Instances have occurred before now where personal feelings have triumphed over public interests, but I do not think that I ever heard of quite so reckless a course as this, by which the medical clique has plunged the great Edinburgh Hospital into litigation, and that with some of its own most generous supporters, rather than allow a dozen women to obtain in its wards the instruction that the Contributors had decreed they should receive![107] The litigation thus begun is still pending, and the incomplete Board of Managers have for all these months carried on the business of the Infirmary without any representatives at all from the Court of Contributors; and it is probable that they make the very fact of their deficient numbers the excuse for having up to this moment given no effect whatever to the Statute unanimously passed in our favour last January by the Court of Contributors. We applied immediately after the meeting for tickets of admission, but were told that the managers must first be consulted, and from that day to this no tickets have been issued to us, though the statute referred to legally secured that “henceforth all registered students of medicine shall be admitted to the educational advantages of the Infirmary, without distinction of sex.” The matter, however, can now be only one of time; and, since the law of the Infirmary is at length on our side, our opponents may, I think, rest assured that our patience in awaiting the end will be at least equal to theirs. In all such struggles a present triumph may be snatched by those in brief authority, but the future belongs inalienably to the cause of justice and liberality. In the meantime, I had, on behalf of my fellow-students and myself, appealed to the University Court to provide us with the means of completing our education, and our friends of the Committee also forwarded to the Court a further legal Opinion from the Lord Advocate and Sheriff Fraser, to the effect,--that the University authorities had full powers to permit the matriculation of women in 1869; that the Resolutions then passed amounted to a permission to women to “_study medicine_” in the University, and that therefore the women concerned were entitled to demand the means of doing so; and finally, that if such means were persistently refused, the legal mode of redress lay in an Action of Declarator.[108] On January 8th, 1872, the University Court declared that they could not make any arrangements to enable us to pursue our studies with a view to a degree, but that, _if we would altogether give up the question of graduation_,[109] and be content with Certificates of Proficiency, they would try to meet our views!