Women nurse all the patients of both ***es, often under horrible and sickening conditions, and lay out all the corpses. No doctor objects to this on sentimental grounds; and why? Because the nurses get only a guinea a week, and not a guinea a flying visit: to women the loathsome part of medicine; to man the lucrative! The noble nurses of the Crimea went to attend _males only,_ yet were not charged with indelicacy. They worked gratis. The would-be doctresses look _mainly to attending women,_but then they want to be paid for it: there was the rub--it was a mere money question, and all the attempts of the union to hide this and play the sentimental shop-man were transparent hypocrisy and humbug.
"A doctor justly revered in Edinburgh answered him, but said nothing new nor effective; and, to our great joy, the majority went with us.
"Thus encouraged, the university court settled the matter. We were admitted to matriculate and study medicine, under certain conditions, to which I beg your attention.
"The instruction of women for the profession of medicine was to be conducted in separate classes confined entirely to women.
"The professors of the Faculty of Medicine should, for this purpose, be permitted to have separate classes for women.
"All these regulations were approved by the chancellor, and are to this day a part of the law of that university.
"We ladies, five in number, but afterward seven, were matriculated and registered professional students of medicine, and passed six delightful months we now look back upon as if it was a happy dream.
"We were picked women, all in earnest. We deserved respect, and we met with it. The teachers were kind, and we attentive and respectful: the students were courteous, and we were affable to them, but discreet.
Whatever seven young women could do to earn esteem, and reconcile even our opponents to the experiment, we did. There was not an anti-student, or downright flirt, among us; and, indeed, I have observed that an earnest love of study and science controls the amorous frivolity of women even more than men's. Perhaps our heads are really _smaller_ than men's, and we haven't room in them to be like Solomon--extremely wise and arrant fools.
"This went on until the first professional examination; but, after the examination, the war, to our consternation, recommenced. Am I, then, bad-hearted for thinking there must have been something in that examination which roused the sleeping spirit of trades-unionism?""It seems probable."
"Then view that probability by the light of fact:
"In physiology the male students were 127; in chemistry, 226; 25 obtained honors in physiology; 31 in chemistry.
"In physiology and chemistry there were five women. One obtained honors in physiology alone; four obtained honors in both physiology and chemistry.
"So, you see, the female students beat the male students in physiology at the rate of five to one; and in chemistry, seven and three-quarters to one.
"But, horrible to relate, one of the ladies eclipsed twenty-nine out of the thirty-one gentlemen who took _honors_ in chemistry. In capacity she surpassed them all; for the two, who were above her, obtained only two marks more than she did, yet they had been a year longer at the study.
This entitled her to 'a Hope Scholarship' for that year.
"Would you believe it? the scholarship was refused her--in utter defiance of the founder's conditions--on the idle pretext that she had studied at a different hour from the male students, and therefore was not a member of the chemistry class.""Then why admit her to the competition?" said Vizard.
"Why? because the _'a priori_ reasoners took for granted she would be defeated. Then the cry would have been, 'You had your chance; we let you try for the Hope Scholarship; but you could not win it.' Having won it, she was to be cheated out of it somehow, or anyhow. The separate-class system was not that lady's fault; she would have preferred to pay the university lecturer lighter fees, and attend a better lecture with the male students. The separate class was an unfavorable condition of study, which the university imposed on us, as the condition of admitting us to the professional study of medicine? Surely, then, to cheat that lady out of her Hope Scholarship, when she had earned it under conditions of study enforced and unfavorable, was perfidious and dishonest. It was even a little ungrateful to the injured ***; for the money which founded these scholarships was women's money, every penny of it. The good Professor Hope had lectured to ladies fifty years ago; had taken their fees, and founded his scholarships with their money: and it would have done his heart good to see a lady win and wear that prize which, but for his female pupils, would never have existed. But it is easy to trample on a dead man: as easy as on living women.
"The perfidy was followed by ruthless tyranny. They refused to admit the fair criminal to the laboratory, 'else,' said they, 'she'll defeat more men.
"That killed her, as a chemist. It gave inferior male students too great an advantage over her. And so the public and Professor Hope were sacrificed to a trades-union, and lost a great analytical chemist, and something more--she had, to my knowledge, a subtle diagnosis. Now we have at present no _great_ analyst, and the few competent analysts we have do not possess diagnosis in proportion. They can find a few poisons in the dead, but they are slow to discover them in the living; so they are not to be counted on to save a life, where crime is administering poison.
That woman could, and would, I think.
"They drove her out of chemistry, wherein she was a genius, into surgery, in which she was only a talent. She is now house-surgeon in a great hospital, and the public has lost a great chemist and diagnostic physician combined.