“As this movement progresses, it is evidently a matter of the utmost importance that female physicians should be most fully and perfectly educated; and I firmly believe that it would be difficult or impossible to find for that purpose any one better qualified than yourself.
“I have had the fairest and best opportunity of testing the extent of your medical acquirements during the period of eight months, when you studied here with me, and I can have no hesitation in stating to you—what I have often stated to others—that I have rarely met with a young physician who was better acquainted with the ancient and modern languages, or more learned in the literature, science, and practical details of his profession. Permit me to add that in your relation to patients, and in your kindly care and treatment of them, I ever found you a ‘most womanly woman.’ Believe me, with very kindest wishes for your success,
“Yours very respectfully,
“James G. Simpson.”[[56]]
Miss Blackwell received similar testimonials from several distinguished physicians in London and Paris, in whose hospital wards she faithfully studied. Thus equipped, she returned to New York in 1855 to join her sister, with a fair hope of success in the arduous undertaking before them.
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, with the aid of a few generous friends, had opened a little dispensary for women and children,—which after three years’ existence, and one year of suspension, developed into the New York Infirmary. This was first chartered in 1854. But when Emily Blackwell returned from Europe, no opportunities existed for either of the sisters to secure the hospital medical work, whose continued training is justly regarded of such inestimable advantage to every practicing physician. This was recognized even at a time that hospitals were regarded as superfluous in undergraduate education.
In 1850, Dr. Marion Sims, arriving as an exiled invalid from Alabama, with a brilliantly original surgical operation as his “stock in trade,”—succeeded, with the aid of some generous New York women, in founding the first Woman’s Hospital in the world. It was just seven years since the first imperfect medical school for women had been opened in Boston: six years since the first woman physician had graduated at Geneva: five years since a permanent school for women had been founded in Philadelphia. The coincidence of these dates is not fortuitous. There is a close correlation between the rise of modern gynæcology, and the rise of the movement for readmitting women to the medical profession, where they once held a place, and whence they had been forcibly extruded. While it is far from true that women physicians are intended only for obstetrics and gynæcology, it is unquestionably true that these two great branches of medicine peculiar to their sex constitute the great opportunity, the main portal, through which women have passed, and are destined to pass, to general medicine. It would have been well if those who conducted the one movement had frankly allied themselves with the leaders of the other. Unfortunately, the more important, and especially the more lucrative, the new medical spheres[[57]] seemed likely to be,—the more eager were those who engaged in them to keep out women.
Dr. Sims thus describes the circumstances of the founding of the Woman’s Hospital:
“As soon as they (the New York surgeons) had learned how to perform these operations successfully” (those that Sims had invented), “they had no further use for me. My thunder had been stolen, and I was left without any resources whatever. I said to myself, ‘I am a lost man unless I can get somebody to create a place in which I can show the world what I am capable of doing.’ This was the inception of the idea of a woman’s hospital.”—“Story of My Life.”
When the New York women organized the hospital they framed a by-law,—which has since passed into oblivion,—to the effect that the assistant surgeon should be a woman. Emily Blackwell was the woman who should have been chosen. She had had an education far superior to that of the average American doctor of the day, a special training under the most distinguished gynæcologists of the time,—Simpson and Huginer—and had received abundant testimonials to capacity; while there was really not another person in New York possessed of either such opportunities or of such special testimonials. At her return, informal inquiries were made to ascertain whether the second woman physician in New York would be allowed a footing where she so justly belonged, in New York’s first Woman’s Hospital. The overtures were rejected: Dr. Sims passed by these just claims to recognition, and evaded the mandatory by-law of his generous friends, in a way that is most clearly shown in his own words: “One clause of the by-laws provided that the assistant surgeon should be a woman. I appointed Mrs. Brown’s friend Henri L. Stuart, who had been so efficient in organizing the hospital. She was matron and general superintendent.”[[58]]