Writing exactly forty years after the events just narrated—at a moment when women doctors are proving so vital an asset to the nation and to humanity at large—one realizes the difference it would have made to the whole world if Sophia Jex-Blake had been content to qualify abroad and to slip on to the Medical Register somehow, instead of throwing the gates wide open for all who were to follow her.
Reference has been made above to her love of poetry, and of all her poems there was none she was wont to recite more solemnly than Kipling’s Explorer:
“Yes, your ‘Never-never country’—yes, your ‘edge of cultivation’
And ‘no sense in going further’—till I crossed the range to see.
God forgive me! No, I didn’t. It’s God’s present to our nation.
Anybody might have found it but—His Whisper came to Me!”
PART III
My fame is in the hands of others. I have weighed in a nice and scrupulous balance whether it is better to serve men or to be praised by them, and I prefer the former.
Sydenham.
(Quoted in S. J.-B.’s commonplace book.)