We are compelled to face many difficulties by this plan. We must anticipate a smaller class at first in consequence of the additional expense laid upon the student, for however low the price of tuition may be made, the added expense of boarding has to be met. The student also, at the outset of her career, is unable to appreciate the great advantages of this enlarged instruction, and is naturally tempted to go where a diploma may most easily be gained. We are quite sure, however, that in a few years the thorough education given by our College, and the distinction conferred by its diploma, will draw to it the best students from every part of our country.
There is one other feature of our College that I must allude to, as I feel in it a profound and special interest: it is the introduction of hygiene into our course as a prominent and obligatory study.
It seems strange that the prevention of disease should not always have engaged the thought and instruction of the guardians of the public health at least as fully as the cure of disease, and yet I believe that this is the first college in America to found a chair of hygiene. Consider the subjects involved in the development of a healthy human organization—a healthy race. Physical and moral training; the inheritance and transmission of qualities; the peculiarities of individual constitution; the nature and influences of climate, soil, food and customs; the prevention of epidemics; the municipal regulations of our cities, etc.—all these subjects come directly and unavoidably into the department of hygiene. Surely every student who receives the degree of Doctor should be thoroughly acquainted with all that Science at present knows on these subjects. How else can he fulfil his noblest trust—the guardianship of individual and public health? For a specialist with a narrowed range of duties such knowledge may, perhaps, be of less importance; but for the family physician, the trusted friend and counsellor year after year—for the public-spirited physician who would give to his wisdom and experience the largest usefulness, these studies are indispensable, and his initiation, his first impulse and interest in this knowledge, should surely be given by his college.
There is one branch of this subject which I think must weigh heavily on the hearts of women physicians, and which will, I hope, through them, engage the attention of every thoughtful woman in our land—I refer to the frightful mortality of young children. Children are born to live, not die. There is a wonderful force of tenacious vitality in all growing organizations—far more proportionate vitality than in the old or even the adult; yet, notwithstanding this beneficent provision of nature, we destroy our young children nearly five times as fast as the other members of our social body. If every woman in our city could hear the daily moan of these dying infants, could feel that every day multitudes of bereaved mothers were weeping over untimely graves, and that her own skirts were not clear of this shedding of innocent blood, we should see an army of earnest co-workers eager to save this multitude of helpless children.
Infancy and early childhood are the especial charge of women, and how do they fulfil this trust? It does not do to look around upon a well-furnished home, bright with the smiling faces of happy children, and say, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Each one is his brother’s keeper to the direct extent that knowing an evil can be cured, he refrains from doing his part to cure it. Did the women of our city resolve to save these children they might be saved. Year by year the mortality might be lessened by the sanitary knowledge diffused by women, and the sanitary regulations their influence might establish, until from their own little circle they could look with joy to a bright cloud of witnesses beyond—thousands of useful lives saved to their homes and their country through their aid!
This suggestion of important practical usefulness will give force to the great principle involved in our College—scientific training for women.
Interest in natural objects, careful, comprehensive observation of them, enthusiasm for unselfish and impersonal ends, are the main principles of scientific study—principles that would enter with invigorating force into the mental development of every girl, that would regenerate the life of women.
Science is no hard dry thing as some imagine; it is the earnest study of this wonderful world around us. It will take the form of each individual mind. In a narrow unimaginative nature it will seem hard and dry; in a warm and loving nature it will flow into every form of benevolent action. It might work a most beneficent change in the relation that we all consider most sacred—the relation of a mother to her children.
The immense force of habit, second only to the original type of constitution, and often overpowering even the original tendencies, is, nevertheless, formed by the silent working of influences, hour by hour and day by day, that are invisible and cannot be measured; that seem absolutely valueless, taken item by item, in the long account, and yet in the aggregate they will save or ruin the body and soul. A mother may instil the love of reading or the love of dress; she may form the habit of out-door exercise or the habit of gossip not by the set precept or even formal regulations, but by her own tastes unavoidably moulding the tastes of her children, and flowing out naturally into these external arrangements that inevitably reflect the ruling spirit or affections of the individual. Did the mother possess a hearty interest in the wonders of field and forest, of sea and sky, what a treasury of delightful intercourse might be found in the varied environs of our city! A mother’s love joined to the broad tastes and knowledge would never weary of the ceaseless questioning of childhood; the older the child, the closer and more influential would be the companionship. The holiday by the sea-side or amongst the mountains, so wasted now in idleness and frivolity, might be a rich harvest-time of delightful knowledge drawn from the treasures of land and water.
It is, then, because of the great value that enthusiasm for natural science would be to woman, value to the individual life, to the home life, and to society, that I think this College will owe its greatest interest. From the fact that it is a Medical College it will derive its practical efficiency in cultivating a taste for science.