There is no doubt that this would have been in most respects the ideal arrangement. There is room for everyone in London. In those days it was absolutely essential for a woman doctor to settle in a town large enough to allow for the overwhelming proportion of patients who declined to take their lives in their hands, so to speak, by trusting one of their own sex. Even if the patient herself was willing to lean her whole weight on an untried plank, husbands and mothers stood in the way. Indeed there were girls who reckoned it the prime luxury involved in earning their own living that they became free to employ the doctor of their choice—a woman.
It is true that patients—and still more their male relatives—were readier to trust S. J.-B. than they would have been to trust most other women. Her inherent motherliness was not weakened by any aggressive femininity; but on the other hand it is not to be supposed that she was any less alarming than she had been as a student. No doctor ever inspired greater enthusiasm and devotion than she did, but it was on the whole the few to whom she appealed. Her vein of tenderness lay too deep for the casual eye to see; and many were afraid of the occasional high-handed imperious ways and the disregard of what people were likely to say.
“It was like being lifted on a comet’s tail,” writes a patient to whom she had been called in an emergency in March 1878, “when you came in, strong and swift, with your eagle wings, getting over distances in a third of the time other people take to do it.”
This is admirable, and describes what many felt, but although being lifted on a comet’s tail is exactly what many patients want, the treatment is not universally applicable.
London, then, would probably have supplied S. J.-B. with a larger practice than she could have worked; many friends, and particularly her brother, were keenly anxious that she should settle there; Mr. Norton always regretted her departure; but, now that the School had been taken out of her hands, it seemed inadvisable that she should remain as a looker-on. The difficulty was to find another place big and representative enough: she dreaded the great midland towns. After much consultation, she decided on the last place on earth she might have been expected to choose,—on Edinburgh.
It was partly the bracing climate, partly the beautiful drives, partly the many friends who had stood by her so gallantly, that led to this spirited decision, but on the whole it was a mistake. The smoke of the conflict was still hot, and some of those who had admired her most had admired her for qualities which were not what they sought in a physician.
Moreover, she was the last person on earth to play up to the expectations of the community in which she lived. The Edinburgh of those days was a more conventional place than Edinburgh is now, and doctors above all were expected to conform to a particular standard. There was a general impression that piety paid and that an interest in missions was a great help to success in practice.
“You never will succeed unless you conform to these usages,” said a friend: “You might have Edinburgh at your feet if you would go to church regularly and show yourself a religious woman,” said another.
It is needless to say that these were not the arguments to use with S. J.-B. Never, moreover, since the far-off school-days in which she had given a highly-valued shilling to “the Jews” had she taken any interest in missions. That vein in her was worked out, or transmuted into something else. The more she read of the old religions—and she did read—the more she found in them to admire and respect,—the more it seemed to her that they were the fitting medium for the training of the people to whom they had been given. It must be frankly admitted too that she continued to see such questions in the atmosphere of the particular Evangelical school in which she had been brought up; in recognizing the evolution of the individual—of herself as an individual—she failed to recognize the evolution of the medium; and her life was so full of active beneficent interests as to leave scant time for the consideration of questions that did not at first sight appeal to her,—that did not seem to be her job.
In the Edinburgh, too, of those days, the ordinary people who “counted” were the people who liked things done “just so.” It disturbed their sense of the fitting, for instance, that S. J.-B. should pay professional visits, driving herself in a pony phaeton. Altogether she was too big, too untrammeled for the post. What was wanted was the woman who is a credit to any cause she may adopt. There are plenty of them now-a-days.