LVII.
MEDICAL SCIENCE FOR WOMEN.
In reading, the other day, a speech on the Medical Education of Women, it struck me that the most important reason for this education was one which the speaker had not mentioned,—the fact that the medical profession stands for science; and that women peculiarly need science, since their natural bent is supposed to be a little the other way. The other professions represent tradition very generally: the lawyer must be bound by precedents; the clergyman generally admits that he must go back to his texts. But the physician claims, at least, to be a man of science, and stands for that before the world. Hence the sacredness with which his position has always been surrounded. The Florida Indians, according to the early voyagers, not only took the physician’s medicine, but they took the physician himself internally, after his death. All other men were buried; but the body of the physician was burned, and his ashes mixed with water, by way of a permanent prescription.
At any rate, the physician himself popularly stands for science; and, in this point of view, his position is very noble. I have known physicians whose professed materialism was more elevated than most of what the world calls religion. To trace that wondrous power called life, which takes these particles of matter, and makes them think with thought, or glow with passion, or put forth an activity so intense as to be the parent of new life from generation to generation,—this study is something sublime. He who reverently ponders on this may call himself theist or atheist, he is yet worthy to be revered: if he can teach us, he blesses us. “I touch heaven,” said Novalis, “when I lay my hand on a human body;” and the popularity among physicians of that fine engraving of Vesalius standing ready for his first dissection, shows that they take a higher view of their vocation than the world sometimes admits.
It seems to me peculiarly important that women should have a share in these studies. They often have time enough. It takes more time for a woman to make herself charming than to make herself learned, Sydney Smith says; and he thinks it a pity that she should often hang up her brains on the wall in poor pictures, or waft them into the air in poor music, when they might be better employed. Yet a great physician, Dr. Currie, says in his letters that he always preferred to have an ignorant patient bring his wife with him, because he could always get more careful observation and quicker suggestions from the woman. This point lies directly in the line of medical education.
The study lies also directly in their path as prospective wives and mothers, and this alone would furnish a sufficient reason for it. A woman of superior gifts, who had studied medicine, but never adopted it as a profession, told me that the mere domestic use of her knowledge had more than repaid her for all the trouble it had cost. For a man who should thus abandon the pursuit, it would be of comparatively little service, apart from the general training; but for a woman, if she fulfills the commoner duties of a woman’s life, this early knowledge will always be a source of direct strength. This applies in a degree to surgery also; and I have always wondered, in view of the old proverb that a surgeon should have “a lion’s heart and a lady’s hand,” why our professors do not oftener aim at developing this heart, if need be, in those who have the hand without training.
LVIII.
SEWING IN SCHOOLS.
Mr. N. T. Allen, of West Newton, Mass., who has had much experience and success as a teacher of both sexes, has been visiting the German public schools. He has lately given an interesting report of his observations to the Middlesex County Teachers’ Association. The reporter says (the Italics being my own),—
“Mr. Allen paid particular attention to the Dorf Schule of the cities, and the Bürger Schule of the country, both being of the lower grades; and contended that the educational system of Germany was far from being perfect, and was inferior in certain respects to that adopted in some of our own States, and carried into successful operation in several towns and communities. It was compulsory and autocratic, in that parents were not allowed any choice in the education of their children; it was unjust toward girls, in establishing and perpetuating the idea of their great mental inferiority to the boys; it was undemocratic, in having different schools for different castes and classes of society; and it was extremely sectarian and bigoted in the religious dogmatic instruction prescribed and forced upon all.”
It is well known that in the German schools a certain number of hours are given by the girls to sewing, and that their course of study, as compared with that of the boys, is narrowed to make room for this. It is for this reason that I, for one, dread to see sewing brought into our public schools. So strong is still the disposition in many minds to put off girls with less schooling than boys, that it seems unsafe to provide so good an excuse for this inequality.
The whole theory of industrial schools is liable to a similar danger,—that of introducing class distinctions into our education. It tends toward that other evil of the German system, described by Mr. Allen, “having different schools for different castes in society.” I hold to the old theory of providing all boys and girls, whatever their parentage or probable pursuit, with a good basis of common-school education, and then trusting the intellectual faculties, thus sharpened, to help them in the struggle for life. Just as it was found in the army that a well-educated young man who had never handled a musket soon overtook and passed a comrade of inferior brains who had been in the militia from boyhood, so is it found to be with those whose minds have been well taught in our public schools. But whether this criticism holds, or not, against industrial schools, as such, it certainly holds when we further make an industrial discrimination against all girls. This we do, if we take an hour of their time for sewing, when the boys give that hour to study.