With all good wishes, believe me,
Yours sincerely,
S. Jex-Blake.”
That this was no new attitude on her part we learn from a letter written many years before to Miss Bertha Cordery. “You are quite right in thinking that I do not by any means as a matter of course congratulate people on their marriage, but when you say that ‘having met, no other result was possible,’ I think you express the essence of a good marriage with the terseness worthy of the distinguished historian.[[155]]”
This seems the best place to say one word about the special interest S. J.-B. took in her Hindu students. The first of these, Annie Jagannadham, was a young woman of such fine and finished character that her early death, soon after her return to her native land, was a matter for infinite regret, but scarcely for surprise. When she qualified as a doctor, S. J.-B. wrote to the Spectator to point out the desirability of sending back Hindu women educated in England to minister to their own countrywomen; and her letter called forth a gratifying response from Mr. James Cropper of Ellergreen (who had been interested in S. J.-B.’s first application to the University of Edinburgh many years before) offering to found a scholarship for Hindu women at her school. This was accordingly done, and a series of Hindu students was the result. Differing from each other in many respects, they were alike in one thing, and that was a real gift for understanding and appreciating their Dean. They seemed to find the Mother side of her by a sort of instinct.
“I cannot tell you,” wrote one who had failed in an examination abroad, “how much your kind letter comforted me. When I was happy I wrote to other people; but when I was in distress I wrote to you and was soothed, for failure did not seem so hard when you were satisfied with my work.”
When Rukhmabai came to Edinburgh for her Final Professional Examination, she was S. J.-B.’s guest, and a strong mutual admiration and friendship was the result.
In accepting the chairmanship of the School, Dr. Balfour had made it almost a stipulation that S. J.-B. should personally undertake the teaching of Midwifery, and, in consequence of this, she was the first woman to be recognized as a lecturer in the Extra-Mural School. As a matter of fact, her special technical training was necessarily out of date. Dr. Balfour probably looked upon Midwifery mainly as a subject that successful physicians leave behind them, and did not realize that greater strides had been made in the teaching of this subject than in any other. However, S. J.-B. was a born teacher, as we know: she worked hard: and she had the able coöperation of the late Dr. Milne Murray, whose attitude towards her in this connection was one more of the splendid loyalties bound up in the story of her life.
And one cannot talk of loyalty without recalling a characteristic letter from Dr. Pechey, written when she received the news of S. J.-B.’s appointment: