Dr. James Barry had a very deep secret…

A Woman in Hiding

Dr. James Barry was born Margaret Ann Bulkley in Ireland in 1789. Barry went on with life as a man in both professional and private life. What drove the doctor to go to great lengths to conceal being a woman stems from Ireland’s strict laws forbidding females to engage in the practice of the medical arts. Margaret Ann Bulkley, forced to take on her uncle’s identity as a means to help her family financially, entered medical school disguised as a man but did extremely well that colleagues and professors shrugged off what suspicions they had in the beginning.

But no secret remains undiscovered…