This absolute equality of medical men and women before the law includes the rights to
(1) Practise in any department of medicine in which their services may be demanded.
(2) Recover fees if necessary.
(3) Sign death certificates.
(4) Sign any certificates for which a medical signature is essential.
Under this latter heading a curious anomaly arises. If a man is signed up as a lunatic, he is, for so long as he remains a lunatic, debarred from using his Parliamentary vote, and, as may be seen from the above, a medical woman's signature is as valid as that of a man for this disfranchising certificate of lunacy. The State, therefore, at the present time allows that a medical woman may be sufficiently learned and reliable to disfranchise a man, though she be not sufficiently learned and reliable to vote herself.
The Insurance Act concerned medical women only in the same way that it affected their men colleagues. The sole reason, therefore, for mentioning it in this paper is that it affords an indication of two things:—
(1)that the Government therein makes no sex distinction in the profession;
(2)that the bogey of sex cleavage, so often mentioned by the timorous in the political world, is here, as always where it is put to the test, proved to be without foundation.
Unfortunately, the Insurance Act divided the medical profession into two parties; women, no more than men, were unanimous on the subject and some were to be found on either side.