Scanty Particulars : The Scandalous Life and Astonishing Secret of Queen Victoria's Most Eminent Military Doctor

by HOLMES, RACHEL

• ISBN13: 9780375505560
• ISBN10: 0375505563
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-01-07
• Publisher: Random House

Summary

An explosive story of colonial life, nineteenth-century science, and the mysteries of sexuality, Rachel Holmes's Scanty Particulars transcends the genre of biography. Through prodigious research and vivid storytelling, Holmes brings to life one of the most enigmatic figures of his time. In the 1820s, Dr. James Barry burst into the English establishment from nowhere. He landed in Cape Town and became the leading military doctor in the South African colony, working tirelessly to improve the conditions of free and enslaved women, lepers, and the indigent. Barry's further travels included postings to the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and Canada. In his career, he collided with some of the leading figures of the age, and his exploits were regarded with fascination by Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. Barry was a flamboyant bon vivant: fashionably dressed, flirtatious, and always accompanied by a poodle. Wherever he went, he sparked gossip, made enemies, and inspired relentless curiosity about his identity--curiosity that erupted into international scandal upon Barry's death, when his maidservant discovered the truth about this brilliant but mysterious icon of the Victorian age.

Author Biography

Rachel Holmes attended King's College, London, and received her doctorate from Queen Mary and Westfield College, London. She has held professorships at the University of London and the University of Sussex. She judged the 2000 Whitbread Novel Award and the 2001 Orange Prize for Fiction. She writes for many newspapers and journals, and is a frequent broadcaster. She resides in London, where she is completing a biography of Saartjie Baartman, the Hottentot Venus.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Betwixt-and-Between	3	(26)
``An eagle's eye, a lady's hand, and a lion's heart''	29	(22)
An Absolute Phenomenon	51	(34)
Sieketroost	85	(34)
Sacrificed to Infamy	119	(33)
``My good name''	152	(17)
Doctor Jamaica	169	(26)
Insular Obsessions	195	(30)
The Last Post	225	(23)
Beyond a Doubt	248	(41)
Habeas Corpus	289	(20)
Epilogue	309	(8)
Acknowledgments	317	(4)
Select Bibliography	321	(4)
Notes	325	(18)
Index	343

Excerpts

Chapter 1

Betwixt-and-Between

"Then I shan't be exactly a human?" Peter asked.

"No."

"Nor exactly a bird?"

"No."

"What shall I be?"

"You will be a Betwixt-and-Between," Solomon said, and certainly he was a wise old fellow, for that is exactly how it turned out.

Sir James Matthew Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens in the frozen heart of winter, a slight figure veered
along the pavements of Edinburgh Old Town. With hands thrust deep into the pockets of a man's greatcoat, the body of the young medical student was concealed completely. Only his head was visible. The night was cold and still. Streetlamps lit his way between the grand monumental portals and pillars of the University of Edinburgh. As if drunk, he lurched with an unsteady gait toward his lodgings in Lothian Street. Self-conscious about staggering on a public street, he tried to regain the more confident composure of his usual strut.

It was the winter of 1810 and James Barry, medical and literary student of the University of Edinburgh, had just attended his first lecture in anatomical dissection with his tutor, the famously "horrid" Mr. Fyfe. His sickened body hastened through the streets away from Fyfe's dissection room as if pursued by death and her grotesque procession. Yet his mind raced back to the scene he had just left, drawn by an intoxicating concoction of horror and curiosity.

He recalled the scene like a demonic dream. A room of instruments and shadows, the temperature of a meat locker, somewhere between an artist's studio and a butcher's shop. The air clammy with malodorous condensation. Mr. Fyfe's three greenhorn students huddled in a group, uncertain of the etiquette for approaching the dissecting table, on which a body was laid out beneath greasy sheeting. Fyfe ushered them forward, stationing each with a clear view-and smell-of the cadaver. This uncomfortably intimate proximity to a corpse not yet three days old and of uncertain origin was the privilege the students paid for in signing up with Fyfe as private pupils. A select audience of young gentlemen, with the best view in an exclusive house, were suddenly and horribly fearful of seeing what their money had paid for.

The terrifying experience was optional. Practical dissection was not a compulsory part of the medical degree for which Barry had registered. While required to be proficient in written and spoken Latin, classics, and philosophy, he did not have to do applied dissection. He could have qualified by learning his anatomy from lavishly printed textbooks. But James Barry had a particular fascination with the study of anatomy, with the folds and secrets of the flesh. He breathed hard through his mouth, fighting back panic as Fyfe lifted the sheet, revealing a loose architecture of bones held together with a worn tarpaulin of skin, like an old, patched sail clinging respectfully to the mainmast in memory of prouder times. Age and the shrunken size of the body in death composed Barry's first impressions. He struggled to translate the clean and figuratively precise lines of his anatomical textbooks into the irregular landscape of the purplish swollen body laid out before him. These and his childhood imaginings, swathed in Catholicism, had left him vaguely expecting that a dissection corpse would be luminous and sepulchral, modest even. In reality, the raw material for the surgeon's knives and saws was gray, graceless, and lumpen.

Heart thumping, temperature rising with the bile in his throat, in this claustrophobic space the only heat he could feel was his own. Yet in Fyfe's chilly, candlelit rooms, James Barry's cold sweat of dread turned to the heated flush of fascination. The lamplit faces of the students began to shine with curiosity, bravado, and fear as Fyfe cauterized the body. He spoke in a clear, neutral tone aimed at reassurance as he made his first incision, along the clavicum and sternum, in order to demonstrate the anatomy of the neck and throat. As he made another incision from the top of the sternum to the chin, Barry's startled attention was drawn to the face of the corpse. Stripped of the animation of everyday life, it was a face unsexed.

The blade sank into the flesh, and blood seeped up against the knife. Fyfe drew up the tough fascia with his forceps and began to describe the anatomical map of muscle and glands within. Barry's fascination deepened as the body was opened and splayed out into a three-dimensional space under his gaze. Fyfe lifted skin and fascia. Inky blood welled over the slashed binding of heavy skin; the body disclosed its interior. The external body disappeared. It was confusing to Barry. Without the boundary of the skin to navigate by, the eye lost its bearings. A chaotic topography reigned within. Barry wondered how he would ever learn to distinguish the fibers, membranes, tendons, tissues, arteries, nerves, and vessels sketched by Fyfe's knife. The organs that make so much difference to life were gray and indistinguishable in death.

The flint slish of his tutor's knife was hypnotic. Barry could not take his eyes from the complicated, messy, and stinking body stretched before him. The foul stench saturated the air. As Fyfe wiped fluids from his hand and reached for a saw, Barry became conscious of a curious new emotion-the absence of any appropriate feeling of horror. This, then, was the state of "necessary inhumanity" required to attain this knowledge.

Keen to make the fullest use of the body, Fyfe offered a dissection of the lower torso and pelvis. He decided to leave the legs for another session, since the night was drawing on. Fyfe eviscerated the pelvis, revealing the shadowed cavity of the cervix and the muscular coat of the uterus, grayish in color. Superfluous membrane slipped back to reveal the subcutaneous folds of the groin. He pointed to the anomaly of some thick flesh-colored tubercles.

Fyfe's knife made shapes out of the gray matter of the anonymous body like a painter picking out an invisible line with a fine sable brush.

Barry was looking at the inverted mirror of a woman's body. A life anatomized. The scalpel cut a swath through the history of the corpse, revealing its physiological secrets to the students. Barry discovered things unknown to the woman during her recently ended life. Yet for all this revelation of the messy flesh, the body was stubborn in its silence. A female body devoid of inhibition in front of an uninvited group of closely observing male strangers.

Mr. Fyfe concluded his demonstration by asking the students if they would like to take a little commemorative souvenir before he covered the leavings. John Jobson, Barry's friend, gamely chose an ear. Barry demurred. He already had everything he needed to take away from the experience. He was determined to become an anatomical explorer, adept at navigating the body through the secrets of surgery.

The young student approached the lodgings where he stayed with his guardian, Mrs. Mary Anne Bulkley. He was relieved that the ordeal was over, yet scintillated and invigorated. He wanted to experience it again. He paused briefly, inhaling a final sharp intake of air to clear away the miasma. Then, turning his back to the street, he disappeared through the door of 6 Lothian Street, closing it behind him with a firmness that echoed into the night.

Narrow and crowded, the tall old tenement houses of Edinburgh Old Town where Barry lodged were subdivided and sublet to writers, intellectuals, artists, and students, who lived and worked beside the cobbled streets thronging with the city's swiftly expanding urban populace. The city Tobias Smollett described as "a hotbed of genius" had been the home of the key thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, including Adam Smith and David Hume. Robert Burns first came to Edinburgh in 1786 in search of a printer who would produce another edition of his poems. He discovered William Smellie, who had produced the first Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1768. The unfortunately named Smellie was not related to William Smellie, M.D., the great surgeon-anatomist who had worked in London alongside Cheselden and the Hunters. Described by Roy Porter as "a great horse godmother of a he-midwife," this Smellie was regarded as the founding father of modern male obstetrical surgery. He had printed a famous obstetrical atlas in 1754: A Sett of Anatomical Tables, with Explanations, and an Abridgement of the Practice of Midwifery. It was a practical guide to midwifery that quickly became a standard textbook of its time, a bible of creation consulted by medical students, fellow practitioners, and artists. Lavishly printed, Smellie's obstetrical atlas was highly collectible, a coveted acquisition for the private libraries of noblemen and gentlemen. There is no doubt that Barry encountered this textbook in the private libraries of Lord Buchan and General Francisco de Miranda.

The University of Edinburgh was at the zenith of its reputation between 1760 and 1820. Founded in 1726, the medical school in particular had immense prestige and an international reputation by the time Barry enrolled. It was a place where a person reticent about his true origins might reinvent himself. Some were the sons of squires, some of prosperous merchants. All were intent upon proving themselves to be gentlemen of learning. As documented by the university register, Barry's classmates included students from England, Scotland, Ireland, the United States, Canada, India, and the West Indies.

Students from outside the city either took lodgings-preferably at the homes of professors-or found accommodation with their parents in a house. So there was nothing unusual about Mrs. Bulkley accompanying James Barry when he went from London up to Edinburgh. It may be significant that, unlike at Oxford and Cambridge, the Test Act-which stipulated that students had to be practicing members of the Church of England-did not apply to the University of Edinburgh. Mrs. Bulkley was an Irish Catholic, so the young Barry's religion could have been a factor that made Edinburgh a suitable choice.

The medical degree for which James Barry enrolled was a three-year course comprising anatomy, surgery, chemistry, botany, materia medica, theory and practice of medicine, and lectures in clinical medicine at the Royal Infirmary. The Edinburgh teaching system was regarded as exemplary for offering a combination of practical and theoretical study. At the end of three years the students undertook an oral examination in Latin, conducted by a panel of professors, in which they were asked how they would treat two specimen cases, and to submit a thesis in Latin.

Of the utmost importance to the ambitious young Barry was the fact that the Edinburgh medical school offered exceptional opportunities for those who wanted to develop their skills in the arts of anatomy and surgery combined with clinical practice. The flourishing state of the medical school was largely due to this combined clinical training. Barry duly signed up for all the regular compulsory courses. The medical school allowed its most prominent faculty members to teach at bedside, in the surgical amphitheatre, and in the clinical lecture room, an arrangement that conferred importance and prestige on the value of empirical observation and practical activities.

It was not an age of donnish decorum. Gentility and gore combined not only in the dissection room and operating theater, but in the politicking that took place in institutional corridors. Many of these medics were flamboyant, argumentative men. The traditionalists pitched themselves against the intellectual renegades, and the students watched their squabbles with glee. All were regarded with suspicion by the general public.

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Excerpted from Scanty Particulars: The Scandalous Life and Astonishing Secret of Queen Victoria's Most Eminent Military Doctor by Rachel Holmes
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