A Woman-Hater Part 35

"The a.s.sembly met and the union orator got up; he was a preacher of the Gospel, and carried the weight of that office. Christianity, as well as science, seemed to rise against us in his person. He made a long and eloquent speech, based on the intelligent surmises and popular prejudices that were diffused in a hundred leading articles, and in letters to the editor by men and women, to whom history was a dead letter in modern controversies; for the Press battled this matter for two years, and furnished each party with an artillery of reasons, _pro_ and _con._

"He said, 'Woman's sphere is the hearth and the home: to impair her delicacy is to take the bloom from the peach: she could not qualify for medicine without mastering anatomy and surgery--branches that must uns.e.x her. Providence, intending her to be man's helpmate, not his rival, had given her a body unfit for war or hard labor, and a brain four ounces lighter than a man's, and unable to cope with long study and practical science. In short, she was too good, and too stupid, for medicine.'

"It was eloquent, but it was _'a priori_ reasoning, and conjecture _versus_ evidence: yet the applause it met with showed one how happy is the orator 'qui hurle avec les loups.' Taking the scientific preacher's whole theory in theology and science, woman was high enough in creation to be the mother of G.o.d, but not high enough to be a sawbones.

"Well, a professor of _belles-lettres_ rose on our side, not with a rival theory, but with facts. He was a pupil of Lord Bacon, and a man of the nineteenth century; so he objected to _'a priori_ reasoning on a matter of experience. To settle the question of capacity he gave a long list of women who had been famous in science. Such as Bettesia Gozzadini, Novella Andrea, Novella Calderini, Maddelena Buonsignori, and many more, who were doctors of law and university professors: Dorotea Bocohi, who was professor both of philosophy and medicine; Laura Ba.s.si, who was elected professor of philosophy in 1732 by acclamation, and afterward professor of experimental physics; Anna Manzolini, professor of anatomy in 1760; Gaetaua Agnesi, professor of mathematics; Christina Roccati, doctor of philosophy in 1750; Clotilde Tambroni, professor of Greek in 1793; Maria Dalle Donne, doctor of medicine in 1799; Zaffira Ferretti, doctor of medicine in 1800; Maria Sega, doctor of medicine in 1799; Madalena Noe, graduate of civil law in 1807. Ladies innumerable, who graduated in law and medicine at Pavia, Ferrara, and Padua, including Elena Lucrezia Cornaro of Padua, a very famous woman. Also in Salamanca, Alcala', Cordova, he named more than one famous doctress. Also in Heidelberg, Gottingen, Giessen, Wurzburg, etc., and even at Utrect, with numberless graduates in the arts and faculties at Montpellier and Paris in all ages.

Also outside reputations, as of Doctor Bouvin and her mother, acknowledged celebrities in their branch of medicine. This chain, he said, has never been really broken. There was scarcely a great foreign university without some female student of high reputation. There were such women at Vienna and Petersburg; many such at Zurich. At Montpellier Mademoiselle Doumergue was carrying all before her, and Miss Garrett and Miss Mary Putnam at Paris, though they were weighted in the race by a foreign language. Let the male English physician pa.s.s a stiff examination in scientific French before he brayed so loud. He had never done it yet.

This, he said, is not an age of chimeras; it is a wise and wary age, which has established in all branches of learning a sure test of ability in man or woman--public examination followed by a public report. These public examinations are all conducted by males, and women are pa.s.sing them triumphantly all over Europe and America, and graduate as doctors in every civilized country, and even in half-civilized Russia.

"He then went into our own little preliminary examination, and gave the statistics: In Latin were examined 55 men and 3 women: 10 men were rejected, but no women; 7 men were respectable, 7 _optimi,_ or first-rate, 1 woman _bona,_ and 1 _optima._ In mathematics were examined 67 men and 4 women, of whom 1 woman was _optima,_ and 1 _bona:_ 10 men were _optimi,_ and 25 _boni;_ the rest failed. In German 2 men were examined, and 1 woman: 1 man was good, and 1 woman. In logic 28 men were examined, and 1 woman: the woman came out fifth in rank, and she had only been at it a month. In moral philosophy 16 men were examined; and 1 woman: the woman came out third. In arithmetic, 51 men and 3 women: 2 men were _optimi,_ and 1 woman _optima;_ several men failed, and not one woman. In mechanics, 81 men and 1 woman: the woman pa.s.sed with fair credit, as did 13 men; the rest failing. In French were examined 58 men and 4 women: 3 men and 1 woman were respectable; 8 men and 1 woman pa.s.sed; two women attained the highest excellence, _optimoe,_ and not one man. In English, 63 men and 3 women: 3 men were good, and 1 woman; but 2 women were _optimoe,_ and only 1 man."

"Fancy you remembering figures like that," said Vizard.

"It is all training and habit," said she, simply.

"As to the study and practice of medicine degrading women, he asked if it degraded men. No; it elevated them. They could not contradict him on that point. He declined to believe, without a particle of evidence, that any science could elevate the higher s.e.x and degrade the lower. What evidence we had ran against it. Nurses are not, as a cla.s.s, unfeminine, yet all that is most appalling, disgusting, horrible, and _uns.e.xing_ in the art of healing is monopolized by them., Women see worse things than doctors.

Women nurse all the patients of both s.e.xes, often under horrible and sickening conditions, and lay out all the corpses. No doctor objects to this on sentimental grounds; and why? Because the nurses get only a guinea a week, and not a guinea a flying visit: to women the loathsome part of medicine; to man the lucrative! The n.o.ble nurses of the Crimea went to attend _males only,_ yet were not charged with indelicacy. They worked gratis. The would-be doctresses look _mainly to attending women,_ but then they want to be paid for it: there was the rub--it was a mere money question, and all the attempts of the union to hide this and play the sentimental shop-man were transparent hypocrisy and humbug.

"A doctor justly revered in Edinburgh answered him, but said nothing new nor effective; and, to our great joy, the majority went with us.

"Thus encouraged, the university court settled the matter. We were admitted to matriculate and study medicine, under certain conditions, to which I beg your attention.

"The instruction of women for the profession of medicine was to be conducted in separate cla.s.ses confined entirely to women.

"The professors of the Faculty of Medicine should, for this purpose, be permitted to have separate cla.s.ses for women.

"All these regulations were approved by the chancellor, and are to this day a part of the law of that university.

"We ladies, five in number, but afterward seven, were matriculated and registered professional students of medicine, and pa.s.sed six delightful months we now look back upon as if it was a happy dream.

"We were picked women, all in earnest. We deserved respect, and we met with it. The teachers were kind, and we attentive and respectful: the students were courteous, and we were affable to them, but discreet.

Whatever seven young women could do to earn esteem, and reconcile even our opponents to the experiment, we did. There was not an anti-student, or downright flirt, among us; and, indeed, I have observed that an earnest love of study and science controls the amorous frivolity of women even more than men's. Perhaps our heads are really _smaller_ than men's, and we haven't room in them to be like Solomon--extremely wise and arrant fools.

"This went on until the first professional examination; but, after the examination, the war, to our consternation, recommenced. Am I, then, bad-hearted for thinking there must have been something in that examination which roused the sleeping spirit of trades-unionism?"

"It seems probable."

"Then view that probability by the light of fact:

"In physiology the male students were 127; in chemistry, 226; 25 obtained honors in physiology; 31 in chemistry.

"In physiology and chemistry there were five women. One obtained honors in physiology alone; four obtained honors in both physiology and chemistry.

"So, you see, the female students beat the male students in physiology at the rate of five to one; and in chemistry, seven and three-quarters to one.

"But, horrible to relate, one of the ladies eclipsed twenty-nine out of the thirty-one gentlemen who took _honors_ in chemistry. In capacity she surpa.s.sed them all; for the two, who were above her, obtained only two marks more than she did, yet they had been a year longer at the study.

This ent.i.tled her to 'a Hope Scholarship' for that year.

"Would you believe it? the scholarship was refused her--in utter defiance of the founder's conditions--on the idle pretext that she had studied at a different hour from the male students, and therefore was not a member of the chemistry cla.s.s."

"Then why admit her to the compet.i.tion?" said Vizard.

"Why? because the _'a priori_ reasoners took for granted she would be defeated. Then the cry would have been, 'You had your chance; we let you try for the Hope Scholarship; but you could not win it.' Having won it, she was to be cheated out of it somehow, or anyhow. The separate-cla.s.s system was not that lady's fault; she would have preferred to pay the university lecturer lighter fees, and attend a better lecture with the male students. The separate cla.s.s was an unfavorable condition of study, which the university imposed on us, as the condition of admitting us to the professional study of medicine? Surely, then, to cheat that lady out of her Hope Scholarship, when she had earned it under conditions of study enforced and unfavorable, was perfidious and dishonest. It was even a little ungrateful to the injured s.e.x; for the money which founded these scholarships was women's money, every penny of it. The good Professor Hope had lectured to ladies fifty years ago; had taken their fees, and founded his scholarships with their money: and it would have done his heart good to see a lady win and wear that prize which, but for his female pupils, would never have existed. But it is easy to trample on a dead man: as easy as on living women.

"The perfidy was followed by ruthless tyranny. They refused to admit the fair criminal to the laboratory, 'else,' said they, 'she'll defeat more men.

"That killed her, as a chemist. It gave inferior male students too great an advantage over her. And so the public and Professor Hope were sacrificed to a trades-union, and lost a great a.n.a.lytical chemist, and something more--she had, to my knowledge, a subtle diagnosis. Now we have at present no _great_ a.n.a.lyst, and the few competent a.n.a.lysts we have do not possess diagnosis in proportion. They can find a few poisons in the dead, but they are slow to discover them in the living; so they are not to be counted on to save a life, where crime is administering poison.

That woman could, and would, I think.

"They drove her out of chemistry, wherein she was a genius, into surgery, in which she was only a talent. She is now house-surgeon in a great hospital, and the public has lost a great chemist and diagnostic physician combined.

"Up to the date of this enormity, the Press had been pretty evenly divided for and against us. But now, to their credit, they were unanimous, and reprobated the juggle as a breach of public faith and plain morality. Backed by public opinion, one friendly professor took this occasion to move the university to relax the regulation of separate cla.s.ses since it had been abused. He proposed that the female students should be admitted to the ordinary cla.s.ses.

"This proposal was negatived by 58 to 47.

"This small majority was gained by a characteristic maneuver. The queen's name was gravely dragged in as disapproving the proposal, when, in fact, it could never have been submitted to her, or her comment, if any, must have been in writing; and as to the general question, she has never said a public word against medical women. She has too much sense not to ask herself how can any woman be fit to be a queen, with powers of life and death, if no woman is fit to be so small a thing, by comparison, as a physician or a surgeon.

"We were victims of a small majority, obtained by imagination playing upon flunkyism, and the first result was we were not allowed to sit down to botany with males. Mind you, we might have gathered blackberries with them in umbrageous woods from morn till dewy eve, and not a professor shocked in the whole faculty; but we must not sit down with them to an intellectual dinner of herbs, and listen, in their company, to the pedantic terms and childish cla.s.sifications of botany, in which kindred properties are ignored. Only the male student must be told in public that a fox-glove is _Digitalis purpurea_ in the improved nomenclature of science, and crow-foot is _Ranunculus sceleratus,_ and the buck-bean is _Menyanthis trifoliata,_ and mugwort is _Artemesia Judaica;_ that, having lost the properties of hyssop known to Solomon, we regain our superiority over that learned Hebrew by christening it _Gratiola officinalis._ The s.e.xes must not be taught in one room to discard such ugly and inexpressive terms as snow-drop, meadow-sweet, heart's-ease, fever-few, cowslip, etc., and learn to know the cowslip as _Primula veris_--by cla.s.s, _Pentandria monogynia;_ and the b.u.t.tercup as _Ranunculus acnis_--_Polyandria monogynia;_ the snow-drop as _Galanthus nivalis_--_Hexandria monogynia;_ and the meadow-sweet as _Ulnaria;_ the heart's ease as _Viola tricolor;_ and the daisy as _Bellis perennis_--_Syngenesia superflua."_

"Well," said Vizard, "I think the individual names can only hurt the jaws and other organs of speech. But the cla.s.sification! Is the mild l.u.s.ter of science to be cast over the natural disposition of young women toward _Polyandria monogynia?_ Is trigamy to be identified in their sweet souls with floral innocence, and their victims sitting by?"

"Such cla.s.sifications are puerile and fanciful," said Miss Gale; "but, for that very reason, they don't infect _animals_ with trigamy. Novels are much more likely to do that."

"Especially ladies' novels," suggested Vizard, meekly.

"Some," suggested the accurate Rhoda. "But the s.e.xes will never lose either morals or delicacy through courses of botany endured together. It will not hurt young ladies a bit to tell them in the presence of young gentlemen that a cabbage is a thalamifioral exogen, and its stamens are tetradynamous; nor that the mushroom, _Psalliata campestris,_ and the toad-stool, _Myoena campestris,_ are confounded by this science in one cla.s.s, _Cryptogamia._ It will not even hurt them to be told that the properties of the _Arum maculatum_ are little known, but that the males are crowded round the center of the spadix, and the females seated at the base."

Said Vizard, pompously, "The pulpit and the tea-table are centers of similar phenomena. Now I think of it, the pulpit is a very fair calyx, but the tea-table is sadly squat."

"Yes, sir. But, more than that, not one of these pedants who growled at promiscuous botany has once objected to promiscuous dancing, not even with the gentleman's arm round the lady's waist, which the custom of centuries cannot render decent. Yet the professors of delicacy connive, and the Mother Geese sit smirking at the wall. Oh, world of hypocrites and humbugs!"

"I am afraid you are an upsetter general," said Vizard. "But you are abominably sincere; and all this is a curious chapter of human nature.

Pray proceed."

Miss Gale nodded gravely, and resumed.

"So much public ridicule fell on the union for this, and the blind flunkyism which could believe the queen had meddled in the detail, that the professors melted under it, and threw open botany and natural history to us, with other collateral sciences.

"Then came the great fight, which is not ended yet.

"To qualify for medicine and pa.s.s the stiff examination, by which the public is very properly protected, you must be versed in anatomy and clinical surgery. Books and lectures do not suffice for this, without the human subject--alive and dead. The university court knew that very well when it matriculated us, and therefore it provided for our instruction by promising us separate cla.s.ses.

"Backed by this public pledge, we waited on the university professor of anatomy to arrange our fees for a separate lecture. He flatly refused to instruct us separately for love or money, or to permit his a.s.sistants.

That meant, 'The union sees a way to put you in a cleft stick and cheat you out of your degree, in spite of the pledge the university has given you; in spite of your fees, and of your time given to study in reliance on the promise.'

"This was a heavy blow. But there was an extramural establishment called Surgeons' Hall, and the university formally recognized all the lecturers in this Hall; so we applied to those lecturers, and they were shocked at the illiberality of the university professors, and admitted us at once to mixed cla.s.ses. We attended lectures with the male students on anatomy and surgery, and _of all the antic.i.p.ated evils, not one took place, sir._

"The objections to mixed cla.s.ses proved to be idle words; yet the old-fashioned minds opposed to us shut their eyes and went on reasoning _'a priori,_ and proving that the evils which they saw did not arise _must_ arise should the experiment of mixed cla.s.ses, which was then succeeding, ever he tried.