The Surgeon's Brain

Dr James Barry was many things. He was a pistol-toting dueller, an irascible grudge-holder, a vegetarian, an obsessive cleaner – and a brilliant, humane military surgeon who served throughout the British empire, travelled the world with a small menagerie of animals, and advocated for public health reform. Barry was also a transgender man living in the Victorian era, a time when the term ‘ transgender' was unknown in Western thought.From the author of New Transgender Blockbusters comes a breathtaking, multilayered work that meditates on the life of Dr James Barry. The poems of The Surgeon' s Brain imagine Barry' s inner worlds and the historical and social pressures that he resisted. As this mesmerising story unfolds and begins to fragment, it speaks to both our past and future ghosts.