Book Report: The Cape Doctor

19. E. J. Levy, The Cape Doctor (2021) (8/29/22)

I don't read much historical fiction, but my cousin, who does, recommended this book highly when I saw her a few weeks ago, and I thought, what the heck? I'm glad I picked it up. It's a very interesting story, based on a true one: of a young woman who becomes a man—in dress, in behavior, in profession, in standing, in self-understanding—in order to get somewhere in life. But as much as the story itself, I appreciated being able to inhabit a time so different from my own (and yet in some ways, sadly, still so similar), which allowed me to test my expectations, what I take for granted.  

The story begins circa 1809 in Ireland, London, and finally Edinburgh, where the narrator, Margaret Brackley, and her mother, move so that Margaret can save the family by becoming a doctor. But in order to do so, she must also become a young man: Jonathan Mirandus Perry, so named after a much-admired Venezuelan benefactor and her artist uncle. She takes on the challenge of medical school with gusto, becoming one of the most accomplished students in her class—partly because, feeling uncomfortable being out in society where she might be found out, she spends all her time studying. But also, of course, because she's intelligent.

And here I will switch to "he," which may be how Perry (based on the actual John Miranda Barry) thought of himself as well. He went on to become a physician in the military, and was sent to South Africa (Britain's Cape Colony), where he was soon drawn into the social circle of the Cape governor, Lord Somerset. The two develop a great fondness for each other, though always gentlemanly—until one day, in the crisis of a sudden illness, Perry's secret is revealed. And then the two become lovers.

This may or may not have actually happened: Levy takes what few facts are known and spins them into a satisfyingly moving tale. The facts include the illustrious faculty and curriculum at the Edinburgh medical school, Dr. Barry's petition for hospital care for the less privileged residents of the Cape and for the credentialing of would-be physicians, his discovery of a cure for syphilis in local flora, a duel, a pregnancy (uncovered in autopsy), a sodomy scandal, and Barry's eventual return to London to care for Lord Somerset in his final months. Levy unweights the factual basis of the story by having Perry narrate: it is a work of fiction, after all. 

But it is also an exploration of identity, of self-creation, also of loneliness and love; of being trapped by history, by context. The cover design evokes the mood and emotion of the contents nicely, I think.

Here is a passage from the time when Perry was still in Scotland, and had been befriended by a Lord Basken, who would invite the medical student to his estate at Dryburgh Abbey:

I discerned in my companions at Dryburgh Abbey, as in my classmates, something more important than wealth or formal education; I had the proper shirts, a fine coat and vest of green silk, beautiful shoes with buckles, books of my own to read by candlelight, but I lacked some more essential ingredient—authority, the sense of belonging not just there but anywhere in the world.
     I understood then that this was what those conversations with General Mirandus had been about. Those questions that seemed pointless at the time, speculative games at best, were all for this one end; in soliciting my opinion on books and art, on politics and history, he was not trying to ensure that I had been diligent in my reading, as I'd thought then.
     He was teaching me to have opinions, or rather he was teaching me what my companions possessed without thought or conscious awareness of it, entitlement: he was teaching me to believe that my opinion mattered, that something—law or policy—might come of what I thought, that my arguments counted, that I could, that I would, like him, shape history. Girl that I was.

Dr. Barry left instructions that he should not be undressed upon his death, but should be interred as he was, with no autopsy. The nurse who attended him did not follow those instructions (perhaps she did not know of them), and so discovered that he was, and always had been, a she. At least, anatomically—in terms of reproductive organs. But what about his brain, his heart? As the narrator remarks more than once, in the end we are all so very similar. When it comes to intelligence, accomplishments, needs and wants, abilities and desires, our reproductive organs matter little. Would that we could all be simply accepted as human.