TWO weeks ago in these pages Stephanie Pain told the extraordinary story of James Barry, the 19th-century “pint-sized, squeaky-voiced” British army surgeon who was discovered after death to be a woman – or so the charwoman who prepared the doctor’s body for burial claimed (8 March, p 46). If the claim is true, Barry’s story represents one triumphant response to the sexism that kept women out of a profession which had once been exclusively theirs. Women were the chief deliverers of care in illness, injury and childbirth in Europe up to the 17th century and have been in most societies for most of history.…
