How deep was the impression made upon Miss Irby by that brief visit we gather from a letter written twenty years later (on July 5th, 1894):
“I was on the point of writing to you after the prize-giving at the London School of Medicine for Women. A visit to those premises always recalls to me those few days with you when you stood there alone in almost bare walls, establishing the fort. You would wish nothing better than that the School should go on as it is going on, friends and foes being drawn into it. But I always burn with the recollection of your first days there.”
CHAPTER XIX
THE RUSSELL GURNEY ENABLING ACT
It was at this stage that Mrs. Anderson’s help was so invaluable to the great venture. She had an assured position—social and professional—in the metropolis; and her name carried the weight that belongs to a sane and shrewd and able personality. It is impossible to over-estimate the good she had done to “the Cause” by simply showing that a woman can be a reliable and successful practitioner. She had founded a small hospital for women; but she still thought that the time for the creation of a good medical school for women had not come,—that it would have been better to wait till public opinion was more distinctly in favour of women doctors: and she would have fostered the growth of public opinion by encouraging women to obtain foreign degrees, and to practise in England as unregistered physicians and surgeons.
She was strengthened in this position by the fact that S. J.-B. was not the Founder she would have chosen: she judged the Edinburgh campaign by its net result as regarded the immediate object at which it had aimed, and, so far as Edinburgh University was concerned, that net result was failure. There were those, moreover, who assured her, not without a measure of truth, that Miss Jex-Blake’s impulsiveness (“want of judgment,” “want of temper,” she told S. J.-B.) had done great harm in Edinburgh. She and her informants alike failed, perhaps, at the moment to realize how that same impulsiveness (mistakes and all) had formed the picturesque element that made the popular appeal,—how that same impulsiveness had roused and had borne the brunt of the latent opposition which must have manifested itself sooner or later under the wisest management.
There is abundant contemporary evidence to this effect. Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi wrote from America:
“You have fortunately been able to interest a much larger and better class of people than have ever bestirred themselves in the matter here. The list of governors of your School is quite imposing. You at least have had the advantage attaching to a conspicuous battle with real and dignified forces engaged on each side; whereas here,—this question, as so many others, has rather dribbled into the sand.”
Miss Pechey, too, after delivering a lecture in Yorkshire a year later, wrote:
“I couldn’t conclude without saying that all we had done towards opening up the medical profession to women was due mainly to Miss Jex-Blake, who had got all the abuse because she had done all the work,—in fact all along she had done the work of three women or (with a grin at the phalanx of men behind)—of ten men! This brought down the house.”
“Mrs. Garrett Anderson is a fine instance of an individual success,” said one of the physicians who assisted the movement in those early days; “but Miss Jex-Blake fights the battle, not for herself, but for all.”