Guess, now, who it is that a British Parliament sets above the law, as a doctor-maker for that public it professes to love and protect!""The Regius Professor of Medicine?"
"No."
"Tyndall?"
"No."
"Huxley?"
"No."
"Then I give it up."
"The Archbishop of Canterbury."
"Oh, come! a joke is a joke."
"This is no joke. Bright monument of British funkyism and imbecility, there stands the clause setting that reverend and irrelevant doctor-maker above the law, which sets his grace's female relations below the law, and, in practice, outlaws the whole female population, starving those who desire to practice medicine learnedly, and oppressing those who, out of modesty, not yet quite smothered by custom and monopoly, desire to consult a learned female physician, instead of being driven, like sheep, by iron tyranny--in a country that babbles Liberty--to a male physician or a female quack.
"Well, sir, in 1849 Miss Elizabeth Blackwell fought the good fight in the United States, and had her troubles; because the States were not so civilized then as now. She graduated doctor at Geneva, in the State of New York.
"She was practicing in England in 1858, and demanded her place on the register. She is an Englishwoman by birth; but she is an English M.D.
only through America having more brains than Britain. This one islander sings, 'Hail, Columbia!' as often as 'God save the Queen!' I reckon.
"Miss Garrett, an enthusiastic student, traveled north, south, east, and west, and knocked in vain at the doors of every great school and university in Britain, but at last found a chink in the iron shutters of the London Apothecaries'. It seems Parliament was wiser in 1815 than in 1858, for it inserted a clause in the Apothecaries Act of 1815_compelling_ them to examine all persons who should apply to them for examination after proper courses of study. Their charter contained no loop-hole to evade the act, and substitute 'him' for 'person;' so they let Miss Garrett in as a student. Like all the students, she had to attend lectures on chemistry botany, materia medica, zoology, natural philosophy, and clinical surgery. In the collateral subjects they let her sit with the male students; but in anatomy and surgery she had to attend the same lectures privately, and pay for lectures all to herself. This cost her enormous fees. However, it is only fair to say that, if she had been one of a dozen female students, the fees would have been diffused;as it was, she had to gild the pill out of her private purse.
"In the hospital teaching she met difficulties and discouragement, though she asked for no more opportunities than are granted readily to professional nurses and female amateurs. But the whole thing is a mere money question; that is the key to every lock in it.
"She was freely admitted at last to one great hospital, and all went smoothly till some surgeon examined the students _viva voce;_ then Miss Garrett was off her guard, and displayed too marked a superiority;thereupon the male students played the woman, and begged she might be excluded; and, I am sorry to say, for the credit of your ***, this unmanly request was complied with by the womanish males in power.
"However, at her next hospital, Miss Garrett was more discreet, and took pains to conceal her galling superiority.
"All her trouble ended--where her competitors' began--at the public examination. She passed brilliantly, and is an English apothecary. In civilized France she is a learned physician.
"She had not been an apothecary a week, before the Apothecaries' Society received six hundred letters from the medical small-fry in town and country; they threatened to send no more boys to the Apothecaries', but to the College of Surgeons, if ever another woman received an apothecary's license. Now, you know, all men tremble in England at the threats of a trades-union; so the apothecaries instantly cudgeled their brains to find a way to disobey the law, and obey the union. The medical press gave them a hint, and they passed a by-law, forbidding their students to receive any part of their education _privately,_ and made it known, at the same time, that their female students would not be allowed to study the leading subjects _publicly._ And so they baffled the Legislature, and outlawed half the nation, by a juggle which the press and the public would have risen against, if a single grown-up man had been its victim, instead of four million ***** women. Now, you are a straightforward man; what do you think of that?""Humph!" said Vizard. "I do not altogether approve it. The strong should not use the arts of the weak in fighting the weak. But, in spite of your eloquence, I mean to forgive them anything. Shakespeare has provided there with an excuse that fits all time:
"'Our poverty, but not our will, consents.'""Poverty! the poverty of a company in the city of London! _Allons donc._Well, sir, for years after this all Europe, even Russia, advanced in civilization, and opened their medical schools to women; so did the United States: only the pig-headed Briton stood stock-still, and gloried in his minority of one; as if one small island is likely to be right in its monomania, and all civilized nations wrong.
"But while I was studying in France, one lion-hearted Englishwoman was moving our native isle. First she tried the University of London; and that sets up for a liberal foundation. Answer--'Our charter is expressly framed to exclude women from medical instruction.'
"Then she sat down to besiege Edinburgh. Now, Edinburgh is a very remarkable place. It has only half the houses, but ten times the intellect, of Liverpool or Manchester. And the university has two advantages as a home of _science_ over the English universities: it is far behind them in Greek, which is the language of error and nescience, and before them in English, and that is a tongue a good deal of knowledge is printed in. Edinburgh is the only center of British literature, except London.