While England claims a “Female Medical Society,” and one “Female Medical College,” the United States has several of the former, and three regularly chartered “Female Medical Colleges.” In a recent announcement of the English college, it claims fifty students, “but the aim of the whole movement is at present only to furnish competent midwives.”
The “Maternity Hospital,” of Paris (which existed long before the late Franco-Prussian war, but which we can learn nothing of since the fall of that once beautiful city), “afforded some opportunity for observation, receiving females nominally as students, but they were not allowed to prescribe in the wards, nor were they instructed in regard to the use and properties of the remedies there prescribed. Indeed, they can hardly rise above the position of proficient nurses,” says our informant.
Some few medical colleges of the United States are admitting females on the same footing as the heretofore more favored “lords of creation.”
A female college has been in existence in Philadelphia for above twenty years. The “New England Female Medical College” was chartered in 1856; but the “regular” colleges, as Yale, Harvard, etc., refuse all female applicants.
New York has been more liberal towards the gentler sex. At Geneva, Rochester, Syracuse, and elsewhere, as early as 1849-50, medical schools of the more liberal sort, but of undoubted respectability and legal charters, opened their doors to female students. In 1869 the New York Female Medical College was chartered, since which time more than two hundred ladies have therein received medical instruction.
In all the principal cities of the Union may be found from one to a dozen respectably educated and successful female practitioners, who have attained to some eminence in spite of the opposition of the “faculty,” and the ignorant prejudices of the common people.
It is surprising how early and persistently some men forget that they were “born of woman!” Their contempt of the capabilities of womankind would lead one to suppose them to be ashamed of their own mothers. Mark Twain’s facetious but instructive speech, once delivered before an editorial gathering in Boston, ought to be rehearsed to them daily; yes, and enforced by petticoat government upon their notice till it became stereotyped into their stupid brains. Mark says,
“What, sir, would the peoples of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir,—almighty scarce! (Laughter.) Then let us cherish her; let us protect her; let us give her our support, our encouragement, our sympathy,—our—selves, if we get a chance.
“But, jesting aside, Mr. President, woman is gracious, lovable, kind of heart, beautiful, worthy of all respect, of all esteem, of all deference. Not any here will refuse to drink her health right cordially, for each and every one of us has personally known, and loved, and honored the very best of them all,—his own mother!”
Sarah B. Chase, M. D., a respectable and successful female physician of Ohio, gives the following excellent advice:—