John Milner Barry

Who was John Milner Barry?

John Milner Barry, was an Irish doctor.

Barry was the eldest son of James Barry of Kilgobbin near Bandon, County Cork. He graduated M.D. at Edinburgh University in 1792, and practised medicine at Cork until his death. He introduced vaccination into Cork in 1800, and was thus the first to make it known to any Irish city. In 1802 he founded the Cork Fever Hospital and House of Recovery and was its first physician. He held the lectureship on agriculture in the Royal Cork Institution for many years, and resigned the post in 1815. He married Mary, eldest daughter of William Phair of Brooklodge near Cork in 1808, and died in 1822. In 1824 a monument with a long laudatory inscription was erected to his memory in the grounds of the Fever Hospital by his fellow-townsmen. Dr. Barry contributed many papers on vaccination, fever, and similar subjects to the London Medical and Physical Journal, 1800–1; to Dr. Harty's History of the Contagious Fever Epidemics in Ireland in 1817, 1818, and 1819, Dublin, 1820; to Barker and Cheyne's Fever in Ireland, Dublin, 1821; and to the Transactions of the Irish College of Physicians, vol. ii.