Born at Norwich on September 4th, 1817, second son of Philip Barnes, an architect and one of the founders of the Royal Botanic Society of London. His mother was Harriet Futter, daughter of a Norfolk squire. Sent to school at Bruges from 1826-1830 he became proficient in French; later he had as tutor George Borrow, the well-known author of the *Bible in Spain*. After an apprenticeship in his native town he entered University College and continued medical studies at the Windmill Street School and at St George’s Hospital. After qualifying in 1842 he spent a year studying in Paris. Having failed to be appointed to the post of Resident Physician to Bethlem Hospital he started practice at Notting Hill. He taught at the Hunterian School and lectured on Forensic Medicine at Dermott’s School. He served as Obstetrician to the Western General Dispensary, and in 1859 was elected Assistant Obstetric Physician, and in 1863 Obstetric Physician to the London Hospital. But within a year he changed over to St Thomas’s Hospital, and in 1875 passed on to become Obstetric Physician to St George’s Hospital. Thus he became the foremost representative in London of his special branch, and his name was attached to instruments and apparatus. With the development of ovariotomy, he advocated an active practice of surgery by obstetricians and gynaecologists. In midwifery he prescribed early interference. In 1847 he first published an account of placenta praevia, elaborated in his Lettsomian Lectures to the Medical Society in 1858, “On the Physiology and Treatment of Flooding from Unnatural Position of the Placenta”. His plan was to separate with the finger the placenta as soon as possible, but other measures have replaced his. He advocated a bag to dilate the cervix, long forceps to extract the foetal head, or perforation when extraction failed. He proposed the term ‘ectopic gestation’ instead of ‘extra-uterine foetation’. Barnes was an active controversialist; the differences of opinion between the Obstetrical and Gynaecological Societies, with which he was much concerned, were solved by their union in the Section of the Royal Society of Medicine. Mrs Robert Barnes gave a sum of £4,010 to the Royal Society of Medicine, and the gift is commemorated in the name of the large hall of the society. Another gift has caused the Pathological Laboratory at St George’s Hospital to be named after him. He was twice married: by his first marriage he had three children; a son, Dr R S Fancourt Barnes, assisted his father in the publication of *Obstetric Medicine and Surgery*, 1884. By his second marriage he had a son and a daughter. He retired at about the age of 70, and died of apoplexy at Eastbourne on May 12th, 1907.