Jan. 21. 1872.
My dear Sophy,
One line to wish you many happy returns of the day, and to tell you that all is going on very well here....
We were very glad that you crept into such a haven of rest as Mrs. Nichol has to offer you: and I am quite sure the strain of so much fighting and organizing must be very great.
It seems hardly possible that you should get on with your own Medical education while there is so much polemical business on hand; but if you carry the point for all women, it will be cheaply bought at the sacrifice of two or three years of individual training in books and bones.”
“When they persecute you in one city, flee ye to another.”
This was advice which S. J.-B. had always kept well in mind, though not with regard to Paris and Zürich; and enquiries as to other British Universities had been diligently prosecuted. St. Andrews was the one that most naturally suggested itself, “as a comparatively rural University, without male students of medicine, and yet with the power to grant degrees.” It is true that the Medical Curriculum at St. Andrews was—and is—very incomplete; but the deficiency might be made good by some teaching-school unable—or unwilling—to grant degrees. Professor Lewis Campbell and Mrs. Campbell had taken a deep interest in the project of making their University the Alma Mater of the women students; S. J.-B. had visited them at St. Andrews in the autumn of 1871, with Miss Massingberd Mundy[[98]]; and there are a number of cordial letters witnessing to the genuine desire of both the Professor and his wife for the success of the scheme.
Their enthusiasm was not typical of the University, however, though Principal Tulloch “seemed friendly in a vague way”; and all hope in this direction had, for the moment, to be given up.
Meanwhile S. J.-B., on behalf of herself and her fellow-students, had made a final appeal to the University Court of Edinburgh to provide them with the means of completing their education, and she had also forwarded to them a farther legal opinion from the Lord Advocate and Sheriff Fraser to the effect that the University authorities had full power to permit the matriculation of women in 1869; that the resolutions then passed amounted to a permission to women to “study Medicine” in the University, and that therefore the women concerned were entitled to demand the means of doing so; and finally, that if such means were persistently refused, the legal mode of redress lay in an Action of Declarator.
On January 8th the University Court resolved that it was not in their power to comply with the requirements of the women as regarded teaching: the whole question, they said, had been “complicated by the introduction of the subject of graduation, which is not essential to the completion of a medical or other education”: if the ladies would altogether give up the question of graduation, and be content with certificates of proficiency, the Court would try to meet their views.