The Doctor is an elegant exploration of the way gender and identity shape a life. The starring role in Patricia Duncker's third novel is given to James Miranda Barry, a historical figure who enrolled as a medical student at Edinburgh during the early 1800s and carved out an illustrious career on three continents. Nothing too strange about that--except that this formidable physician, duelist, and man-about-town was actually a woman. Duncker has created "an imaginative exploration" of the real Barry's life, adjusting facts and adding figures to transform a story of love and adventure into a masque of sexual identity. Here is a ripping good yarn in which the hero is really the leading lady, and the love interest is a kitchen maid turned actress, who relishes "the breeches parts" in Shakespeare's plays. It makes for an enthralling tale, peopled with actors and soldiers, artists and revolutionaries. And the illicit liaisons and family secrets provide an appropriately vertiginous backdrop for Barry's own transformation into someone who was "neither man nor woman but partook of both."