Born at Newmarket on 20 September 1847, where his father, William Barrow, and brother practised as veterinary surgeons. He was the second son; his mother's maiden name was Boyce. He was educated at Aldridges, Bury St Edmunds and at King's College, London. He received his medical education at King's College Hospital, where he was house surgeon to Sir William Fergusson and to John Wood for the year 1873-74. He succeeded William Rose as Sambrooke surgical registrar in 1875 and became pathological registrar on the resignation of Urban Pritchard in 1876. He then acted as private assistant to Henry Smith. He would probably have been appointed assistant surgeon to King's College Hospital in 1880, but the post was filled by Watson Cheyne, who came from Edinburgh, where he had been house surgeon to Lister. In 1880 he was surgeon to the Westminster Dispensary and in 1882 he acted as assistant surgeon at the West London Hospital. He was appointed assistant surgeon to the Royal Free Hospital in 1883, becoming full surgeon in 1888. He resigned in 1904, and was made consulting surgeon in the following year. On 5 December 1882 he was elected assistant surgeon to the Westminster Hospital, but resigned on 24 August 1886, when he returned to King's College Hospital as assistant surgeon on the death of Hutchinson Royes Bell. Here he became full surgeon in 1893, and consulting surgeon in 1912. During the war of 1914-18 he returned to the hospital to take charge of the civil surgical cases. Always interested in horses, Boyce Barrow, on his retirement from active practice in London, began to breed race-horses on a small farm at Blackmore, in Essex and later moved to a larger property at Writtle, where at times he had as many as fifty horses in his stud. He owned and trained Beguiled, which finished second to Liwood at Northolt Park on the day of his death, and in his stables died Common, the winner of the Guineas, the Derby, and the St Leger in 1891, the owner being Sir Blundell Maple. Boyce Barrow was killed on 30 May 1939, aged 91, whilst asleep in a car driven by a friend, which crashed into a trolley-bus standard in Forest Road, Walthamstow, Essex. He never married. It was said of him that he was more interested in his patients and in his horses than in administration or teaching. He never held a lectureship, rarely came to a medical school committee, and was most erratic in his attendance at the hospital. He made no contribution to the literature of surgery and was never seen at a meeting of any of the societies of which he was a member. He was hospitable and very popular with his colleagues and the students.