UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN.
“Recognizing the equality of both sexes to the highest educational advantages,” for four years the doors of the University of Michigan have been “open to all students.”
“The University is organized in three departments, as follows: the Department of Literature, Science, and the Arts; the Department of Medicine and Surgery; the Department of Law. Each department has its Faculty of Instruction, who are charged with its special management.”
Eager to avail themselves of the advantages here offered in such a “broad, generous, and hospitable spirit,” a number of women from different parts of the country have matriculated, and are or have been pursuing studies in common with students of the other sex.
During the four years three women have graduated from the Literary Department, four from the Law, and twenty-one from the Medical. At the present time there are in the first department above mentioned, fifty women; in the second, five; and in the third, thirty-eight.
Of those in the Law and Medical Departments I can say comparatively little. The general impression is, that they have endured the work quite as well as the men; and it is a fact, that a number of the women who entered the Medical Department, with four lectures per day to attend, and all the work of the laboratory and dissecting-room to perform, have steadily improved in health from the time of entering until leaving; while those who were well at the beginning of their college work, have in no case suffered a deterioration of health from their intellectual labor. One of these women, Miss Emma Call, of Boston, graduated last year, the first in her class.
Thus far the women-graduates from this department have generally taken positions in their profession which they are filling with usefulness, if not with honor; and in which, as far as powers of endurance are concerned, they are showing themselves able to compete with male physicians. There seems to be an impression prevalent among them—and perhaps it is not peculiar to their sex alone—that the physician should be the physiological educator as well as the healer of the race, that his or her duty is to teach people how to use the “ounce of prevention” as well as the “pound of cure,” and that, through the mutual labors of the two sexes, more than in any other way, is to be brought about the long-desired, and much-needed, health reform.
Although it may yet be too early to form an estimate of the effect of this system of “identical co-education” upon the health of the women who have graduated from this University, we believe that there has been only one case of protracted illness, and there is no reason for asserting that this was caused by intellectual labor—at least, in this institution, since the lady was here only six months—having taken her previous course elsewhere—and is a graduate from the Law Department.
Of those who have graduated from the Literary Department, we have positive information that as yet they have suffered no “penalties” from their “severe and long-continued mental labor,” and they were, on graduating, as well as on entering. One woman who matriculated with the present senior class, took the whole course in three years, went forth in better health than when she entered, and is at present the principal of the High School at Mankato, Minn., while another is still prosecuting her studies, and contemplates taking a course of law.
In regard to those at present in the Literary Department, it is impossible to get at any statistics as to excused absences, which will show the average attendance of one sex as compared with that of the other, and from which inferences can be deduced in regard to the health of the women-students; for the university authorities—not having dreamed that there was a “new natural law” to be revealed, which should assert that the course of “identical co-education” is conducive to health and usefulness for the one sex, and to premature decay and the hospital or cemetery for the other—have not preserved the records of excused absences. The professors assert that non-attendance upon recitations, on account of ill-health, has been no greater on the part of the young women than of the young men, and that in many cases, the attendance of the former has been better than that of the latter; yet there is nothing, perhaps, except personal acquaintance and observation, which can reveal the true condition of the present health of the women of the Literary Department of Michigan University, and the manner in which it has been affected by the intellectual labors they have undergone.