It was in this same year of 1879, however, that the cause was heartened by the beginning of the tardy capitulation of the Massachusetts Medical Society, the council of which following in the wake of ten or a dozen of the other State medical societies, finally voted to admit women to membership on equal terms with men. This society differs from most of the other State medical societies in that its membership does not consist, as does theirs, of delegates from the constituent county societies. Members join the Massachusetts Medical Society as individuals, and it aims to include all reputable members of the profession. It had previously refused to recognize homeopathic and eclectic physicians, holding these latter as “irregular” practitioners of medicine, even though their diplomas were legalized by the same authority as that which had legalized those of its own members. Its refusal to admit women to membership showed its intention to classify women also as “irregulars,” even women who had received their diplomas as regular classmates of men who were acceptable. The _Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_, of October 9, 1879, expressed itself characteristically in an editorial: We regret to be obliged to announce that at a meeting of the councilors, held on October 1, it was voted to admit women to the Massachusetts Medical Society.... Enshrouded in her mantle of science, woman is supposed to be endowed with power to descend from that high pedestal upon which we men have always placed her, and to mingle with us unscathed in scenes from which her own modesty and the esteem of the other sex has hitherto protected her. The editor seems to have forgotten that women had long mingled in those “scenes” as patients and as nurses; it was only as physicians that they were being “protected” from them. However, the “protectors” were loath to discontinue their gallant services and, following the protest of the Suffolk District branch of the State Society, the Council rescinded its vote, thus relegating the medical women to their pedestals. But the Society continued in a state of unrest, friends of the admission of women gaining in strength and their opponents losing proportionately, though by-issues were also injected. Eventually, the inevitable was foreseen; the question remained only as to the form which it would take. The handwriting on the wall was visible when in 1883 the Pennsylvania State Medical Society (!) sent a woman (Dr. Alice Bennett) as delegate to the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society. She was accepted officially, and she sat through the proceedings, and nothing happened. At the annual meeting of the following year, 1884, the By-Laws were amended so as to permit of the admission of women on an equality with men; and then that storm center cleared.