It is not to be supposed that the “cataracts and breaks” were a thing of the past. There were many who found S. J.-B. a delightful person to work with, but even they had no difficulty in seeing how it was that others had a different experience.
“But the Doctor is nearly always right,” said one of her assistants in later years, “when she differs from other people.” And this was perfectly true. She was nearly always right; but the few times she was wrong were sufficient in many quarters to give the dog the proverbial “bad name.”
Moreover, one must frankly admit that her rightness was often too uncompromising, too business-like, too far in advance of what other people could be expected to agree with, too inconsiderate of ordinary human frailty. “You treat other people like pawns,” Miss Du Pre used to tell her, but, although she quoted the remark, she never seemed really to grasp it.
During the first few years of her life at Bruntsfield Lodge she took a great interest in local women’s questions. She was a moving spirit in the organization of one or two large suffrage meetings, and in the laborious propagandism and canvassing involved in the election of women as poor law guardians. Evidence of the thoroughness of her work persists to this day; but it was not always appreciated by the Edinburgh ladies who coöperated with her. They thought her so big and masterful that nobody else got a chance. It was just as well that her own special work absorbed her more and more. In 1884 she had written for Macmillan (at the instigation of her friend Mrs. S. R. Gardiner) a useful little book on The Care of Infants, which was warmly received by the profession and by a considerable public, and she was steadily taking notes for a second edition of her Medical Women, which should bring the narrative down to the date of publication.
Public affairs, too, demanded their share of interest. That weary Medical Bill kept cropping up at intervals, and S. J.-B. was often appealed to privately by members of parliament and others for information and advice. They were well aware, of course, that her main interest was to safeguard the rights and privileges of women, but they also knew something of her mental acumen and thoroughness of method. Moreover, she was unconnected with any of the great vested interests which constituted the great stumbling block in the way of any Bill. There is a telegram extant addressed to her by the President of the Edinburgh College of Physicians who had gone up to London to watch the debate,—“Please wire Mr. Stansfeld to be sure to be here in time to secure dropping of bill proposed.”
Towards the end of 1884, the Edinburgh Extra-Mural School made an effort towards incorporation, and memorialized the Privy Council to grant them a Charter. S. J.-B. was anxious to take advantage of this opportunity to raise again the question of the admission of women to medical education in Scotland, especially as, by this time, the various missionary bodies were quite alive to the importance of the subject.
“The Free Church are also willing to move,” she writes to Mr. Stansfeld on November 20th, “and they wish to memorialize the Privy Council direct, and to request that any Charter granted may not exclude women, but make it at least optional for the College to admit them. To my intense amusement the request has just come to me that I will ‘draft’ such a memorial, but I have not the remotest idea how even to address the Privy Council!”
It was not only the Free Church that asked her help. The lecturers, mindful of her power of enlisting the sympathy of statesmen in the past, also begged her to use her influence in high quarters, and, through the National Association, to present a petition to the Privy Council. Mr. Stansfeld was helpful as ever, advising her to interview Lord Carlingford, from whom she had a gracious reception. “But the primary condition must be,” she writes to Dr. Littlejohn, “that the Charter distinctly commits the College to the admission of women on equal terms. If this is not approved, the whole thing falls to the ground.”
The reader of the foregoing chapters might not unnaturally be prepared to hear that the College was duly incorporated, and that the women were left in the lurch; but it was the unexpected that happened. The effort of the Extra-Mural School to achieve incorporation failed, but the examining bodies for which the School existed, the Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, decided a few months later to admit women. We may reasonably suppose that the renewed discussion of the whole question had not been in vain, but, so far as S. J.-B. was concerned, it was a case of the seed cast into the ground, which springs and grows up “he knoweth not how.” On March 17th, 1885, she writes to Dr. Pechey:
“Meanwhile I have two splendid pieces of news to send you, if they have not yet reached you,—viz. (1) The Irish College of Surgeons has not only opened all its examinations, and even its fellowships, to women, but also all the classes in its School,—making separate arrangements for Practical Anatomy only. (2) More wonderful still, the Scottish Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons of Edinburgh and Glasgow (now combined to give one ‘Triple Qualification’) have decided without a division to throw open all their examinations to women. I am exceedingly surprised, for though I heard an application had been made, I thought there was little hope of success, and took no trouble about it. However, so it is, and I hope to have classes opened in the Extra-Mural School (and perhaps in connection with St. Andrews) next winter. Somebody has left St. Andrews (subject to a life interest) a legacy of £50,000 on condition of admitting women. So you see all round ‘Pigs is looking up.’