ABSTRACT
"In considering the intra-professional relations I would say a few words upon the admission of women to the medical profession, and I would express an earnest wish that no slight reasons should influence us in withholding from them a cordial reception into our ranks. The admission is now an accomplished fact, and it were 362well for us to accept it gracefully as such, and leave time to work out the true solution of their capability and usefulness among us. For my own part I gladly accept their admission; but it is well to look at the matter through non-professional eyes, and I will place before you two such opinions contrasting with them the public utterances of two most eminent opponents of our own profession. Thomas Carlyle says:—'that medicine is not intrinsically unfit for them, is proved from the fact that in much more sound and earnest ages than ours, before the medical profession rose into being, they were virtually the physicians and surgeons as well as sick nurses, all that the world had. Their form of intellect, their sympathy, their wonderful acuteness of observation, &c., seem to indicate in them peculiar qualities for dealing with disease, and evidently in certain departments (that of female disease) they have quite peculiar opportunities of being useful.' A greater than Thomas Carlyle says, upon the general possibility of their suppression, 'make fast the doors upon a woman's wit and it will fly out at the casement, shut that and it will out at the keyhole, stop that and it will fly with the smoke out of the chimney.'
