“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. Guess, now, who it is that a British Parliament sets above the law, as a doctor-maker for that public it professes to love and protect!” “The Regius Professor of Medicine?” “No.” “Tyndall?” “No.” “Huxley?” “No.” “Then I give it up.” “The Archbishop of Canterbury.” “Oh, come! a joke is a joke.” “This is no joke. Bright monument of British funkyism and imbecility, there stands the clause setting that reverend and irrelevant doctor-maker above the law, which sets his grace's female relations below the law, and, in practice, outlaws the whole female population, starving those who desire to practice medicine learnedly, and oppressing those who, out of modesty, not yet quite smothered by custom and monopoly, desire to consult a learned female physician, instead of being driven, like sheep, by iron tyranny--in a country that babbles Liberty--to a male physician or a female quack. “Well, sir, in 1849 Miss Elizabeth Blackwell fought the good fight in the United States, and had her troubles; because the States were not so civilized then as now. She graduated doctor at Geneva, in the State of New York. “She was practicing in England in 1858, and demanded her place on the register. She is an Englishwoman by birth; but she is an English M.D. only through America having more brains than Britain. This one islander sings, 'Hail, Columbia!' as often as 'God save the Queen!' I reckon.