Edward William Barton-Wright CE, FRSA, MJS (member of the Japan Society) (8 November 1860 – 13 September 1951) was an English entrepreneur specialising in both self defence training and physical therapy.

Over the next two years, he also added elements of British boxing, French savate and the la canne (stick fighting) style of Swiss master Pierre Vigny.

The school offered classes in a range of self-defence disciplines and combat sports as well as various physical therapies involving the electrical application of heat, light, vibration, and radiation.

During the next few years, Barton-Wright organised numerous exhibitions of self-defence techniques and also promoted tournament competitions at music halls throughout London, in which his Bartitsu Club champions were challenged by wrestlers in various European styles.

During early 1902, Barton-Wright organised and promoted the "Great Anglo-Japanese Tournament" tour, which featured Bartitsu demonstrations and contests in provincial centers including Nottingham, the Sandringham Military Base, Oxford, Cambridge University and Lancashire.

His therapeutic business, specialising in the use of various electrical appliances to treat the pain of gout and rheumatism, was viewed with suspicion by the London medical establishment and was subject to bankruptcy proceedings on several occasions during the first three decades of the 20th century.

He is referred to as a "famous physiotherapist and judoist" in Attempted Rescue, the 1966 autobiography of English horror writer Robert Aickman, who recalled Barton-Wright as an acquaintance of his great-aunt's.

Barton-Wright's historical significance was recognised, largely through research carried out by British martial arts historians Richard Bowen and Graham Noble and then by members of the Bartitsu Society.

In June 2012, Barton-Wright was commemorated in a wall display in the Sherlock Holmes Collection at Marylebone Library, London and in an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Barton-Wright is depicted as an ally and trainer of a secret society of female bodyguards who protect the leaders of the radical suffragettes in the graphic novel trilogy Suffrajitsu: Mrs. Pankhurst's Amazons (2015), in the spin-off novellas Carried Away, The Second-Story Girl and The Isle of Dogs and also in the 2015 short story The Wrestler and the Diamond Ring.