During the early years of the college I occupied the Chair of Hygiene, and had the pleasure of welcoming Miss Jex Blake, then visiting America, as a member of the first class. The Professor of Hygiene also superintended the important work of the sanitary visitor at the homes of the poor. It has always seemed to me, during many years of active private practice, that the first and constant aim of the family physician should be to diffuse the sanitary knowledge which would enable parents to bring up healthy children.
The most painful experience which I met with in practice was the death of one of my little patients from the effects of vaccination. This baby, though carefully tended and the lymph used guaranteed pure, died from the phagedenic ulceration set up by vaccination in a rather scrofulous constitution. To a hygienic physician thoroughly believing in the beneficence of Nature’s laws, to have caused the death of a child by such means was a tremendous blow!
This serious experience awakened a growing distrust as to the wisdom of all medical methods which introduce any degree of morbid matter into the blood of the human system; a distrust which no amount of temporary professional opinion or doubtful statistics has been able to remove. Although I have always continued to vaccinate when desired, I am strongly opposed to every form of inoculation of attenuated virus, as an unfortunate though well-meaning fallacy of medical prejudice.
CHAPTER VII
RETURN TO ENGLAND
1869
In 1869 the early pioneer work in America was ended. During the twenty years which followed the graduation of the first woman physician, the public recognition of the justice and advantage of such a measure had steadily grown. Throughout the Northern States the free and equal entrance of women into the profession of medicine was secured. In Boston, New York, and Philadelphia special medical schools for women were sanctioned by the Legislatures, and in some long-established colleges women were received as students in the ordinary classes.
Our New York centre was well organised under able guidance, and I determined to return to England for a temporary though prolonged residence, both to renew physical strength, which had been severely tried, and to enlarge my experience of life, as well as to assist in the pioneer work so bravely commencing in London, and which extended later to Edinburgh.
I soon found that social questions of vital importance to human progress were taking root in the prepared soil of the older civilisation—questions which were of absorbing interest. During the following twenty years the responsibility of the Christian physician assumed to me an ever-deepening significance.
After a refreshing tour in the lovely Lake District, arranged by my old friend Herman Bicknell, we attended the Social Science Congress held in Bristol in September of 1869. This was indeed a noteworthy experience. I was the guest with Miss Mary Carpenter of her relations Mr. and Mrs. Thomas. One morning Miss Carpenter came into my room with her hands full of papers, saying, ‘These papers refer to a subject that you must take up. It is to be discussed at a sectional meeting to-day, from which all women are excluded; but you, as a doctor, have a right to be present, and will be admitted, and you must attend.’
This formed my introduction to that tremendous campaign against the unequal standard of sexual morality known as the repeal of the ‘Contagious Diseases Acts,’ in which for the following seventeen years I was to take an active part, and which, from its extended bearings, moulded the whole of my future life.
The study of the papers thus brought to my notice by Miss Carpenter was a revelation to me. Perhaps happily for me, during my past life and medical experiences I had never fully realised the wide bearing of this subject and the inevitable social degradation produced by a double standard of morality. My eyes were now suddenly opened, never to be closed again, to that direful purchase of women which is really the greatest obstacle to the progress of the race.