It was against handicaps like this that the women in medicine were making progress. Dr. Gertrude B. Kelly’s name, in New York, is at the top in the annals of surgery. Dr. Bertha Van Hoesen is a famous surgeon in Chicago. Dr. Mary A. Smith and Dr. Emma V. P. Culbertson are leading members of the medical profession in Boston. Dr. Lillian K. P. Farrar was in 1917 appointed visiting surgeon on the staff of the Women’s Hospital in New York, the first woman in New York City to receive such an appointment. Dr. S. Josephine Baker, who established in New York the first bureau of child hygiene in the world, is probably more written of than is any man in medicine. As chief of this department, she has under her direction 720 employés and is charged with the expenditure annually of over a million dollars of public money. She is a graduate of Dr. Blackwell’s medical college in which social hygiene first began to be taught with the idea of making medicine a preventive as well as a curative art. It was the idea that Harvard University a few years later incorporated in a course leading to the degree “Doctor of Public Health.” And though a woman had thus practically invented “public health” and another woman, Dr. Baker is the first real and original doctor of public health, Dr. Baker herself was refused at Harvard the opportunity to take their course leading to such a title. The university did not admit women. But a little later the trustees of Bellevue Hospital Medical College, initiating the course and looking about for the greatest living authority to take this university chair, came hat in hand to Dr. Baker, even though their institution does not admit women to the class rooms. “Gentlemen,” she answered, “I’ll accept the chair you offer me with one stipulation, that I may take my own course of lectures and obtain the degree Doctor of Public Health elsewhere refused me because I am a woman.” Like this the woman who has practically established the modern science of public health, in 1916 came into her title. It is probably the last difficulty and discrimination that the American woman in medicine will ever encounter.
The struggle of women for a foothold in the medical profession is the same story in all lands. It was the celebrated Sir William Jenner of England who pronounced women physically, mentally and morally unfit for the practice of medicine. Under his distinguished leadership the graduates of the Royal College of Physicians in London pledged themselves, “As a duty we owe it to the college and to the profession and to the public to offer the fullest resistance to the admission of women to the medical profession.” Well, they have. The medical fraternity in all lands took up the burden of that pledge.
A WORLD-WIDE RECONSTRUCTION
But to-day see the builders at work at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. Yale and Harvard have also announced the admission of women to their medical colleges. And it is not by chance now that these three most exclusive medical colleges in the United States have almost simultaneously removed their restrictions. They are doing it too at the University of Edinburgh and at the University of Moscow. The reverberation from the firing line on the front is shaking all institutions to their foundations. As surely as if shattered by a bomb, their barriers go down. Like that, the boards of trustees in all countries are capitulating to the Great Push of the new woman movement. All over the world to-day the hammers and chisels are ringing in reconstruction. It is the new place in the sun that is being made for woman. The little doors of Harvard and Yale and Columbia are creaking on their ancient hinges because the gates of the future are swinging wide. It is not a thin line that is passing through. The cohorts of the woman’s cause are sweeping on to occupy the field for which their predecessors so desperately pioneered.
Forward march, the woman doctor! It is the clear call flung back from the battle fields. Hear them coming! See the shadowy figures that lead the living women! With 8000 American women doctors to-day marches the soul of Elizabeth Blackwell. Leading 3000 Russian women doctors there is the silent figure of Marie Souslova, the first medical woman of that land, who in 1865 was denied her professional appellation and limited to the title “scientific midwife.” With the 1100 British women there keeps step the spirit of Sophia Jex Blake pelted with mud and denied a degree at Edinburgh University, who in 1874 founded the London School of Medicine for Women.
And there is one grand old woman who lived to see the cause she led for a lifetime won at last. The turn of the tide to victory, as surely as for the Allies at Verdun or the Marne, came for the professional woman’s cause when the British War Office unfurled the English flag over Endell Street Hospital, London. It floated out on the dawn of a new day, the coming of which flashed with fullest significance on the vision of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.[1] The beautiful eyes of her youth were not yet so dimmed with her eighty years but that all of their old star fire glowed again when the news of this great war hospital, entirely staffed by women, was brought to her at her home in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where she sat in her white cap, her active hands that had wrought a remarkable career now folded quietly in her lap.
[1] Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson died at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, England, Dec. 17, 1917.
Dr. Anderson was the second woman physician of modern times, the first in England. When as Elizabeth Garrett she came to London to be a doctor in 1860, there was no University in her land that would admit her. Physicians with whom she wished to study, were some of them scornful and some of them rude, and some were simply amazed. “Why not become a nurse?” one more tolerant than the rest suggested. The girl shook her head: “Because I mean to make an income of a thousand pounds a year instead of forty.” The kindly old doctor who finally yielded to her importunities and admitted her to his office, also let her in to the lectures at the Middlesex Hospital with the specific arrangement that she should “dress like a nurse” and promise earnestly “not to look intelligent.” Her degree she had to go to Paris for. Like that she got into the medical profession in 1871 a year before her marriage to the director of the Orient steamship line. Dean of the London School of Medicine for Women and founder of the New Hospital for Women, she came through the difficult days when it was only in “zenana” practice in India that English women doctors had a free field. Russia too dedicated her pioneer medical women to the heathen, modestly designing them for the Mussulman population and at length permitting them the designation “physician to women and children.” That idea lingered long with civilisation. As late as 1910 a distinguished British surgeon in a public address allowed that there was this province for the woman physician, the treatment of women and children. But any medical woman “who professed to treat all comers,” her he held to be an “abomination.”
Then the world turned in its orbit and came to 1914. And Elizabeth Anderson’s eyes looked on the glory of Endell Street. Do you happen to be of that woman movement which but yesterday moved upward toward the top in any of the professions so laboriously and so heavily handicapped? Then for you also, Endell Street is the shining citadel that to-day marks the final capitulation of the medical profession to the woman’s cause, as surely as the New York Infirmary in Livingston Place still stands as the early outpost established by the brave pioneers. But the ordinary chance traveller who may search out the unique war hospital in the parish of St. Giles in High Holborn, I suppose may miss some of this spiritual significance to which a woman thrills. The buildings which have been converted from an ancient almshouse to the uses of a hospital are as dismal and as dingy as any can be in London. They are surrounded by a fifteen foot high brick wall covered with war placards, a red one “Air Raid Warning,” a blue one “Join the Royal Marines,” and a black one “Why More Men are Needed. This is going to be a long drawn out struggle. We shall not sheathe the sword until—” and the rest is torn off where it flapped loose in the winter wind.
In a corner of this wall is set Christ Church, beside which a porter opens a gate to admit you to the courtyard. Here where the ambulances come through in the dark, the bands play on visitors’ day. It is a grey court yard with ornamental boxes of bright green privet. On the benches about wait the soldiers, legless soldiers, armless soldiers, some of them blind soldiers. On convalescent parade in blue cotton uniform with the gaiety of red neckties, every man of them at two o’clock on a Tuesday is eager, expectant, waiting—for his woman. Mothers, wives, sweethearts are arriving, the girls with flowers, the women with babies in their arms. And each grabs his own to his hungry heart. You go by the terrible pain and the terrible joy of it all that grips you so at the throat. Inside where each woman just sits by the bedside to hold her man’s hand, it is more numb and more still. A girl orderly in khaki takes you through. Her blue shoulder straps are brass lettered “W. H. C.,” “Women’s Hospital Corps.” The only man about the place who is not a patient is the porter at the gate. The women in khaki with the epaulets in red, also brass lettered “W. H. C.,” are the physicians and surgeons.