Ever yours truly,
David Masson.”
The view that the result of the motion was a success in its kind proved to be a general one, and the matter was discussed at great length by newspapers, lay, medical and religious.
“There is no possible reason,” said the Guardian,[[62]] “why a very large proportion of instruction may not be given with perfect propriety to men and women together; but there are clearly some parts in a medical course which cannot be so treated, and there ought to be no difficulty whatever in making arrangements for these. To provide separate lectures for a few special occasions is a very different thing, both in the matter of convenience and expense, from insisting on having two distinct and separate courses throughout in every department.... Professor Masson’s motion was defeated, but by a majority so small—eleven in a meeting of a hundred and five—that its success at some future time seems certain. Let the ladies only add to the exercise of one quality, with which the world credits them, that of patience, another, which is supposed to be a less common attribute of their sex, perseverance, and they will assuredly gain their point.”
“The female students almost deserve this rebuff,” said the Spectator,[[63]] “for making the concessions they have done to English prudery, concessions not made either in France, Austria, or the United States. The only safe ground for them to stand on is that science is of no sex, and cannot be indelicate unless made so of malice prepense, and that by the very conditions of the profession the modesty of ignorance must be replaced by the modesty of pure intent.”
It is not to be supposed that the women students were fortified by a unanimous chorus of journalistic support: far from it: some six or seven months later the Spectator strove to understand “the bitter and, so far as we know, the unprecedented malignity with which women who aspire to be Doctors are pursued by the literary class.”
One does not wish to dwell on this. It was simply bound to be. As Sir James Stansfeld said seven years later in reviewing the whole movement:
“It is one of the lessons of human progress that when the time for a reform has come you cannot resist it, though, if you make the attempt, what you may do is to widen its character or precipitate its advent. Opponents, when the time has come, are not merely dragged at the chariot wheels of progress—they help to turn them. The strongest force, whichever way it seem to work, does most to aid.”
It is the more pleasing, however, to record the sane and wholesome view taken from the first by the leading responsible papers, including Punch.
“I am very vexed about the General Council,” wrote Miss Pechey from her home; “but it’s no use worrying,—at least so the nightingale tells me. She sang two hours at my bedroom window last night, and said all sorts of pretty things. I wish I could bring her to Edinburgh with me, but she wouldn’t like it; besides they are a very old family, and have lived in the place from the time of the Britons, so she wouldn’t like to move.