It must have been three years before I left school that I conceived the idea of studying medicine; it was during the period when I was so religiously inclined. I had been to a Sunday-school excursion on Seneca Lake that day when the idea came to me. There I had heard much talk of a girl in our class who, having received a severe fall some months before, and whom we had considered hopelessly injured, was now improving surprisingly under the care of a woman physician from a distant town. Her parents were too poor to procure these services, but an aunt had recently sent for the physician; and the girl’s recovery then seemed assured. All this I heard without apparently hearing, giving it scant heed in the hustle and gayety of our lake picnic. An old negress on the boat had told our fortunes that day, predicting beaux and happy or unhappy marriages for all the girls but me. When someone asked, “Isn’t she going to marry?” she replied:
“Go ’long thar, her father doan’t want her to marry—she hain’t got no call to get married.”
I was rather pleased at this: if it showed anything, I thought, it showed that I was to have something different from a merely domestic career; but I had no idea what my course in life was to be, nor what I wanted it to be; and I think I was not then particularly concerned about my sick schoolmate.
It was that night after returning home, as Mother and I sat on the “stoop” in the darkness, talking in a desultory way, that this news about Dora’s improvement occurred to me. Our talk was mingled with my own dreams and cogitations as to what my future was to be. I knew I must do something, but what that something was I did not know. Music had been prohibited, teaching was out of the question because of my incompetency in mathematics—suddenly into my mind there came the strange, hitherto undreamed-of idea, and I said, first to myself, then to Mother, “I will be a doctor.”
It all came in a twinkling—how scarce women physicians were, how much they must be needed, and that if there were more of them in the smaller towns, poor modest girls like Dora, who had refused treatment from a man, need not suffer so for lack of means to employ them.
I can hear now the dismay in Mother’s voice as she said, “Oh, Eugenia!” Fired with the idea, I talked eagerly and rapidly; it seemed clear that it was to be; there was no question about its fulfilment; but how it was to be accomplished, so far as finances were concerned, I was puzzled to know. For Father’s health was precarious then—two bank failures and hard times made just the ordinary expenditures hard to meet. I did not see how it could be done, but knew it would. Elated over the project, the very suddenness with which it had come to me convinced me of its ultimate accomplishment. I felt annoyed at Mother’s objections. When she demurred, I insisted on her giving a reason. Her chief one, that it was going out of my sphere, irritated me. In those days (I hope I am less so now) I was very intolerant of another’s point of view, and Mother’s illogical way of meeting questions tried me exceedingly. Her insight, her intuition, her faith, her estimate of character, were strong, but her logic was poor. Probably then, knowing me as she did, she felt it would be a life for which temperamentally I was not suited; perhaps she divined some of the disappointments and failures I have since experienced; but she was unable to give a reason and could only protest in a pitying way. I can hear her tones yet, her words of regret and dismay, as I announced my intention with a finality she seemed to realize.
That night I wrote in my diary, doubtless sentimentally, of this new idea. I think I rather gloried in Mother’s objections, and in the ridicule of my sister when she heard of it. (She probably felt much as some other girls and boys did: some boys who remembered my hyper-sensitiveness and timidity as a child thought I would never have “sand” enough to study medicine.)
For a little I chose to consider myself a martyr. Years later, in looking over the diaries of that period, much of what I had written seemed so at variance with what I then felt, that it seemed like the experience of another person—so false, so sentimental, such a pose! In shame and disgust I destroyed the records.
From the time, though, that the idea came to me, it was persistently held. In school I worked with added zeal, paying especial attention to studies I thought would be of use to me, and feeling impatient at those which were distasteful, and which I thought little likely to be helpful. But how poorly qualified was I then to judge of this! I know now that just because of my failure to buckle down to what was hard for me (particularly mathematics and physics), I missed the mental training I most needed in those years. The education of the attention, the moving along calmly from proof to proof, the deductions, the synthesis, the exactness, the close, true ways of thinking, the patience, the calmness; in short, the mental discipline which mathematics would have given me, I failed to acquire; and I can now see how handicapped I have been because of this failure. With senses so acute, and the emotional nature so intense, the proper balance would have been found in a more rigid intellectual training. The deficiencies have had to be made up, when made up at all, at too great a cost; and the efficiency in my chosen field of work has fallen far short of what it might have been had I been more tractable then, more heedful of the advice of my elders.