This was truly the darkest hour and it was followed by the dawn of which the proverb speaks. As the sunshine of help from the community grew stronger, it was possible steadily to extend the ministrations of the Hospital to the more dependent, so the report of 1898-1899 was able to state: Nearly (if not quite) two thirds of all our work is given in charity ... though we are slow to give charity indiscriminately but would have each one make some return, however small, for benefits received, thereby aiding her to keep her self-respect. The treasurer’s report for the year of 1868 notes the receipt of one thousand dollars which was collected by Miss Sophia Jex-Blake for supporting four free beds. Sophia Jex-Blake came to this country as a student of Dr. Sewall and was a resident student at the Hospital. She went later to the newly opened Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, and still later she returned to Great Britain and became the leader in the struggle which attended the attempt to open to women the medical course at the University of Edinburgh--reference to which has been made by Dr. Zakrzewska in a previous chapter. The attempt failed and she went to Switzerland where the men students at the University of Berne seemed to find no difficulty in permitting women to study medicine with them.[14] The year of 1869 was especially noteworthy for the burden which was lifted from Dr. Zakrzewska’s mind by the official return of Dr. Samuel Cabot to the consulting staff of the Hospital, though ever since his formal resignation in June, 1866, he had continued to advise the women who, against almost insurmountable obstacles, were struggling to give the surgical help called for by the increasing numbers of their patients. If one requires expert teaching and constant practice to learn to diagnosticate and prescribe for medical ailments, it is much more difficult for one to learn to diagnosticate and prescribe for surgical ailments, since a surgical prescription demands trained skill of the hands as well as of the brain. And opportunities for acquiring this trained skill of the hands are at the best very limited in number and very expensive in detail, while they also require a very exacting environment and an entourage trained to the highest degree. And they are, further, beset on all sides by dangers which are momentous and immediate as well as more remote. It is a fine index of the essential quality of these earlier women that they were not daunted by the difficulties of the situation, and that the conservative spirit of the sex was not too much affrighted by the dangers which on every hand confronted them and their patients.