Margaret Bulkley

Born in Cork around 1789. Her uncle, the artist James Barry, died in 1806 and left the family money. By her twenties Margaret had used it to enrol at the University of Edinburgh Medical School under his name.

She practised as a male military surgeon for the next 56 years. In Cape Town in 1826 she performed what is recorded as the first Caesarean section by a British surgeon in which both mother and child survived. The grateful family named the boy James Barry.

She rose to Inspector General of Hospitals, the second-highest medical post in the British Army. Her sex was discovered by a charwoman named Sophia Bishop who laid out her body in 1865. The Army sealed her papers for nearly a hundred years.