“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-class
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 class 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 sex; 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 analytical chemist, and
something more--she had, to my knowledge, a subtle diagnosis. Now we have
at present no _great_ analyst, and the few competent analysts 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
classes since it had been abused. He proposed that the female students
should be admitted to the ordinary classes.
“This proposal was negatived by 58 to 47.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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