The Secret Life of Dr James Barry by Rachel Holmes

Author:Rachel Holmes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Life so precarious, death so imminent. These were the challenges that confronted Barry in Jamaica. And they were compounded by another encounter with his old enemy from the Cape: endemic corruption in an unregulated medical fraternity whose primary interest was their own self-enrichment. ‘This is a superb country for physicians,’ expostulated the entrepreneurial Dr Cynric Williams; ‘a customary fee is a doubloon, and the inhabitants are all sick in their turn; for there are very few who escape a seasoning; and a great proportion die.’ Rich pickings indeed for medics more interested in cash than cure. There were no professional medical schools, civilian hospitals, societies, or learned journals. Here Barry was at the frontier of tropical medicine, his modern methodology in sharp contrast to the humoral-climatic and miasmatic theories of medicine to which less progressive colonial practitioners still clung. Their advocacy of bloodletting, purging, vomiting, blistering, sweating, and overdosing with opium, mercury, and antimony proved as fatal to their patients as did the climatic conditions and disease itself. The sale of medicines imported from Europe made up the largest part of the average doctor’s income. As at the Cape, Barry continued to crusade against this medical profiteering, enhancing his reputation as a missionary of modern medicine.

In August 1831, shortly after his arrival, Barry was sent to deal with an epidemic outbreak of yellow fever at Stony Hill barracks, nine miles north of Kingston. Incidence of death was high, but the one in seven fatality rate recorded at the end of the outbreak was regarded as a success, as this disease usually killed twenty-five per cent of its victims. The authorities noted Barry’s achievement, and agreed to his irregular request that he be allowed to retain his quarters in Stony Hill. Barry liked this rugged, verdant station with its elevated vistas situated in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, and he now adopted the routine of driving down to Up Park Camp in a small brougham, ‘even in the hot season.’ The rough road wound precariously down to Kingston, and Barry’s eccentric commuting was regarded by even the locals with a mixture of humour and bemused awe. Like Phaeton, child of the sun, Barry would arrive to attend to his duties at Up Park Camp breathless, hot, and dusty from his precarious descent. At night he returned to Stony Hill, daring the overgrown and indirect road in the heavy tropical dusk.

Mrs Magnus, a Jamaican woman who lived in Stony Hill village and served the officers at the barracks, recalled that in addition to his arduous commute, Barry was the only officer who ever refused her entry to his rooms. He was ‘very peculiar in his habits,’ she recalled, ‘never allowing a woman to attend him or to even enter his quarters.’ Years later, Mrs Magnus told a Captain Dadson, by then living in Barry’s old rooms, that she was always struck by the ‘delicacy of hands and smallness of his feet.’ Only his manservant and Psyche were permitted freedom of access to Barry’s otherwise closeted chambers.

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