Introduction to the Authors
George Biro was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1938 to an Italian mother and Hungarian father. In 1947, the family migrated to Australia. He had initially thought of becoming a journalist but his parents discouraged it and recommended him to find a secure and socially acceptable job. To fulfill this, he became a medical student in Sydney. To become a freelance journalist he turned to free-lance medical writing.
His articles are available in various medical publications. This is his second book.
Jim Leavesley is a Blackpool-born physician, his parents reproved his early fantasies of becoming a Lancashire County cricketer, that, and the fact that he wasn’t good enough. He entered Liverpool University Medical School and graduated in 1954.
In 1957, he migrated to Perth, Western Australia.
Both have a detailed background on medical history and so that you can look up on the internet!
Most of these essays were featured on the ‘after hours’ section of the medical newspapers Australian Doctor and the Medical Observer. Others were adapted from broadcasts written for and presented on the ABC radio.
This book presents itself as a selection of bizarre, whimsical and ghoulish essays as well as off-beat, quirky clinical facts that are brought together in this book.
For a woman to succeed in a man’s world, she has to be twice as good as a man. Luckily this is not too hard! (Anonymous)
Around 1795, a girl was born to the Barry family in London, she was raised by her aunt and uncle. There was too, a well-known painter by the name of James Barry who believed in the encouragement of not just males but females too in reaching their potential. This gem of an uncle had passed away when she was 11 years, she took her love of learning and his name from him!
At 15, ‘James’ and her aunt moved to Edinburgh and she passed herself off as a male to join the University Medical School. She could never have accomplished this as a woman for she still had half a century away! Fellow students unknowingly would tease her for her slight build and her hairless chin. Her close friend wanted to teach her how to box but she had chose the rapier instead. At 17, she completely her brilliant thesis on hernias. At the early age of 20, she gained her MD by defending her thesis against the interrogating faculty squadron and by discussing two of Hippocrates Aphorisms which was in Latin at the time!
For all you nerds, if you dare; here’s his ‘Aphorisms’;
The Internet Classics Archive | Aphorisms by Hippocrates
https://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/aphorisms.2.ii.html
In 1813, she managed to avoid the usual physical examination, satisfied the Army Medical Board, and started her lifetime career in military medicine.
She distinguished herself in the Battle of Waterloo.
There was a cholera epidemic in Cape Town that she impressively coped up with. She also saved a mother and a child by way of Caesarean delivery! This was before the time of conception of antiseptic and anaesthetics with an exceptional outcome. Soon she was a physician to the governor of Cape Town. She wore high-heeled boots and satin waistcoats with padded shoulders, since she excelled at duels men dared not ask of her high voice or the little dog she always kept next to her. By 1821, she had raised the level of medical care as a colonial medical inspector, she decreeded that only physicians and apothecaries should prescribe drugs.
She was headstrong and quarrelsome, and often went to prison for breaches in discipline. She also drafted the enlightened Rules for the General Treatment of Lepers and complained to the governor about the floggings at the prison. In 1845, at the age of 50, she was infected with the dreaded yellow fever, she forbade her colleagues from calling her and that if she had died, she should be made buried fully dressed. When her assistant paid her a visit, she saw that she no man! She had to swear her assistant to secrecy!
After a year’s sick leave she returned to duty. During the Crimean War, 400 out of the 500 wounded, had recovered in her hospital! It was truly a remarkable feat! At 62, as an inspector general of all British Army Hospitals in Canada, she worked to improve the food, water and hygiene in the camps. When she had died at 71, they found on the bedpost the sheet she had worn to flatten her breasts. The army authorities continued her deception, which reflected on her birth certificate and her tombstone, people’s faces turned red at the sight of her obituary in the Manchester Guardian.
Over 80 years later, the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps gave her a much more fitting epitaph;
“Whoever was ‘James Barry’ she has the distinction of being first – the first woman doctor of the British Isles. Secondly, the one – served her country in all climates of distinction… preferred to do so – the only way available in her lifetime – by assuming the trapping of the male sex.”
Source;
WHAT KILLED JANE AUSTEN? and Other Medical Mysteries – George Biro and Jim Leavesley
Chapter 2, Eccentrics, Reformers and Pioneers
https://www.elielarrey.com/history-of-surgery/the-curious-case-of-margaret-anne-buckley-aka-dr-james-barry-md-1789-1865
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/dr-james-barry/dr-james-barry-source-1/
https://www.guidelondon.org.uk/blog/museums-galleries/margaret-ann-bulkley-aka-dr-james-barry/
More on the authors;
Australasian Medical Writers Association – Getting To Know One Another
https://www.medicalwriters.org/news-and-announcements/blog/getting-to-know-one-another/
RACGP – Dr Jim Leavesley
https://www.racgp.org.au/the-racgp/history/obituaries/dr-jim-leavesley
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