They had had, perhaps, less advantages in booklearning when young, yet they had the power of inspiring youth to a higher and more thorough study, and their influence in developing the thinking powers of the students was something remarkable. Originality of thought, reasoning and deduction was the example given to us by them. And the form of their teachings was not so much memorizing prescribed methods as the teaching of the students how to observe closely all the phenomena of the case of illness in question and how to study the smallest details, physical, mental and moral, in order to find the primary cause. Such instruction can never be gained from books, although medical literature has now begun to attempt it. Many of the students ridiculed the hints and directions given, while to others they were the inspiration for deeper study even after the degree was obtained. I know it was so in my case, and works like Kölliker’s _Comparative Anatomy_, later Virchow’s _Cellular Pathology_, and works on biology, embryology and histology became really the foundation upon which I built my practice, taking little heed of recommendations of how to treat cases or how to administer doses of this or that old or new remedy or system of remedies. I did my own reasoning, I made my own deductions, in as logical a method as possible as the cases revealed themselves to my understanding through physical or psychical symptoms. Originality and spontaneity of mental action are injured by unthinking cramming of mind and memory with booklearning. It is for these reasons that I love to think, with gratitude and a deep feeling of honor, of the men who then constituted the medical faculty, although two of them were greatly annoyed by the presence of the four women students and did not hesitate to manifest their feelings in word and deed, without being offensive. Indeed, even this feeling that our presence was objectionable was of use in our training, as it gave us a strong foretaste of the prejudice which we were to meet in our professional lives. And it helped us in many ways to develop the courage which we were to need in meeting the offensive behavior of many physicians and students with whom we were obliged to come in contact when trying to seek fellowship in private practice, or to increase our knowledge, or to gain admittance to public institutions. CHAPTER XVIII