James Miranda Barry by Patricia Duncker

Author:Patricia Duncker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

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The hospital staff were advisedly anxious at the advent of Dr James Miranda Barry. The doctor interfered with everything. Habitual systems were overthrown overnight. New régimes were instantly enforced. Sensibilities were understandably ruffled and, in private, tempers were well and truly lost. Long before the transmission of infectious and contagious diseases was fully understood, James Miranda Barry had grasped an essential necessity for every hospital: absolute cleanliness. This was his obsession, his religion. On the question of hygiene he was neither liberal nor tolerant. He was a fanatic.

Barry insisted on a daily change of linen for every patient, frequent dressing of wounds and the boiling of all surgical instruments. He ordered his staff to achieve a level of disinfective scrubbing that prepared the way for godliness. His assistants were forced to hold out their hands like little children, for the doctor’s inspection, before they trailed off behind him on the ward rounds. When he was called in for consultations he ordered all the previous doctor’s prescriptions to be removed without even looking at them. Such tactics did not endear him to his colleagues. He opened windows, even in the coldest weather, and insisted upon what one rival described as excessive ventilation. Barry swept into overheated sick rooms on a gust of cold, fresh air.

The colony’s hospital was fortunately placed, in view of Barry’s fresh-air methods. It was situated less than a mile away from his quarters and built on a little hill. There were two main wards, both designated for men only, and a small female ward in a house with a verandah, a hundred yards away. This tiny building also served as a lying-in hospital for difficult cases. But most of the colonial wives who did not trek home to England preferred to give birth at home, aided by the midwife. Soon everyone wished the delicate Dr Barry to be there too, in constant attendance. The women’s hospital was quiet and empty. A mountain spring that rose out of the earth a little higher up had been tapped to supply constant, fresh, ice-cold water from the belly of the earth. Barry had the water analysed in the first week of his command and found it to be rich in minerals that would do no one any harm. But he still insisted that all linen should be boiled, as should the water used for operations. Under Barry’s rule, bed bugs became a thing of the past.

But on that first day, early on a February morning, when Barry trotted up the uneven narrow road, much pitted by erosion and potholes, the hospital staff, patiently engaged upon their usual business, did not suspect that they were about to enter the vanguard of nineteenth-century medical reform. Barry had spent most of his life banning medical practices that were centuries old, and that day was to be no exception. No word of the doctor’s early arrival had reached the hospital and Barry caught them unawares.

The Deputy Governor abandoned him in the courtyard. ‘Well, here you are, old chap.

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