Meanwhile a quiet satisfactory holiday must have. No one can tell how many more with the old folks, and this must be what will be good to remember.”
“June 20th. Maurice’s lecture. ‘Miss Jex-Blake’s investigations in America might help much to the solution of the problem’ [of mixed education, presumably]. And after the lecture he thanked me for my book. I’m cock a hoop now!”
“June 24th. On the whole my resolve well kept till now,—one month’s success in no (or few and light) ‘cataracts and breaks.’ Somehow I have a solemn sort of feeling about it this year, as if it would be the last with one or other.”
“Ah, darling,” she writes to her Mother on the voyage, “it was such hard work to say Goodbye last week! Do you know for one little minute I wondered whether after all the price wasn’t too hard to pay, and whether after all I shouldn’t give up doctor, hospital, M.D. and all and just stay with the old Mother.”[Mother.”]
“Sept. 29th. Boston. I am sorry to say that Harvard has refused me again, so I must go to New York!—Ah, well,—‘all things are less dreadful than they seem’!”
In that autumn of 1868 the Blackwells carried out their project of starting a medical school for women in New York.
Two class-tickets are extant admitting Miss S. L. Jex-Blake to the classes of Practical Anatomy and of the Principles and Practice of Medicine at the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary; and there is also a letter from Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell giving advice about rooms:
“With regard to your winter’s work, we will discuss it when you come. We shall be glad to meet your views in any way we can.
There are other matters connected with the school itself we shall be glad to talk over with you, one in particular, which I think would interest you, and in which, from your exceptional position in the class, I think you could help us in our organisation; but I shall leave its discussion till you come.
I hope you will allow time to get thoroughly settled and through with the trouble of it before November.”