"WHEN I reached Great Britain, the right of women to medicine was in this condition--a learned lawyer explained it carefully to me. I will give you his words: The unwritten law of every nation admits all mankind, and not the male half only, to the study and practice of medicine and the sale of drugs. In Great Britain this law is called the common law and is deeply respected. Whatever liberty it allows to men or women is held sacred in our courts until _directly_ and _explicitly_ withdrawn by some act of the Legislature. Under this ancient liberty, women have occasionally practiced general medicine and surgery up to the year 1858. But for centuries they _monopolized,_ by custom, one branch of practice, the obstetric; and that, together with the occasional treatment of children, and the nursing of both sexes, which is semi-medical, and is their _monopoly,_ seems, on the whole, to have contented them, till late years, when their views were enlarged by wider education and other causes. But their abstinence from general practice, like their monopoly of obstetrics, lay with women themselves, and not with the law of England.
That law is the same in this respect as the common law of Italy and France; and the constitution of Bologna, where so many doctresses have filled the chairs of medicine and other sciences, makes no more direct provision for female students than does the constitution of any Scotch or English university. --The whole thing lay with the women themselves, and with local civilization. Years ago, Italy was far more civilized than England; so Italian women took a large sphere. Of late the Anglo-Saxon has gone in for civilization with his usual energy, and is eclipsing Italy; therefore his women aspire to larger spheres of intellect and action, beginning in the States, because American women are better educated than English. The advance of _women_ in useful attainments is the most infallible sign in any country of advancing civilization. All this about civilization is my observation, sir, and not the lawyer's. Now for the lawyer again: Such being the law of England, the British Legislature passed an act in 1858, the real object of which was to protect the public against incapable doctors, not against capable doctresses or doctors. The act excludes from medical practice all persons whatever, male or female, unless registered in a certain register; and to get upon that register the person, male or female, must produce a license or diploma, granted by one of the British examining boards specified in a schedule attached to the act.
"Now, these examining boards were all members of the leading medical schools. If the Legislature had taken the usual precaution, and had added a clause _compelling_ those boards to examine worthy applicants, the act would have been a sound public measure; but for want of that foresight--and without foresight a lawgiver is an impostor and a public pest--the State robbed women of their old common-law rights with one hand, and with the other enabled a respectable trades-union to thrust them out of their new statutory rights. Unfortunately, the respectable union, to whom the Legislature delegated an unconstitutional power they did not claim themselves, of excluding qualified persons from examination, and so robbing them of their license and their bread, had an overpowering interest to exclude qualified women from medicine. They had the same interest as the watchmakers' union, the printers', the painters'
on china, the calico-engravers', and others have to exclude qualified women from those branches, though peculiarly fitted for them; but not more so than they are for the practice of medicine, God having made _them,_ and not _men,_ the medical, and unmusical, sex.
"Wherever there's a trades-union, the weakest go to the wall. Those vulgar unions I have mentioned exclude women from skilled labor they excel in, by violence and conspiracy, though the law threatens them with imprisonment for it. Was it in nature, then, that the medical union would be infinitely forbearing, when the Legislature went and patted it on the back, and said, you can conspire with safety against your female rivals.
Of course the clique were tempted more than any clique could bear by the unwariness of the Legislature, and closed the doors of the medical schools to female applicants. Against unqualified female practitioners they never acted with such zeal and consent; and why? The female quack is a public pest, and a good foil to the union; the qualified doctress is a public good, and a blow to the union.
"The British medical union was now in a fine attitude by act of Parliament. It could talk its contempt of medical women, and act its terror of them, and keep both its feigned contempt and its real alarm safe from the test of a public examination--that crucible in which cant, surmise, and mendacity are soon evaporated or precipitated, and only the truth stands firm.
"For all that, two female practitioners got upon the register, and stand out, living landmarks of experience and the truth, in the dead wilderness of surmise and prejudice.
"I will tell you how they got in. The act of Parliament makes two exceptions: first, it lets in, _without examination_-- and that is very unwise--any foreign doctor who shall be practicing in England at the date of the act, although, with equal incapacity, it omits to provide that any future foreign doctor shall be able to _demand examination_ (in with the old foreign fogies, blindfold, right or wrong; out with the rising foreign luminaries of an ever-advancing science, right or wrong); and, secondly, it lets in, without examination, to experiment on the vile body of the public, any person, qualified or unqualified, who may have been made a doctor by a very venerable and equally irrelevant functionary.
