Skip to content

Radio 2 Book Club: Dr James Barry

Dr James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time by Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield will feature on the Radio 2 Fact not Fiction Book Club on Thursday 21 July.

The book was selected with the help of a panel made up of Reading Agency and library staff from across the UK. Find out more about the non-fiction strand of the Radio 2 Book Club.

You can win 10 copies of Dr James Barry for your reading group – just visit our Noticeboard.

We have an exclusive extract available for you to read as well as some discussion questions for your reading group.

Dr James Barry

Dr James Barry: Inspector General of Hospitals, army surgeon, duellist, reformer, lady killer, eccentric. He performed the first Caesarean in Africa, was deported from St Helena and gave Florence Nightingale a dressing down in the Crimea. At home, he was surrounded by a menagerie of animals, including a cat, a goat, a parrot and half a dozen small terriers. Long ago, in another life, he had also been a mother.

This is the amazing story of Margaret Ann Bulkey, the young woman who broke the unwritten rules of Georgian society to become one of the most respected surgeons of the century. Her life became one long, audacious act of deception that saw her rise to positions no woman had ever reached before, but it also left her isolated, perhaps even costing her the chance to be with the man she loved.

Selection panel review

Our library reading panel found Dr James Barry fascinating – here are some of their comments:

“I very much enjoyed it. The book benefits from having an excellent subject, thorough research and a novelistic approach to the writing. The book focuses on Margaret Bulkey, who, as a highly intelligent and well-bred young woman in Georgian England, found herself and her mother fallen on hard times. Due to the very limited possibilities for women to earn their living, Margaret disguised herself as a man, and went to medical school in Edinburgh. She went on to become Dr James Barry, Inspector General of Hospitals, and led a very colourful (though not unblemished life), sometimes struggling to conceal her true identity. This dynamic true story is served well by the authors’ engaging writing style peppered with well-placed fact, and reads fluidly.”

“It tells the story of a girl, born the 1700s when there were very few options for women, who poses as a man to go to medical school and becomes a surgeon, and spends basically the rest of her life that way. It was a fascinating read, to my shame I had never heard of this person, so found it really interesting, I think it is a story many people would find a good read.”


“I knew nothing of Dr James Barry before reading this and found it most fascinating and a gripping read. Really well written and interesting.”

About the authors


Michael du Preez was born and raised in Cape Town. He graduated from medical school in 1958, and went on to become a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. Since retiring in 2001, he has spent over a decade researching the life of Dr James Barry, and has published several scholarly papers about Barry in medical journals. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

Jeremy Dronfield is a writer, biographer and novelist. He lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire.

A word from Michael and Jeremy

“We’re delighted to be chosen by Radio 2’s Fact Not Fiction Book Club. The full story of James Barry’s life and career deserves to be known as widely as possible – through this club, it will hopefully inspire and enlighten many who had previously never even heard of her. That a girl of modest background, born in 1789 (when women were almost ‘walk-on players’ in life) should adopt the guise of a man in order to study medicine, and subsequently travel over continents and islands as an army surgeon – rising to a rank equivalent to that of general – is almost unbelievable. She was fearlessly outspoken, fighting lifelong for what she believed to be right, and treating the meek, the lowly, the high and the mighty with equal care and compassion. Moreover, this singular life played out against a period in world history which spanned the Napoleonic wars to the Crimean conflict and the abolition of slavery.”

Get involved

Tune in to the Radio 2 Arts Show on Thursday 21 July to hear an interview with Michael and Jeremy talking about their book.

Do you want to read Dr James Barry? You can share your thoughts with us on Twitter using #DrJamesBarry. You can also see what other readers thought, or add the book to your group’s reading list.

Want to find out more? Take a look at the Radio 2 Book Club Twitter feed or find out more on the Radio 2 Book Club website

Comments

Log in or Sign up to add a comment

News

Radio 2 Book Club - Winter titles

The Winter season of the Radio 2 Book Club is out now, with brilliant brand-new fiction titles to discover. The BBC Radio 2 Book Club is on the Zoe Ball Breakfast Show. It features a wide range of titles and authors, recommending great reads from both new and much-loved writers, encouraging listeners to perhaps try out a genre they might not have read before, and share their opinions and insights on the titles and great reads they’re enjoying right now.

Resources

How to start a reading group

Interested in joining a reading group or starting one of your own? Download our quick guide to getting started. You can also download icebreaker questions to help get your discussion started, and a social media guide to show how you can share your reading with others online.

News

Discussion guides

We know how useful a discussion guide is for your book club meeting, so here you’ll find some recent guides provided by publishers. Free to download, you can use them to help choose your next book and guide your discussion.

View our other programmes