WOMEN DOCTORS.

Thames Guardian and Mining Record, Volume I, Issue 148, 30 March 1872, Page 3

WOMEN DOCTORS.

(From the New York Tribune.) Tue prospects of medical education for women are brightening. The medical faculty of Moscow, it is stated, have not only decided that the privilege of acquiring a thorough medical knowledge would be of utility to women, but have “ resolved to admit them to the educational courses aud lectures of the University, and to the privilege of following all the labours of the MedicoChi rurgical Academy. The Ernperor has also issued an order that women shall be instructed m midwifery, and authorised them to act as surgeons, to vacciuate, and bo employed as chemists.” In contrast to this is the course of the professors in Edinburgh, who have just gained their point in the University court for the present, aud stopped the progress of the ladies who have successfully passed their first examination. This action of the doctors is an old example of Scotch obstinacy ; the University, in 1869, nassed resolutions admitting women to the full rights and privileges of the medical instruction, provided the classes were kept separate from those of the male students.” Several women paid their matriculation fees, and have been baulked by the simple dogged refusal of the individual professors to lecture to them. Whether the Edinburgh ladies have followed the most effective or politic course in their manner of urging their claims, there is certainly great room to question. In one or two instances their behaviour has been neither wise nor womanly ; but Scotch women, as Scotch men, are apt to trample down any small gentleness or courtesies that blossom on their way when they are on the trail of an abstract bit of justice. The quibble of individual right to choose their pupils urged by the professors, by which the women are deprived of their legal right to instruction will not, however,' avail very long. John Bull’s love of fair play and weaker sense of chivalry are both roused, and Mr Gladstone but uttered the popular feeling when he expressed, in his late speech at Greenwich, his willingness to aid “ in removing the serious social inequalities under which women labour, so far as it could be done without tampering with the fundamental laws which providentially determine their place in the world.”

The slow progress made by women who sincerely desire to educate themselvss thoroughly for this profession is the more singular in view of the fact that, since the days of Pharaoh’s midwives, women have been amateur doctors all over the world. The fair mistresses of the Crusaders could not read or write, very probably, but they had no inconsiderable skill in pharmacy, and even surgery ; and in the East they have, of necessity, the medical care of their own sex. Yet Dr Beddoes, in 1791, was the first physician who delivered lectures to ladies, and urged their proper training for the work. We know of no reason for this tardy advance apart from the strenuous opposition of regular physicians. The higher the rank a practitioner holds in his profession, the more apt he is to protect its bounds by strict class etiquette and conversatism, and to guard agaiust quackery with an over-sensitive jealousy. Women, as they know, cither as scholars or workers, are not unjustly held to bo open to the foregone suspicion of shallowness, haste, and lack of thoroughness or precision. The female student of medicine, therefore, enters the field with the stigma of her sex clinging to her, and it is by no vituperation or coup deforce , such as Miss Jex Blake attempted in Edinburgh,.that she will ensure success, but rather by the thoroughness and patience as scholars which have marked some of the American women when striving for their position, and the skill and unpretentious merit which they have shown when it was gained.