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 ■v 
 
 'y'' THE MEDICAL EDUCATION 
 
 OF WOMEN. 
 
 /^' 
 
 Lecture bv 
 
 Mrs. ASHLEY CARUS-VVILSON. 
 (Mary L. G. Petrie, B.A. Lond.) 
 
 Price: tS Cents. 
 
 iProceeds* for tlie Montreal 
 Mtiterrilty Hospital. 
 
M 
 
XHB 
 
 Medical Education 
 
 ... OF 
 
 WOMEN 
 
 A IvBCTURB 
 
 i.Y 
 
 ]VlKS. AsHi^KY CARUS- WILSON 
 
 (Mary L. G. Prtrih, B.A. I.onu.) 
 
 MONTREAL : 
 
 JOHN LOVELL & SON, 
 
 1895. 
 
 i* 
 
This lecture was delivered in the Assembly Hall of the High 
 School, on January 22nd, 1895. 
 
 Admission was by 25c tickets, and proceeds, amounting to 
 $160,00, were handed to the Materniiy Hospital of Montreal. The 
 Rev. Edgar Hill presided, and the vote of thanks to ;he lecturer 
 was moved by Her Excellency the Countess of Aberdeen. 
 
t 
 
 The Medical Education of Women. 
 
 Even larger than usual was the throng assembled 
 for the great annual function of the University of 
 London on Presentation Day, May lo, 1883. Some 
 300 new graduates were receiving their diplomas from 
 Ivord Granville, the Chancellor of the University, and 
 of these the 30 who filled the innermost row of the 
 horseshoe of academic robes were women. The en- 
 thusiasm of an enthusiastic gathering reached its climax 
 as two ladies came forward together : one, unlike all the 
 other Deans of colleges who were that day presenting 
 their successful students, in ordinary dress ; the other, 
 unlike all the other presentees, a matron, not a young 
 girl. For the former was Mrs. Garrett Anderson, who, 
 21 years before, had asked in vain to be allowed to 
 graduate at I^ondon, who had then taken a brilliant 
 medical degree at Paris, and become Dean of the first 
 feminine medical college, the famous I^ondon School 
 of Medicine for Women. And the latter was Mrs. 
 Scharlieb, who had just come out at the head of an 
 honours list in the M.B. examination with the Gold 
 Medal in Obstetrics. She and Miss Edith Shove, 
 presented by Mrs. Garrett Anderson on the same 
 occasion as a graduate in honours also, were the first 
 women who had ever won medical degrees at a British 
 University. 
 
This incident, one not to be forgotten by any who 
 were present, illustrated four things : — the successful 
 issue of a long battle to win for women the privilege 
 of the best medical instruction ; the capacity of women 
 to use such a privilege well ; the generous behaviour 
 of the men who can afford to be generous to women 
 when they distinguish themselves ; and the practical 
 purpose to which medical education of women may be 
 put. Miss Shove was appointed medical superin- 
 tendent of the female staff at the London General 
 Post Office, and Mrs. Scharlieb devoted herself to the 
 still greater needs of our fellow-subjects in India, as 
 lecturer to women at the Madras University, and head 
 of the Hospital for Women at Madras. 
 
 Some time ago, a Governor of McGill University 
 suggested that I should lecture in Montreal on the 
 Medical Education of Women. The opportunity for 
 doing so came with a request not to be refused when I 
 thought of my infant first-born son, that I would 
 lecture, choosing my own subject, on behalf of the 
 Maternity Hospital. I have now visited that hospital, 
 and seen something of what it is doing to preserve the 
 mother's health ; to give the child's health a fair 
 chance ; and to exercise a moral and spiritual influence 
 for good that cannot be put into statistics. Having 
 visited it, mere willingness to give this lecture be- 
 comes real satisfaction that it is in my power to aid 
 an institution that does such good and womanly work. 
 
 I am, however, under several disadvantages in deal- 
 ing with this theme. I have never myself been a med- 
 ical student, and scarcely anyone could know less than 
 
 
f 
 
 I do of the medical profession from the patient's point of 
 view. Moreover, I must honestly confess to being in 
 many respects an old-fashioned woman, who believes 
 implicitly that a woman's highest happiness as well as 
 her highest honour is to be found in earning the 
 ancient commendation that her husband's heart trust- 
 eth in her, and her children rise up and call her blessed- 
 I have no great admiration for the '* strong-minded " 
 female, who makes herself ungainly and regards man 
 as her natural enemy. She is after all chiefly a crea- 
 ture of the imagination ; I have seldom or never met 
 her in real life ; and the women whose intellectual 
 powers and whose useful lives have won my hearty 
 homage have been essentially " womanly." 
 
 But as a graduate of the University of London, I 
 have seen a good deal of the movement for medical 
 women, and have known many of its leaders. Friends 
 in Great Britain and elsewhere have been furnishing 
 me with the most recent statistics of it, and also with 
 an enumeration of the commonest arguments against it. 
 We will consider these arguments in order, as 
 summed up by an eminent professor in a United States 
 college : — " History, Physiology and the general judg- 
 ment of society unite in a negative of woman's fitness 
 for the medical office." 
 
 History shows that the medical woman is not the 
 startling innovation, the revolutionary institution we 
 sometimes suppose her to be. From the days of 
 Agamede (Iliad XL 739) and Agnodice of Athens, and 
 the mediaeval dames who not only nursed but medi- 
 cally treated the wounded knights, to the days of the 
 
T 
 
 6 
 
 learned professors Dorotea Bocchi and Alessandra 
 Gigliani of Bologna, and of the skilled physicians Lady 
 Anne Halket and Mrs. Samuel Bury in the 17th cen- 
 tury, women have practised successfully. One impor- 
 tant department is and always has been entirely in their 
 hands in many European countries, and (^ueen Victoria 
 is actually the first British queen who was attended by 
 an accoucheur instead of an accoucheuse. The mothers 
 of to-day have learned to acquiesce in a custom that 
 would have horrified our ancestresses. 
 
 The first legislative exclusion of women from the 
 profession was an accidental result of the Medical Act 
 of 1 858, which required all persons recognized bylaw 
 as medical practitioners in the United Kingdom to 
 register themselves as having definite qualifications. 
 Holders of a foreign degree practising before but not 
 after 1858 might so register themselves. Dr. Elizabeth 
 Blackwell.an Englishwoman who graduated at Geneva 
 College, New York, in 1849, registered accordingly, and 
 was for eight years the one woman on the list. Miss 
 Garrett (now Mrs. Garrett Anderson) having qualified 
 at Apothecaries Hall by paying heavy fees for separate 
 instruction, registered in 1866. Then they took alarm, 
 and decreed that separate instruction should qualify 
 no longer, and none but men registered henceforth 
 till 1877. Meanwhile, at Zurich in 1867, at St. Peters- 
 burg in 1869, at Paris in 1870, and at Michigan in 1871, 
 pioneer women had won medical degrees. 
 
 In 1869, Miss Sophia Jex-Blake, befriended by not a 
 few well-known and highly esteemed professors, boldly 
 applied for a degree at the University of Edinburgh, 
 and the authorities Avere fairly surprised into permit- 
 
 
 f 
 

 r 
 
 ting her and four friends to matriculate, and duly in- 
 scribed them as " cives Academicc Kdinensis." They 
 seemed mere enthusiastic amateurs willing to pay 
 extra fees for a crotchet, till, to the astonishment and 
 horror of these authorities, the prize list came out. 
 Of the men 23 per cent., and of the women 100 per 
 cent, were on it, and Miss Ivdith Pecliey was found to 
 be actually head of her year, and entitled to one of the 
 four Hope scholarships awarded to the four foremost 
 students. Then followed steady opposition, too evi- 
 dently inspired by a mere spirit of trades-unionism in 
 those who did not really believe in the feminine inferi- 
 ority which they so loudly asserted. The scholarship 
 was refused, all sorts of vexatious regulations calcula- 
 ted to wear out the patience and to exhaust the purses 
 of the unwelcome women were framed ; the lowest 
 class of students were permitted to indulge in offen- 
 siv^e behaviour, which culminated in mobbing and 
 pelting the five ladies as they proceeded to the ex- 
 amination room ; the complicated machinery of Scotch 
 law was set on foot in a ti umped-up libel case, where 
 the pursuer got one farthing damages and the de- 
 fendants were mulcted in £915 costs ; attacks of the 
 most malignant kind appeared in the press ; and finally 
 the University made what the Examiner called " a 
 delicious suggestion that would have done Dogberry 
 credit." — Waive the question of graduation, and be 
 content with certificates of proficiency. 
 
 They lost their law suit against the University to 
 claim what it had pledged itself to give them ; they 
 had to become " M.D.'s " at Berne instead of at 
 Edinburgh. But the story once more illustrates 
 
" How far high failure overleaps the bounds 
 Of low success." 
 
 The injustice and violence with which these women 
 had been treated roused attention to the whole question 
 of higher education of women as quiet pursuit of study 
 could not have done. The more chivalrous Edinburgh 
 students constituted themselves into a bodj^-guard for 
 their protection. A public subscription for their legal 
 costs not only covered these, but grew into a first en- 
 dowment for the Edinburgh Hospital for Women and 
 Children, to which Dr. Jex- Blake is now physician. The 
 Scotsman, Spectator^ and other leading journals became 
 their staunch champions, and in 1871 the National 
 Association for Promoting the Medical Education 
 of women was founded. On November 3rd, 1894, this 
 body was able to congratulate Dr. Jex- Blake on the 
 opening of Edinburgh University to women, exactly 25 
 years after her application for a degree. 
 
 It is always easy to point out when any forward step is 
 taken, that the time was ripe for it, and it is therefore 
 inevitable. None the less, it is almost always due to one 
 person's well-defined purpose and dauntless determina- 
 ion in carrying out that purpose. In this case, the time 
 was ripe, but Dr. Jex Blake had the satisfaction of being 
 the person to wage to a successful issue what she aptly 
 terms " The battle in Edinburgh " in her volume on 
 " Medical Women," whence my information concerning 
 it is mainly taken. 
 
 Ere we turn to its results elsewhere, let us pay due 
 attention to the fact that the lady who earned, but did 
 not win, the Hope scholarship is now, as Mrs. Pechey. 
 Phipson, at the head of the Cama Hospital, Bombay ; and 
 

 k 
 
 that when, a year or two ago, the effects of Child-Mar- 
 riage in India were under discussion, she gave evidence 
 that only a woman who is also a doctor could have 
 given, what must do more than aught else to make as 
 obsolete as suttee an abuse even crueller than suttee 
 itself 
 
 I have now to tell how the London degree, generally 
 acknowledged to be the highest medical qualification 
 obtainable in Britain, was the first to be thrown open to 
 women. In 1862, only the chairman's casting vote had 
 brought about the rejection of Mr. Grote's motion to 
 accede to Miss Garrett's request for admission to that 
 University. In January, 1874, 471 of its graduates 
 memorialized Parliament to legislate for the admission 
 of women. This memorial was largely due to one en- 
 lightened medical man, a fact which bears out Dr. Jex- 
 Blake's experience that "it is seldom among the men 
 whose personal superiority needs no assertion that any 
 jealousy of women's claims is found." Various Bills 
 which aimed at opening the medical profession and the 
 Universities generally to women were brought forward 
 in the House of Commons by Lord Mount Temple, Mr. 
 Russell Gurney, and by Mr. Stansfeld, from whose article 
 in the Nineteenth Ce?itury for July, 1877, I take some of 
 these particulars. In January, 1 878, the London Convc- 
 tion approved, by a majority of almost two to one, the 
 Charter for the admission of women laid before it by 
 the Senate, and London thus became the first British 
 University to admit women to its degrees. 
 
 Meanwhile, the Irish College of Physicians, by 
 examining women who already had foreign qualifica- 
 tions, had enabled five more women to enroll them- 
 
10 
 
 selves on the British Register in 1877; the London 
 School of Medicine for Women had been opened with 
 23 students in October, 1874; and arrangements for 
 their clinical instruction had been made with the Royal 
 Free Hospital which had no male students. 
 
 Two other Medical Schools for Women only have since 
 been opened in Britain : the Edinburgh vSchool and Queen 
 Margaret College, Glasgow. In 1892 an Ordinance of 
 the University Commissioners authorized the Scottish 
 Universities to admit women to instruction and gradua- 
 tion. In July, 1894, Miss Marion Gilchrist and Miss 
 Alice It. L. Cumming took medical degrees at the Uni- 
 versity of Glasgow, the former being third of the six who 
 passed " with high commendation." The latter is resi- 
 dent medical officer at the Eye Infirmary at Greenock. 
 They are the first girl graduates in medicine at a Scottish 
 University. 
 
 In October, 1894, some 200 women were entered on 
 the British Register as now practising. Of these, one- 
 quarter are in India, five in China, three in Australia 
 and three in Canada. Some medical women have al- 
 ready passed awa3^ leaving memories fragrant as those 
 of Helen Prideaux, gold medalHstin Anatomy of Lon- 
 don University, who took fatal diphtheria from a child 
 patient in 1885 ; and Fanny Butler, the brave medical 
 missionary, who died at Srinagar in 1889. The " thin 
 spun life " of each was cut off at the beginning of a 
 career of rare promise, but not too soon to prove what a 
 woman doctor may be. 
 
 In the list of women doctors who received appoint- 
 ments during 1894, we find two in Children's Hospi- 
 tals, one in a County Asylum, one in a Church 
 
 t 
 
 . 
 
11 
 
 h 
 
 Army Dispensary, and two in the Cama Hospital at 
 Bombay. One of the latter is Rukhmabai, the Hindu 
 lady whose hard lot recently drew public attention to 
 the condition of her countrywomen. She has since 
 become an M-D. of Brussels. Medical instruction is 
 now given to women at Calcutta and Madras as well 
 as at Bombay. 
 
 Fourteen years ago, the number of medical women in 
 the United States was reckoned at 470. According to a 
 statement in the PVoz/ian's Sii^na/ for 'November, 1894, 
 there are now about 2,000. From a paper prepared by 
 Mrs. Lankton, M.D., of New York, for the Chicago Con- 
 gress of Women last year, we learn that there are now 
 five colleges and one school of pharmacy for women 
 only in the States, besides 36 medical colleges which 
 admit mixed classes. 
 
 Our proximity to the States make the women of 
 Canada more " advanced " in some respects than those 
 of " the old country ; " but the medical movement has 
 made less progress here than in Britain, and far less in 
 Quebec than in Ontario. Queen's University, Kingston, 
 ■was the pioneer. One of its graduates, who has prac- 
 tised in Montreal for five years, and who can speak of 
 the change in favour of medical women which has come 
 over public opinion in that time, tells me that she ob- 
 tained her license to practise here on the strength of the 
 study in I^ondon and Edinburgh which placed her on 
 the British Register and not on the strength of her 
 Canadian degree. One can hardly believe that such an 
 anomaly as this will last. 
 
 To Dr. D. J. Gibb Wishart, Registrar of the Ontario 
 Medical College for Women, I am indebted for the fol- 
 
12 
 
 i 
 
 lowing particulars of the movement in Canada. In 
 1878-9, Dr. Augusta Stowe Gullen attended the lectures 
 of the first year in Toronto University as a medical stu- 
 dent. She graduated in the United States, took an 
 ad eundem degree at Trinity University, Toronto, in 
 1887, and is now Professor of Diseases of Children in 
 the Ontario College. In 1883 two colleges opened their 
 doors to women only : the Ontario Medical College 
 (formerly known as the Women's Medical College in 
 affiliation with Trinity College, Toronto, and Toronto 
 University), and the Women's Medical College of 
 Kingston, now closed. Queen's College, Kingston, had 
 admitted women to mixed classes in 1881, and for the 
 first time conferred the M.D. degree on women in 1885, 
 The first of the 34 graduates who have been educated 
 at the Ontario College took the Toronto degree of 
 M.D., CM., in 1887. In 1892, the same year in which 
 Scottish degrees were first thrown open to women, 
 Victoria University, Ontario, and the University of 
 Manitoba followed the example of Toronto. 
 
 Six Canadian Universities now offer medical degrees 
 to women, viz.: the four Universities in Ontario, Mani- 
 toba University and the University of Bishop's College 
 in this Province of Quebec. At Bishop's College, at 
 Manitoba University, at Toronto University or Trinity 
 College, Toronto, a woman can obtain medical instruc- 
 tion. But the only place in which it is giv^en to women 
 alone is the Ontario College. 
 
 The Medical Faculty of Bishop's College, the one 
 department of that University which is in Montreal and 
 not at Lennoxville, is the only place for medical instruc- 
 tion of women in our Province. A friend now studying 
 
 
L 
 
 13 
 
 there gives me these statistics of it. Women were 
 admitted in 1890, and twelve women students have since 
 registered. Two have graduated : Dr. Grace Ritchie in 
 1.S91, who is now, as Assistant Demonstrator in Ana- 
 tomy, the one lady on the staff of the College ; and Dr. 
 Maude Abbott in 1894, who took the Chancellor's Prize 
 for the best final examinations. Of sixty students now 
 at the College, eight are ladies. Lectures in some few 
 subjects are duplicated for them, and they have their 
 own demonstrator in Anatomy. Otherwise the classes 
 are mixed. They receive their clinical instruction at 
 the Western Hospital, Montreal, the only Quebec Hos- 
 pital that as yet admits women students. Its patients 
 are chiefly but not exclusively women. While this is 
 in the press, the results of the Bishop's College Medi- 
 cal examinations for 1895 are announced. Of seven stu- 
 dents who graduate, two are ladies : Miss Cunin, who 
 takes the Wood Gold Medal, the only medal awarded 
 this year, and Miss Landau, who takes the Chancel- 
 lor's Priz2 for the best final examinations. Both the 
 prizes offered for competition to first year students 
 have been won by Miss Gomery. 
 
 May we hope that the next chapter added to the his- 
 tory of this movement in our own Province will be that 
 Montreal follows the example so successfuU}^ set in the 
 capital of the Empire, by founding a first rate Medical 
 College for women only, and admitting its students to 
 the medical degrees of all our Universities ? 
 
 In spite of all sorts of opposition and under manifold 
 disadvantages, we have seen women winning and mak- 
 ing noble use of Medical Education. The arguments 
 
14 
 
 from History are clearly on our side. What of those 
 from " Physiology and the general judgment of So- 
 ciety " blended in the current objections which we will 
 now deal with ? 
 
 "It is the unfeminine pursuit of some who are 
 thrusting themselves into public and professional life at 
 the expense of the finest traits of womanhood." 
 
 " Unwomanly " is a taunt as hard and vague to meet 
 as was the taunt of "cowardly" which formerly drove 
 many a man into a duel over nothing at all. And as the 
 medical woman cannot say for herself " I am woman- 
 ly," we who know her must say it for her, as I for one 
 do say it most heartily from my knowledge of a good 
 many. It is a strange thing that this objection is not 
 raised when a woman toils all day at chain-making 
 or the heavy sewing machine, both more exhausting 
 and less remunerative than professional work ; or 
 when her good looks and power of smart repaitee 
 are turned to account in the barmaid's undesirable call- 
 ing ; or when the woman, yea, the gentlewoman, as- 
 sists, as nurse, on the severest surgical cases, or scrubs 
 the hospital floor. Yet it is supposed, as Mr. Robert 
 Wilson remarks in his brilliant essay, " ^Esculapia 
 Victrix" {Fortfiig/itiy Review, January, 1886) that at- 
 tendance at the sickbed will inevitably debase her 
 character unless she is too ignorant to find out what is 
 the matter with her patient. 
 
 This objection comes from a personage for whom we 
 have most of us far too much respect, — I mean the well- 
 known Mrs. Grundy. It is — if we think a moment we 
 shall all see that it is — a slander on a great and noble 
 profession to say that medical study must sully the 
 
 t 
 
 I 
 
15 
 
 i 
 
 mind, and sheer absurdity to talk of the publicity of 
 medical practice of women among women. In that 
 clever novel, " Mona Maclean, Medical Student," writ- 
 ten by one thoroughly conversant with what she des- 
 cribes, — fori understand that " Graham Travers " is the 
 nom de plume oi 2i lady doctor now practising in Edin- 
 burgh — nothing is finer than its closing suggestion of 
 work for a woman doctor that the best and ablest of 
 men could not do. Instead of admitting that it is an 
 unwomanly calling, I would assert that it is a calling 
 fit only for the most womanly, and changing one word, 
 would say with " Aurora Leigh": 
 
 " No perfect doctor is developt here 
 From any imperfect woman." 
 
 Again we are told that a woman lacks physical 
 strength for medical training, and for the practice after- 
 wards of a profession that makes her the servant of the 
 public at all hours. This difficulty was more applicable 
 to the sensitive and sentimental damsel of the past than 
 to the golfing, bicycling, snowshoeing, tobogganning 
 damsel of the present. Ce rtainly, the training is severe. 
 '' I have seen men dropping like flies as they fainted on 
 witnessing their first big operation," said a doctor to me. 
 The man who would be quite callous under such cir- 
 cumstances is not the man to be a doctor at all. 
 
 But when responsibility comes, we have not time to 
 " feel queer," and "a lion's heart " which a doctor, it is 
 said, needs as well as " an eagle eye and a lady's hand," 
 can be acquired by those to whom nature has given vbe 
 last qualification. I know of one girl who all but fainte^i 
 a year or two ago at the mere description of a carriage 
 accident, who now, armed with the National Health So- 
 
16 
 
 ciety's medal and a medicine chest, is ministering to all 
 sorts and conditions of sufferers in India with the en- 
 thusiasm of a born nurse. The proportion of women 
 capable of this strain on nervous energy may be smaller 
 than the corresponding proportion of men, but facts 
 show that some are capable of it, as nurses and as doc- 
 tors also. Dr. Lankton says that the an.swer to one 
 question recently sent to many women doctors in the 
 States was " Health better than before entering the pro- 
 fession." A further suggestion that women would never 
 be strong enough to perform operations is answered by 
 quoting the difficult and successful operations of Dr. 
 Garrett Anderson and Dr. Scharlieb, or the one that 
 has just been successfully performed on a fair Japanese 
 by two lady doctors in Montreal ; and also by a reminder 
 that ordinary doctors are seldom called upon to operate. 
 
 The unseemliness of common medical study, and of 
 the subsequent medical attendance of women on men 
 are brought forward as objections by raising two en- 
 tirely irrelevant issues. 
 
 The first difficulty has been exaggerated in a way 
 scarcely creditable to those who dwell upon it. 
 Pioneer women, such as Dr. Jex-Blake, Dr. Putnam, 
 and Dr. Agnes Maclyaren, and the handful of women 
 students in our own Province, have had to study with 
 men. But they assure us that given pure-minded 
 women of ordinary tact, and men students of whom the 
 majority are gentlemen, scientific study can be carried 
 on in a wholly scientific spirit, and it is well to remem- 
 ber sometimes that purity and prudery are not neces- 
 sarily synonymous. In other places, when the first 
 step has been taken, separate instruction for women 
 
 I 
 
n 
 
 I 
 
 i 
 
 lias been secured. There is no reason why it should 
 not be secured here. It is not improbable that in the 
 future the whole range of subjects technically known 
 as gyncecology will be studied not only by women alone^ 
 but bv women only. The second suggestion is equally 
 wide of the mark. There is no chance either that men 
 will wish to be attended by women, or that women 
 could ever wish to attend men as doctors. " You would 
 not like to be attended by these medical ladies? " said 
 an Edinburgh student canvassing aga inst Miss Jex- 
 Blake to a sage old gentleman. "No, sir," was the 
 reply ; "but it is just because I should not like to be 
 attended by a woman that I will do my best that 
 women shall not be forced to submit to the medical 
 attendance of men." 
 
 To those who fancy that delicacy is outraged by the 
 acquisition of medical knowledge by women under any 
 circumstances. I would say : Is there no outrage to the 
 sa cred ideal of motherhood when all its physical inci- 
 dents are discussed in detail among men, or expounded 
 by a man to a class of lads ? Is there no outrage to 
 that tender and chivalrous ideal of womanhood, which 
 is one of the highest results of Christian civilization, 
 when men are called upon to make minute investigation 
 of the worst that disease can do fbr a woman's fair 
 form ? 
 
 The familiar but somewhat antique " wife and mother" 
 argument comes before us next. " Medical women will 
 marry," say some. " Medical women will not marry," 
 say others. Ere we leave these two dreadful alterna- 
 tives to slay each other, let us glance at each. 
 
 " If she marries, it will all be thrown away," said a 
 
18 
 
 father not long ago of his young daughter's studies at 
 Cambridge. I confess that even now I am unable to 
 discover what that father meant. Going, however, be- 
 yond a college to a professional training, it is said that 
 the possibility of marriage cutting short a professional 
 career at any moment will hinder a girl from giving 
 her whole mind to the longest and most expensive of 
 all special educations. Now, the fact that in ''the old 
 country " at any rate there are more women than men, 
 makes it certain that some women will not marry. 
 Why should not definite work enable them to be happy 
 and useful instead of unhappy and useless spinsters ? 
 And why should so many girls, just for lack of such 
 work, be driven into second-best marriages? The pro- 
 fessional women who do marry will have qualified 
 themselves for their duties as wives by strenuous work, 
 better than they could have done by fashionable idleness, 
 and will certainly not have lessened their capacity for 
 enjoying the highest happiness in marriage. Nor must 
 they be inevitably lost to their profession. Some will 
 already have given several years to it. Some as child- 
 less wives will have abundant leisure after marriage. 
 Some, when they have devoted ten or twelve years to 
 the nursery, will be set free to resume their professional 
 work, with unabated ardour and ripened experience. 
 
 Say others : *' Medical women will not marry, and, 
 being spinsters, will be of less use as doctors than mar- 
 ried men." Now, what are the facts ? Of the women on 
 the British Register last October, I find that one-fifih 
 are married, and many others are, let us note, young 
 practitioners likely to marry in the next few years. In 
 short, it is with medical women as it is with women, and 
 
 , 
 
 I 
 
19 
 
 with men also, in all other callings ; some will marry, 
 and bring experience of the sort that quickens sympathy 
 into their work thereby. Some will not marry, and 
 will have the more leisure to live mainly for their pro* 
 fession, and to work as and when they will. From 
 both classes, the public and the profession will gain. 
 
 One word more as to matrimony and motherhood. 
 Mr. Grant Allen, in one of his lively essays, speaks of 
 " the modern system of higher education which is 
 wrecking the maternal powers of the best class of our 
 English community." This vigorous statement has 
 one flaw, it is altogether untrue. We can now prove 
 over and over again, that there is no necessary con- 
 nexion between cultivated brain in the mother and 
 feeble body in the child. And for duties of motherhood, 
 as for all other duties, the educated woman has the 
 advantage over her uneducated sister. 
 
 Once more we are told that the medical profession is 
 already overcrowded, and that a few ambitious women 
 are creating an artificial demand for lady-doctors by 
 providing a supply not really needed. 
 
 In the medical, as in all other callings, there is more 
 than enough work for the competent, while the incom- 
 petent are for ever tending towards the disconsolate 
 ranks of the unemployed. The number of British medi- 
 cal women could be doubled to-morrow, without taking 
 work away from a single medical man. Every woman's 
 personal experience will bear out what I have now to say 
 concerning a matter that cannot be freely discussed. 
 Good authorities assert that only one woman in ten is in 
 absolutely sound health. What of the other nine ? The 
 three worst will go to a medical man, adding to the un- 
 
20 
 
 avoidable suffering of their ailment the uncalled-for 
 suffering of an experience painful even to the rich 
 woman who sees a first rate specialist in presence of rela- 
 tive and nurse, and doubly jiainful to the not less modest 
 poor woman, who goes alone to an inferior practitioner, 
 or is the subject of a clinical demonstration to men stu- 
 dents in a hospital. Three suffering less acutely will 
 resort to some mischievous patent " cure all," whose 
 apparent efficacy is due to the opium it contains. The 
 importunate and repulsive advertisements of these hor- 
 rid drugs and the statistics of their enormous sale prove 
 that women are doctoring themselves every day with 
 the worst results. The three remaining sufferers will 
 go through life with permanently depressed health, 
 joyfulness and usefulness alike unknown to them. We 
 could all name such women, many with gifts and graces 
 above the average, whose health is vaguel}' described 
 as *' delicate," not a few of whom would never have be- 
 come invalids had they sought medical advice in girl- 
 hood, or in early married life, and who would have 
 .sought such advice could they have had it from a 
 woman. In illustration of that assertion, take the fol- 
 lowing passage from a prize essay on '* The Study and 
 Practice of Medicine by Women," by Miss Edith A. 
 Huntley nowM.D. of Brussels, and medical miss) oaary 
 in Kashmir : '" You know I could not tell the doctor 
 what I am telling you ; " or, " Yes, I have been to a doc- 
 tor, but then I could not tell him all," are specimens of 
 words often spoken by women to an unqualified occa- 
 sional medical adviser of her own sex known to the 
 writer. Some of the students of the London School of 
 Medicine can tell of appeals which women have made to 
 
 ' 
 
21 
 
 them for advice, even in their very first year's student- 
 ship. One in a remote district of the North listened to 
 a tale of secret suffering, and after giving the best ad- 
 vice her limited experience could suggest, received the 
 reply : "Oh, MivSS ! if I had known of a leddy doctor 
 twenty years ago, how nuich suffering I might have 
 been spared ! " Another in the South was consulted by 
 a motherly woman, and on protesting with regret her im- 
 competence to help, was answered with the entreaty : 
 " Oh but, Miss, you have books ; could not you read and 
 try something ? I don't want to have to ask the doc- 
 tor." 
 
 Thus we catch occasional glimpses of distress none 
 the less real because it must be almost inarticulate. 
 And now and again in a quiet moment of confidence, 
 one woman will tell another, with bated breath, that 
 kindly and considerate as were the offices of her medical 
 adviser, when she was laid up, or went under that 
 operation, the hardest thing she had to endure was 
 submission to a man's attendance. 
 
 Moreover, with all the advance in medical .science 
 in recent times, there are still many for whom the 
 notion that '' Providence sends disease, and medicine 
 takes it away " is not defunct. The first proposition is 
 profane, the second is nii.schievous, and both are false. 
 But widely diffused intelligence on matters relating to 
 health is needed to establish once for all for men in 
 general, that all sickness is due to breach of natural 
 laws as Divine as spiritual laws. Lest I be charged 
 with feminine bias here, let me quote from Dr. Alfred 
 Schofield's admirable Manual of Personal and Domes- 
 tic Hygiene : " The present state of ignorance 
 
09 
 
 amongst women — to whose lot most of the domestic 
 hygienic work of the world must necessarily fall — is 
 appalling, and nothing less than an anachronism ! " 
 
 This ignorance might be enlightened, without any risk 
 to the innocence of the truly pure-minded to whom all 
 things are pure, by recognising that there can be noth- 
 ing '^ improper " in necessary knowledge of the human 
 frame, so wonderfully made by God, and thus putting an 
 end to much unwholesome mystery and uneasy curiosity 
 as well as to much perilous ignorance. How then may 
 women gain a knowledge of their own structure ? From 
 men, when even the patient in dire need finds it as hard 
 to give explicit answers to the doctor as he does to frame 
 questions that will not distress her ? Or from women, 
 who have only a crude traditional empiricism to guide 
 them, and who work out erroneous and mischievous 
 practice from misleading theories ? Our first though not 
 our highest duty is to be well-developed animals. For 
 physical and consequent mental incapacity to fight the 
 battle of life is a sadder and harder fact to deal with, 
 and a truer explanation for the chronic proverty and 
 misery in our midst, than any of the usual scape-goats 
 of the demagogue or even of the political economist. 
 In avenging breach of laws of health. Nature knows no 
 forgiveness of sins, and no distinction between wilful 
 sins and sins of ignorance, but visits the sins of parents 
 on children remorselessly. Well-intentioned people, 
 highly educated in other matters, err daily in these 
 matters, with disastrous results to themselves and 
 their posterity, and so we pay a heavy price for the 
 conventional propriety that hinders men from teaching, 
 and forbids ^women to qualify themselves as teachers, 
 
 
 
23 
 
 c 
 
 1 
 
 in the discreditable, because preventable, sufferings of 
 fragile mother and puny child. When the medical 
 woman becomes the acknowledged instructor of her 
 sisters in all they need to know concerning themselves, 
 when the man who by marriage makes himself res- 
 ponsible for the welfare of a woman as well as for his 
 own learns, not from another man, but from his own 
 wife, all he needs to know concerning her, there will be 
 a rise in the health standard of the whole community. 
 
 I^astly, we are told that women will never consult 
 women with confidence ; they will prefer men in diffi- 
 cult cases. 
 
 Now, confidence is the outcome of acknowledged 
 efficiency. As to this, the lists of the University of 
 lyondon tell their own tale. Candidates are known by 
 numbers only, and I have heard of an examiner, after 
 he had sent ni his return of marks, eagerly asking 
 which of the papers he had just classed were written 
 by women ? Under these circumstances of absolute 
 equality, the women have done better than the men. 
 For instance, in the B.A. examination for five years, 
 less than 50 per cent, of the men and 73 per cent, of the 
 women passed. It would be absurd to say that this 
 proves the superiority to women as such, though it 
 indicates that the deep-rooted notion of their intellec- 
 tual inferiority, if not dead, is moribund. But what it 
 does prove is that the average woman, unlike the aver- 
 age man, does not as a rule go to college, or at least 
 to the University of London, whose medical degrees 
 women especially covet. And, therefore, while there 
 will always be a certain number of men who are doc- 
 tors because they must do something, it will be long 
 
2i 
 
 before women take up the profession whose special fit- 
 ness for it does not urge them forward, because they 
 must have something to do. This explains such a fact 
 as the following : — In the Clapham Maternity, officered 
 by the lyondon School of Medicine for Women, no 
 mothers have died for many years. From a friend now 
 at that School comes news of a recent tribute to women 
 students, which I would not venture to quote if it had 
 not been uttered by a man, a doctor, and a doctor not 
 less distinguished than Dr. Matthews Duncan. He said 
 at a medical examination : " These grand women ! 
 When they don't know a thing they frankly say so, 
 instead of trying to conceal their ignorance as the men 
 do." Another friend of mine, who became for the 
 second time a mother under particularly difficult cir- 
 cumstances, paid in my hearing a warm and sponta- 
 neous tribute to the lad}- doctor who attended her, that 
 was worth any amount of general assertion : " She was 
 first-rate, and I can't tell you how pleasant it was to 
 have a lady about me at the time. My nurse, a woman 
 of great experience, who had worked with many men 
 doctors, said she had never seen a case better con- 
 ducted, and had often seen cases conducted worse." 
 
 For myself in recent use of various volumes prepared 
 for the guidance of young mothers, I cannot but observe 
 that the most practically helpful because most explicit 
 is written by a doctor who is also wife and mother. It 
 is no disparagement to the medical man to admit that, 
 other things being equal, the medical woman has the 
 advantage over him of knowing by personal experience 
 many things that he knows only by description and 
 observation. Not only then by lessening the number 
 
25 
 
 of women who go unrelieved, but also by utilizing the 
 characteristics common to doctor and to patient, may 
 suffering be mitigated in the days to come. 
 
 Enough has been said to show that History and Phy- 
 siology are in favour of medical women, and their evi- 
 dence must ere long influence " the general judgment of 
 Society " given these five conditions : First, that the 
 profession continues to attract women of the intellect and 
 character it has attracted hitherto. Next, that separate 
 instruction for the profession should be given to women, 
 and that their practice should be among women and 
 children. I^astly, that their standard of attainment and 
 their scale of remuneration should be precisely the 
 same as for men. We could doubtless cite, each of us, 
 examples of the proverbial generosity of medical men 
 to the poor, and medical women are not likely to be less 
 generous. But if for patients who are not poor they 
 should ever attempt to undersell men, they would be 
 wronging not those men only, but themselves and the 
 profession. I have not heard that they propose to do 
 anything of the kind. 
 
 Given these conditions, good will be done by medical 
 women, first to themselves, in giving persons who 
 would otherwise " die with unexerted powers " as 
 "recreants to their race "a sphere for their special 
 gifts ; secondly, to the public in lessening the terrible 
 amount of preventable suffering ; and thirdly, to tlie 
 profession by bringing into it those peculiar qualifica- 
 tions which make woman complementary to man, for 
 •' Woman is not undevelopt man 
 
 But diverse. Could we make her as the man 
 Sweet love were slain." 
 
26 
 
 The medical woman is then sorely needed by her 
 own compatriots. What shall we say of the far more 
 urgent need of her among a population more than equal 
 to that of the whole United Kingdom, to whom she 
 only can give any aid at all ? I refer to our fellow-sub- 
 jects in the zenanas of India, who suffer untold physi- 
 cal misery amidst a dense ignorance that starves where 
 we should nourish, and maltreats where we should 
 cherish. Some eleven years ago, a grateful Maharani 
 said to Miss Elizabeth Beilby, zenana missionary and 
 M.D. of Berne, who had cured her : " Take down from 
 iny dictation a message which you are to deliver to the 
 Empress of India." Miss Beilby obtained an interview 
 with Her Majesty on her return to" Europe, and gave 
 the message. The Queen turned to her ladies, and 
 said: "Something must be done. We wish it to be 
 generally known that we sympathise with every effort 
 to relieve the suffering women of India." Lord Dufferin 
 had just been appointed Viceroy at that time, and it 
 was the Queen herself who inspired his wife to organize 
 in August, 1885, what is known as "The Countess of 
 Dufferin's Fund for Supplying Female Medical Aid to 
 the Women of India." Being under government aus- 
 pices, it can have no directly religious aim, though it 
 works in friendly relation to the various missionary 
 societies, and it is worthy of note that but for these 
 societies in general, and for one medical missionary in 
 particular, it would never have come into existence. 
 
 Some are ready to criticise what they term the "pro- 
 selytising " aim of these medical missions. Why should 
 we interfere with the patient's religion ? The criticism 
 is explicable when it co'.nes from one who believes that 
 
27 
 
 one religion is as good as another, an opinion almost 
 exclusively found among those who have never been 
 out of a Christian country. The Christian can vindi- 
 cate medical missions at once, by appeal to the highest 
 Authority of all, to Christ's own charge : " Heal the 
 sick, and say unto them, the Kingdom of God is come 
 nigh unto you." 
 
 • 
 
 It is too late to ask : Shall there be medical women ? 
 They are there, they w^re there long before " the wise 
 woman " o: Shakespearian fame. The practical ques- 
 tion is : Shall they be educated practitioners ? In an- 
 swer to it, I have tried to lead you up from the homely 
 body who, out of a knowledge purely empirical, 
 recommends her neighbour not to feed the baby on her- 
 rings and currant cake ; to the trained nurse, whose 
 advent brings hope and comfort into the stricken home ; 
 to the lady doctor, ministering as only a woman can to 
 the needs of women and children ; and, finally, to the 
 medical missionary, healing the troubled body and 
 comforting the still more troubled soul of one without 
 God and therefore without hope, in the midst of a sin 
 and misery which we in Christian lands can have but a 
 faint conception of, by telling that this is not the devil's 
 world after all, that the kingdom of God has been set 
 up and must prevail. She is indeed doing the grand- 
 est work any human being can do. For in the words 
 of one of the noblest in the long roll of noble medical 
 men, David lyivingstone : — " God Himself had one 
 only Son, and He was a missionary and a physician." 
 
MEDICAL COLLEGES FOR WOMEN ONLY IN 
 GREAT BRITAIN AND CANADA. 
 
 The London SchooIv of Medicine for Women, 
 in association with the Royal Free Hospital. Dean, Mrs. 
 Garrett Anderson, M.D. Address : 30 Handel Street, 
 Brunswick Square, London, W.C It was founded in 
 1874, and of the whole number of women now on the 
 British Register, 137 were educated either wholly or 
 partly here. 162 students were reported in January, 
 1894, as attending the School or Hospital. Of 23 lec- 
 turers and demonstrators, 14 are women. The School 
 prepares especially but not exclusively for the Univer- 
 sity of London and the Royal University of Ireland. 
 
 The Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, 
 with clinical instruction in the Royal Infirmary. Dean, 
 Miss Jex-Blake, M.D. Address: Surgeon Square, 
 Edinburgh. Founded in 1886. Its five years curricu- 
 lum is specially adapted to the requirements of the 
 University of St. Andrew's and of the Conjoint Scot- 
 tish Colleges, but qualifies for all other examining 
 boards. H. R. H. the Duchess of Fife is its President. 
 
 Oueen Margaret College, Glasgow, with clinical 
 instruction in the Royal Infirmary and Sick Children's 
 Hospital. It was founded in 1883 as a Women's Col- 
 lege, in connection with the Faculty of Arts in the Uni- 
 versity of Glasgow. Its School of Medicine was opened 
 in 1890, and prepares for the Glasgow degrees. 
 
 Ontario Medical College for Women,Toronto, 
 Canada, with clinical instruction at the General Hospi- 
 
30 
 
 tal, St. Michael's Hospital, the Victoria Hospital for Sick 
 Children, and the Toronto Dispensary. Dean, Dr. R. 
 Barrington Nevitt. Address: 291 Sumach Street, 
 Toronto. It was founded in 1883, and is now attended 
 by some 40 students. Of 30 professors, lecturers, 
 demonstrators and assistants on its staff, six are women. 
 It prepares specially but not exclusively for the degrees 
 of Trinity College and of the University of Toronto. 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR : 
 
 CLEW.S TO Holy Writ or The Chronolcc.r-.\l 
 Scripture Cycle. A scheme for studying the whole 
 Bible in its historical order during three years. 
 
 Tenth thousand. Crown 8vo. Cloth. 
 
 London, Hodder & Stoughton. 
 
 New York, American Tract Society.