Woman’s Medical College, Chicago, report in 1890, 90 students.
University of California, report in 1890, 8 female students out of total of 27.
Cooper College, San Francisco, report in 1890, 18 women out of total of 167.
From Ann Arbor I have only obtained the list of female graduates, which is 88.
The total number of graduates from the Philadelphia School, who have been enrolled among the alumnæ, is 560.
The total number of graduates of the New York School is 135.
During the current year, a movement has been inaugurated to obtain admission for women to the medical school of the Johns Hopkins University for the purpose of advanced study.[[95]]
Future advance for the education of women in medicine must be in the line of their admission to the schools where the highest standard of education is maintained; and to such affiliation of their own schools with universities, as may bring them under the influence of university discipline. There is no manner of doubt that, with a few unimportant restrictions, co-education in medicine is essential to the real and permanent success of women in medicine. Isolated groups of women cannot maintain the same intellectual standards as are established and maintained by men. The claim of ability to learn, to follow, to apply knowledge, to even do honest original work among the innumerable details of modern science, does not imply a claim to be able to originate, or to maintain by themselves the robust, massive intellectual enterprises, which, in the highest places, are now carried on by masculine strength and energy.
Whether, as has been asserted,[[96]] the tendency to quackery among women is really more widespread than among men, may well be doubted. It is true that their lesser average strength peculiarly inclines women to follow the lines of the least resistance. On that very account, it is singularly unfortunate that the greatest, indeed in this country an invincible, resistance has been offered to woman’s entrance at the best schools, while inferior and “irregular” colleges have shown an odd readiness to admit them. It would seem that co-educational anatomy is more easily swallowed when administered in homœopathic doses! Evidently, however, for the maintenance of these irregular schools,[[97]] the women are not responsible: and they only have two of their own.
Because women require the intellectual companionship of man, to be able to recognize the highest intellectual standards, or to attain them in some cases, and to submit to their influence in others,—it does not follow that they have no special contributions of their own to offer to the work of medicine.