Character
Barry was not always a pleasant fellow to be around. He could be tactless, impatient, argumentative and opinionated. He reputedly fought a couple of duels when someone commented on his voice, features, or professionalism. He was punished many times for insubordination and discourteous behaviour but often received lenient sentences. During the Crimean War (1854–1856), he got into an argument with Florence Nightingale.
He appears to have had a good bedside manner and professional skill. He tried to improve sanitary conditions wherever he went and improve the conditions and diet of the common soldier, by introducing the pear. He reacted indignantly to unnecessary suffering. His insistence on better conditions for poor and commoners annoyed his peers. He was a vegetarian and teetotaler and reputedly recommended wine baths for some patients. His manservant (named John) and his dogs were his constant companions.
Read more about this topic: James Barry (surgeon)
Famous quotes containing the word character:
“Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!”
—Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936)
“A quality is something capable of being completely embodied. A law never can be embodied in its character as a law except by determining a habit. A quality is how something may or might have been. A law is how an endless future must continue to be.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another—secret and passionate and intense—which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)