Patricia Duncker

Francisco brought me up to ask questions and to insist upon my right to know the answer

Welcome aboard, James Miranda Barry. You’d be wasted as a woman. Join the men.’
Then they all laughed

A polite enquiry concerning his medical studies from an unfortunate visitor drew forth a description of his new course on military surgery, giving more detailed information about gangrene and amputations than the company could possibly have wished to know

Yet I am afraid of what lies before me, anxious at what I have left behind, and impatient of this moment of transition

My entire life has been a perpetual encounter with unforeseen accidents. Remain unruffled, or at least appear to be so

He is the kind of man who is as likely to die of bad temper as of one particular illness. He alienates everybody with his opinionated belligerence.

He had decided that Barry could not possibly be the medical Ghengis Khan of the colonial service that everybody said he was

The most common cause of disease in gentlemen of your class, sir, is lack of exercise and bad diet. Most of what you eat, I may assert with some certainty, is at best rubbish, and at worst poison.’

‘I am not in the habit of repeating private conversations’

The offspring of a white man and a black woman is a mulatto; the mulatto and the black produce a sambo, from the mulatto and the white comes the quadroon, from the quadroon and the white the mustee, the child of a mustee by a white man is called a musteefino and the children of a musteefino will be free by law and will count as whites