“The especial propriety of qualifying women to practice among children and their own sex, will be admitted I hope by all.”—Rt. Rev. Bishop Potter, 1850.
“We have long been persuaded that both morality and decency require female practitioners of medicine. Nature suggests it; reason approves it; religion demands it.”—Northern Christian Advocate, 1850.
“This is one of the most important projects of the day for the improvement of the condition of women.”—Zion’s Herald, 1850.
“The employment of men as ‘midwives’ is a modern custom, and one not to be commended.”—Phil. Saturday Post, 1850.
“To attend medical clinics in company with men, women must lay aside their modesty. There are still enough gentlemen who would blush to expose their mothers or sisters or wives to what, before women, would be improper and indecent.”—Letter to editor N. Y. Med. Record, 1884, by M. K. Blackwood.
“History, physiology, and the general judgment of society unite in the negative of woman’s fitness for the medical office.”—“Woman and her Physician.” Lecture, Theoph. Parvin, Prof. Dis. Women, 1870.
“If I were to plan with malicious hate the greatest curse I could conceive for women, if I would estrange them from the protection of women, and make them as far as possible loathsome and disgusting to man, I would favor the so-called reform which proposed to make doctors of them.”—Editorial Buffalo Med. Journal, 1869, p. 191.
“There are free-thinkers in the medical profession as there are free-lovers in social life.... The opposition of medical men arises because this movement outrages all their enlightened estimate of what a woman should be. It shocks their refined appreciation of woman to see her assume to follow a profession with repulsive details at every step, after the disgusting preliminaries have been passed.”—Sherry, Med. and Surg. Reporter, July 6, 1867.
“It is obvious that we cannot instruct women as we do men in the science of medicine; we cannot carry them into the dissecting room and hospital; many of our more delicate feelings, much of our refined sensibility must be subdued before we can study medicine; in females they must be destroyed.”—Remarks on Employment of Females as Practitioners, Boston, 1820.
“The ceremonies of graduating Miss Blackwell at Geneva may well be called a farce. I am sorry that Geneva should be the first to commence the nefarious process of amalgamation. The profession was quite too full before.”—Letter by D. K. to Boston Journal, Feb. 1849.