CHAPTER XVII
Interesting adventure leading to acquaintance with Ralph Waldo Emerson—Marie receives the degree of M.D.—The faculty presents her, as a gift, with the note which she had given in payment for her lecture fees—Reflections: direct benefit which the men students derived from co-education; tribute to her college teachers, especially Drs. Delamater and Kirtland. (Twenty-six years of age: 1856.)
This second year of my stay in Cleveland was therefore a most valuable episode of my life, turning all my views topsy-turvy, uprooting me, so to say, from all German conservatism and throwing me into this chaotic medley of contradictions.
However, the one straight aim of preparing myself for the examinations leading to a medical diploma kept me from any alarming detour in my progress of evolution, and the year closed without any other than the usual events in the course of life, as, for instance, the birth of a nephew which arrived in December and which I superintended, my brother-in-law defraying my expenses to and from New York.
But I did have one very interesting adventure. And one daughter, Virginia Vaughan, who had been really the means of my being asked to become the guest of the house, was the leader in this. Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson had lectured in Cleveland and he was as usual a guest of Mrs. Vaughan; she had been his pupil when a young lady and at school in Boston and quite an intimacy existed between them. From Cleveland, Mr. Emerson went to Hudson, ten miles away, the real seat of the Western Reserve College, and he was advertised to lecture there at six in the evening.
Virginia, anxious to hear Mr. Emerson again, came to the medical college which closed at four in the afternoon, and proposed our going to Hudson on the half-past four o’clock train to return on the one leaving there at nine. On arriving at the Hudson lecture hall, we found a notice posted on the door informing the public that the lecture would be at seven o’clock.
We went back to the station intending to return to Cleveland and there we found there was no train until the one at nine o’clock. The station was a crude, cold room, having only an insignificant little stove, so Virginia proposed that we find Mr. Emerson who, she knew, was at the house of his cousin, Professor Emerson, a member of the college faculty.
It was a cold, bitter day with plenty of snow everywhere, so we could do nothing better than seek the house of the Professor. There we were made so cordially welcome by Mrs. Emerson that we forgot even our very improper appearance in our common everyday working attire. These kind hosts would not allow us to return in that last train but telegraphed to the family in Cleveland of our whereabouts, insisting that we remain with them over Sunday, there being no trains till Monday morning at eight o’clock.
That evening, after returning from the lecture and while partaking of a cup of hot tea, we noticed a bright rosy light upon the parlor windows. Thinking it was an exhibition of “northern lights,” we all started for the door. Alas! it was a great conflagration of magnificent hues of dark red flame.
We went to see the spectacle from a little hill between the house and the fire where hundreds of people were already assembled, all of whom were warmed and pleased by the wonderful flames, without any one making any effort to extinguish them or to try to prevent their spreading from the burning cheese storehouse to the adjacent factory. Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson asked in astonishment of the men standing nearest, “Why don’t you try to extinguish the fire?” One replied in a very phlegmatic way, “Because we have no firemen or machines.” While another added, “Even if we had, there would be no use for them as we have no water.” The little town of Hudson, with its pretty streets and with a college aspiring to become soon a university, was without water. This seemed impossible to believe, yet it was true, as Professor Emerson assured us.
This night will always remain a memorable one, for independently of that glorious illumination of the snow-covered city and landscape which was so fearful and yet so wondrously beautiful, it gave me an opportunity to get acquainted with one of the greatest philosophers of our times. This opportunity was well used during the Sunday morning when all but Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson and myself went to church, I having no suitable clothes for such attendance. This short acquaintance gave rise to the many kind and pleasant words to people with which Mr. Emerson favored me in later years, and to a very interesting friendship with members of Professor Emerson’s family residing in New York and Boston.
During the winter of 1855-1856, my life in Cleveland became doubly interesting because I began to speak English and thus was able to manifest my appreciation of the delightful impressions which I received, directly and indirectly, through the channels outside of my medical studies.
How often was I surprised by the doubts of these more or less radical reformers concerning the success of women as medical practitioners. Only Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke rationally about the innovation of women physicians; yet he doubted that women would enter upon any other profession except that of teaching.
Having spent Christmas in New York with my sisters and the family, who enjoyed the newly arrived baby as only the first one can be enjoyed, I returned to my college life with new zest, and I now had the extra task to perform of writing my thesis for examination.
New Year’s Day, 1856, was cold and windy and brought a snowstorm. The lake opposite the house presented a sad and terrible aspect in the presence of an icebound schooner with several dead sailors covered with ice and hanging in its rigging. Attempts to reach the vessel in small boats had failed, and a number of sturdy, sympathizing men were standing on the shore discussing plans for relief that still might be given to some unseen fellow beings on board.
As the day was no holiday, I, of course, had to go to college. But it was a bitter day. I thought my first winter in Cleveland was a severe one, but this was cruelly so and it continued till late in March.
The first ten weeks of the year were spent very industriously by me in preparing to pass my examinations, after my thesis was accepted. The latter was considered exceptionally good, and was the cause of my not failing as a candidate for a diploma, because I received only mediocre marks in all the branches of study, even falling below the passing mark in one branch.
I wish to make a statement of this fact here for many good reasons. One is, that it shows the utter absurdity of giving marks or numbers at all, for independently of my being still very awkward in English expressions, I was, and still am, very slow in thinking out any subject and I have a very poor mechanical memory.
Among my three companions I was very much liked when discussing or reasoning out problems of our studies, often systematizing what seemed to us chaotic on a first reading. They often made me the “quizzer,” and I was not a little ashamed to hear with what readiness they gave names and relations of organs, knowing how impossible it would be for me to do the same.
But when it came to practical deductions or applications they always relied upon me. I enjoyed the confidence of those professors with whom I had practical instruction, and I had always out-patients on hand to look after. For this latter, my companions felt they had no time, sitting and committing to memory their lessons, and only one of them had had any practical work in that she had lived in a “water-cure” establishment.
I envied my three friends not a little when I found they graduated with full marks and high honors. However, the desired diploma of “M.D.” was also awarded to me. I felt grateful for it, intending to make the most conscientious use of the power thus given to me and which I felt I fully deserved, as I could not help judging my medical knowledge to be as complete as that of any one of the forty-two graduates.
And it is for this reason, also, that I condemn the method of judging of the ability or competence of any student simply from questions and answers. So much knowledge can be acquired by storing the memory with all sorts of details, without making one’s self fit to digest what is learned and to assimilate even a part of it. But how necessary is this latter when one is called upon to help all sorts of conditions in people who seek advice for physical, mental or moral ailments. And a physician, in the full sense of the word, must be qualified to help human nature from these three points of view. The mere studying and learning by heart of the symptoms of diseases, and of the origin, preparation and doses of drugs, ought to be the last chapter to be examined upon.
My private studies in which examinations would have given much more satisfactory results, were “biology,” “cellular anatomy” and “comparative anatomy,” in none of which subjects had we any instruction in the college. And it is my opinion that the medical profession will not, and cannot, make medicine a science as long as these branches (in both their physiological and pathological forms) are not studied profoundly and made a foundation upon which to build methods for averting or controlling disease. So long as physicians are taught to talk of “curing disease,” so long will the whole profession wander in the realm of empiricism, if not outright quackery.
It may be excusable that I thus use myself in illustrating what I think is so pernicious, namely, cramming the memory with learning isolated facts and filling the brain to its fullest capacity with the names of authors and their opinions, leaving no room for individual reasoning or research or for the power of making original deductions and applications.
After this apparent digression, I must return to my theme, namely, the last few weeks of my student life in Cleveland. As I have already stated how distrustful the so-called “good society” was concerning female medical students and how ready the so-called “reformers” were to seek them, I must here mention a peculiar aberration which had taken hold of the whole community. I refer to what was then called Mesmerism. The individual thinking and theorizing on this subject assumed with many persons a perfectly preposterous form. The views held were based on no scientific research or study but simply on memorizing what was published (often after the most superficial observation) regarding hysterical or somnambulistic manifestations.
The faith with which statements of so-called “cures” in all sorts of illnesses were received was just as widespread as that which later accepted Clairvoyance, Hypnotism and Christian Science. These, one after the other, followed the Mesmerism and Magnetism waves; but they are all precisely the same thing, under other names, and they are all more or less influenced by what is called Spiritualism. And the countless “miracle” workers, under a host of names, are all of the same class.
The desire for the assistance of superrational influences is one of the greatest obstacles which the human mind has to overcome. It will take centuries of education before the majority of thinking beings will learn that a cell will produce only its like, that modifications of the cell are produced only after a time of slow and, as yet, imperceptible changes, and not suddenly by prayer or personal magnetism.
One of the most perplexing phenomena which I observed was that educated men themselves became victims of these delusions. For instance, I knew a professor of botany who was so completely absorbed in the phenomena of Spiritualism and Magnetism that he submitted himself to treatment by these uneducated pretenders for an ailment produced by malaria. It is sometimes almost discouraging to see that even education will not prevent faith in the superrational or supernatural.
But the Earth has billions and billions of years to live, and at the rate of mental development as we have observed it, I have no doubt that the human intellect will grow out of its present infantile condition into a maturity of which even the present generations have no conception, although, unconsciously, we all assist in nursing the embryo of intelligence which we call “knowledge” and “science.”
One may dream of the greatness of the human mind when all the inhabitants of the earth will be as well-developed mentally as the few out of the billions are to-day. One may imagine that the lowest of the Pygmies in mid-Africa or the stupidest Esquimaux near the North Pole will be able to think, to reason and to enjoy, as much as I do now; and that the then great minds will work and struggle to bring up in the scale such poor ignorant mortals as those of my present level, these then existing by the billions as we have the billions of illiterate existing to-day.
[Walt Whitman had a similar thought, and it is interesting to compare her and his expression of it, remembering the difference between prose and poetry, and the obstruction to expression caused by a foreign tongue which never became easy to her. In “Leaves of Grass,” he says:
This day before dawn I ascended a hill and looked at the crowded heaven,
And I said to my Spirit, When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be filled and satisfied then?
And my Spirit said, No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.]
In March, 1856, the great event took place. On Commencement Day, forty-two students, four of whom were women, received the degree of “M.D.” The hall in which the exercises took place was crowded, not only with friends of the graduates but with a goodly number of the curious of the city who had come to get a look at the women doctors. A deep silence prevailed after the president had alluded to the female portion of the students, and the dropping of a pin might have been heard when one after the other, according to alphabetical arrangement, they stepped up to the platform, each to receive her roll of parchment. No sign for or against them was made and all went home in a dull, somber mood.
The doors of the college had closed behind us, and the words of advice to “go out and do honor to your chosen profession” with which the whole event had concluded, rang in my ears, though I had not the slightest idea how to realize them.
Shortly after Commencement, the dean of the college (Dr. Delamater) called upon me. A call from this venerable gentleman was a thing so unusual that numberless conjectures as to what this visit might mean flitted through my brain on my way to the parlor. He received me, as usual, paternally, wished me a thousand blessings, and handed back to me the note for one hundred and twenty dollars, payable in two years, which I had given for the lecture fees. He told me that in the meeting of the faculty after graduation day, it was proposed by one of the professors to return the note to me as a gift. To this, those present cheerfully gave a unanimous vote, adding their wishes for my success and appointing Dr. Delamater as their delegate to inform me of the proceedings.
This was a glorious beginning, for which I am more than thankful, and for which I was especially so at that time when I had barely money enough to return to New York, with very small prospects of getting means wherewith to commence practice. The mention of this fact might be thought indiscreet by the faculty in Cleveland were they still so organized as to admit women, which I am sorry to say is no longer the case, though they give as their reason that women at present have their own medical colleges and, consequently, no longer have need of theirs.
Before I quit the subject of the Cleveland College, I must mention a fact which may serve as an argument against the belief that the sexes cannot study together without exerting an injurious effect upon each other. During the last winter of my study, there was such emulation in respect to the graduating honors among the candidates for graduation, comprising thirty-eight male and four female students, that all studied more closely than they had ever done before—the men not wishing to be excelled by the women, nor the women by the men. One of the professors afterwards told me that whereas it was usually a difficult thing to decide upon the best three theses to be read publicly at the Commencement, since all were more or less indifferently written, this year the theses were all so good that it was necessary, to avoid doing absolute injustice, to select thirteen from which parts should be read.
Does not this prove that the stimulus of the one sex upon the other would act favorably rather than otherwise upon the profession? And would not the very best tonic that could be given to the individual be to pique his amour propre by the danger of being excelled by one of the opposite sex? Is not this natural, and would not this be the best and the surest reformation of humanity and its social condition, if left free to work out its own development?
On the day following the visit of Dr. Delamater, I received a letter from my brother-in-law in which he told me that his business compelled him to go to Europe for half a year, and that he had, therefore, made arrangements for me to procure money, in case that I should need it to commence my practice. He said that he intended to assist me afterwards, but that as he thought it best for my sister (his wife) to live out of New York during his absence, he was willing to lend me as much money as I required until his return. I accepted his offer with infinite pleasure, for it was another instance of real friendship. He was by no means a rich man but was simply in the employ of a large importing house.
By giving lessons in German, I had earned a little money that served to cover my most necessary expenses. For the last months that I spent in Cleveland, I carried in my purse one solitary cent as a sort of talisman, firmly believing that some day it would turn into gold; but this did not happen, and on the day that I was expecting the receipt of the last eighteen dollars for my lessons, which were designed to bear my expenses to New York, I gave it to a poor woman in the street who begged me for a cent, and it doubtless ere long found its way into a ginshop.
The twenty months that I spent in Cleveland were chiefly devoted to the study of medicine in the English language, and in this I was assisted by most noble-hearted men. Dr. Delamater’s office became a pleasant spot and its occupants a necessity to me. On the days that I did not meet them, my spirits fell below zero.
In spite of the pecuniary distress from which I constantly suffered, I was happier in Cleveland than ever before or since. I lived in my element, having a fixed purpose in view and enjoying the warmest tokens of real friendship. I was liked in college, and though the students often found it impossible to repress a hearty laugh at my ridiculous blunders in English, they always showed me respect and fellowship in the highest sense of the terms.
After receiving the degree of “M.D.” and leaving the college behind me, it seems quite right to stop for a few moments and cast a retrospective glance at my own situation, objectively. I wonder whether any one can justly claim that one has always followed a well-laid plan in life, or whether conditions and environment do not mold our actions, sustain our firmness and fortify our persistence in following or working towards a positive aim.
I do not think that in youth the individual shapes the modus operandi of any undertaking. In spite of having a vague idea, or even a strong desire to carry into effect such an idea, environment as well as outside influences must come to the aid, in order to keep alive and to nourish the hope that his preconceived idea or desire can ever be realized. Without such assistance, the young aspirant can easily be diverted and led into spheres of action not intended or desired in the first instance.
After we become older, we may honestly imagine that we followed a regularly planned course in life, when we really lived simply according to whatever chances from time to time molded or influenced our activity.
During the years from 1850 to March, 1856, it now seems to me that no definite plan determined my action, and that all that guided me was the strong desire to make for myself “an independent livelihood” and to assist all persons who felt that same strong desire.
Several times I was tempted to change my field of work so as to obtain this independence. For instance, in Berlin, after leaving the Charité Hospital, offers were made to me by eminent physicians to take charge of private hospitals which were then beginning to be started, especially for surgery. I did not accept these offers, partly because they again placed me in dependence and partly because surgery had been distasteful to me as it was then practiced, without anesthetics, the use of neither ether nor chloroform having become general.
So, as we reason from the concrete to the abstract, I doubt that any one, man or woman, can stand up and declare that one has achieved exactly what one hoped to achieve when entering upon the battlefield of active life. There is no doubt that an intrinsic fitness for a certain kind of activity guides us towards such influences as we need to develop this fitness, but that is all.
It is for this reason, perhaps, that I never married, although educated and trained with the idea that the true sphere of woman is to be a wife and mother. Also, I was very sentimentally inclined towards men, to moonlight walks and to the exchange of friendly letters; but I always grew tired of it all in a very short time and decided that none of these attachments was the right one, proving that my desire for independence was innate. So, happy the man who got released from me and happy was I to remain free.
Again, after arriving in New York, I might just as well have become a manufacturer, as I had begun to be, if I had become familiar with the English language. I was quite happy in that branch of work and was able to assist many a woman in various ways. But the impossibility of acquiring the language in that limited sphere prevented the enlargement of my knowledge and connections necessary in that branch of activity.
Then later came, last but not least, the temptation to go as missionary to the Cherokee Indians. I have not a doubt that in that direction I could have developed my independence and have been extremely useful, had I not been influenced by people in whose judgment I had full confidence—a rare thing in young, impulsive, enthusiastic natures, to accept the advice of others. I was bridled and held in check, not by a clear vision but by influences which overpowered me as the magnet does the iron which it attracts.
Also, do I consider it fair and right and not out of place to speak of the lecturers and teachers connected with the medical department of the Western Reserve College. At the time as well as in the following years, I often heard depreciatory remarks about our professors and their methods of instruction.
There was no doubt that a very few of the students in attendance had a collegiate education superior to that which some of the professors might have had in their younger days, for instance, Dr. John J. Delamater, then over seventy years old, and Dr. J. B. Kirtland, not far from seventy, both of them the kindest of men, true philanthropists and men of a natural genius who had attained a high position among their fellow men.
They had had, perhaps, less advantages in booklearning when young, yet they had the power of inspiring youth to a higher and more thorough study, and their influence in developing the thinking powers of the students was something remarkable. Originality of thought, reasoning and deduction was the example given to us by them. And the form of their teachings was not so much memorizing prescribed methods as the teaching of the students how to observe closely all the phenomena of the case of illness in question and how to study the smallest details, physical, mental and moral, in order to find the primary cause. Such instruction can never be gained from books, although medical literature has now begun to attempt it. Many of the students ridiculed the hints and directions given, while to others they were the inspiration for deeper study even after the degree was obtained.
I know it was so in my case, and works like Kölliker’s Comparative Anatomy, later Virchow’s Cellular Pathology, and works on biology, embryology and histology became really the foundation upon which I built my practice, taking little heed of recommendations of how to treat cases or how to administer doses of this or that old or new remedy or system of remedies. I did my own reasoning, I made my own deductions, in as logical a method as possible as the cases revealed themselves to my understanding through physical or psychical symptoms. Originality and spontaneity of mental action are injured by unthinking cramming of mind and memory with booklearning.
It is for these reasons that I love to think, with gratitude and a deep feeling of honor, of the men who then constituted the medical faculty, although two of them were greatly annoyed by the presence of the four women students and did not hesitate to manifest their feelings in word and deed, without being offensive.
Indeed, even this feeling that our presence was objectionable was of use in our training, as it gave us a strong foretaste of the prejudice which we were to meet in our professional lives. And it helped us in many ways to develop the courage which we were to need in meeting the offensive behavior of many physicians and students with whom we were obliged to come in contact when trying to seek fellowship in private practice, or to increase our knowledge, or to gain admittance to public institutions.