Thus it happened that I went to Boston for the second time in the beginning of July, visiting Mrs. C. M. Severance and using my introductions to begin a regular, systematized campaign “to beg for an institution for American women.” For myself I could never have begged; I would sooner have drowned myself. Now I determined to beg money from Americans to establish an institution for their own benefit. Dr. Blackwell agreed to this plan, as there was nothing risked in it, I taking the whole responsibility. In spite of finding the women of Boston quite ready to listen to me, it was not an easy task to get a three years’ promise of six hundred and fifty dollars. The first question put to me was always, “Can you not raise this small sum in rich New York?” The explanation had to be repeated over and over that only a very few women in social life dared to connect themselves openly with “such radical reformers” as we appeared to them. To turn upon “the sphere of woman” and declare openly that she can take the whole responsibility of managing a public institution, as well as the care as a physician of sick women and children, seemed so monstrous to most men and women that in New York money was intrusted to us only with incredulity. The second and more important question was as to “why we needed and wanted a dispensary and a hospital for women physicians.” Nobody at this present time would or could believe that this need then had to most people a preposterous sound. And here I may tell you an episode which occurred to me in Philadelphia, to which city I went after returning from Boston with my six hundred and fifty dollars pledged. In Philadelphia, the first medical college for women (the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania), had been established in 1850, and it was housed in extremely modest quarters in a rear building on Arch Street. I was introduced through Dr. Ann Preston, one of the first graduates of this college and now one of its professors. And I spoke to the friends of this enterprise at a gathering of both men and women, explaining the need of a practical professional training after a merely theoretical course of instruction. I tried to make plain the greater difficulties which beset the introduction of the young women students to the private patients of their preceptors even though these patients were ever so poor, and I illustrated the situation by quoting Dr. Ann Preston’s conscientious refusal to practice under such circumstances, she simply teaching physiology in the college. I also spoke of others going to Europe to seek this clinical instruction from foreign physicians and maternity hospitals.