Dr Edith Helen Maud Barnes

Personal Details

Dr Edith Helen Maud Barnes FFARCS MB BS DA

Known as: Helen

12/04/1903 to 1997

Place of birth: Brent Pelham, Hertfordshire

Nationality: British

CRN: 524474

Education and qualifications

Professional life and career

Postgraduate career

Little information is available and is mainly reliant on her self submitted biographical college form. Edith Helen Maud Newman was born in 1903 at Brent Pelham, Hertfordshire. Her father was a church clergyman. After school in Brighton, she entered The London School of Medicine for Women in 1921 and graduated 1927. Following medical school she undertook house jobs at the Royal Free Hospital and the Royal Brompton Consumption Hospital.

From 1929 to 1940 she worked in both General Practice alongside her husband  and Anaesthesia  at the Woburn Hospital in Bedford. She passed the examination for the DA in 1941. During the war years she apparently worked as an anaesthetist for the Emergency Medical Service both at Charing Cross Hospital and the Three Counties Hospital, Arlesey.

Following the war, according to her biographical form, she worked as an anaesthetist at the Metropolitan Hospital and the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital in London until 1962. She doesn’t state if this was at consultant level. Answering the question of why she became interested in anaesthesia she states: “as an asset to General Practice, then war, then became really interested”.

Professional interests and activities

No information is available about other professional interests or activities outside of general practice or anaesthesia.  She possibly undertook some work  as a medical examiner for the income tax service  in Leighton Buzzard. One interesting vignette is a short account that she submitted to the Lancet in 1943 when she self experimented with the recently introduced Tubocurarine,  “Intocostrin”. Her colleagues administered 4mls of the drug and she goes on to describe how she felt similar ptosis symptoms of myasthenia gravis, extreme prostration and an impending sense of death. Her jaw muscles were well relaxed enabling  her colleagues  to visualise her vocal cords with a laryngoscope whilst she was conscious. She went on to use the drug to orally intubate five patients. This account is well worth reading for its audacity. She also published an account about modern trends in ENT anaesthesia in 1952. The history of the London Medical School for Women is also worth exploring as a reflection of women in medicine of Dr. Barnes generation.   

Other biographical information

Little information about her interests outside of medicine is available. She married Warren Alston Barnes in 1929. He is also recorded as working at the Brompton Hospital which is possibly where they met. He went on to work as a General Practitioner in Woburn. The GMC register has both husband and wife recorded at the same practice prior to the war years and the electoral register has them living at the same house in Leighton Buzzard from the early 1930’s to the 1960’s. Helen also had an address in Devonshire Street,  London and one speculates that she lived here during the week whilst working with her anaesthetic interests. Her husband passed away in 1968. There is no indication of any children. Little is known about her retirement years and she appears to have passed away in Hampshire in 1997 at the age of 93.  

Author and sources

Author:

Dr Innes Simon Chadwick

Sources and comments:

Information obtained from EHMB’s self submitted college biographical “Boulton Form” dated 1988.
Bibliographic information obtained from Ancestry.com accessed on line August 2022.
GMC, Medical Directories 1930 and 1942 accessed by Ancestry.com
“A taste of our own medicine”.  Dr. Maria Capoluongo,  History of Anaesthesia Society Proceedings 2008, Vol 39 page 74.
“Use of Curare for Direct Oral Intubation”. Helen Barnes, Letter to the Editor, The Lancet, Vol 241, p478 April 10 1943.