While reviewing the above for the press (May 1872), the following lines came under my notice, and I think them the more suitable to quote as they are from the pen of a woman who has never herself shown the least inclination for the study of medicine, and who, therefore, speaks entirely from the abstract point of view:-- “Nothing will ever make me believe that God meant men to be the ordinary physicians of women and babies. A few masculine experts might be tolerated in special institutions, so that cases of peculiar danger and difficulty might not be left, as they are now, to the necessarily one-sided treatment of a single sex; but, in general, if ever a created being was conspicuously and intolerably out of his natural sphere, it is in my opinion, the male doctor in the apartment of the lying-in woman; and I think our sex is really guilty, in the first place, that it ever allowed man to appear there; and, in the second, that it does not insist upon educating women of character and intelligence and social position for that post. “Indeed, common delicacy would seem to demand that all the special diseases of women should be treated principally by women; but this aside, and speaking from common sense only, men may be as scientific as they please,--it is plain that thoroughly to know the women’s organism, what is good for it and what evil, and how it can best be cured when it is disordered, one must be one’s self a woman. It only proves how much unworthy passion and prejudice the great doctors allow to intrude into their adoration of ‘pure science’ and boasted love of humanity, that, instead of being eager to enlist the feminine intuitions and investigations in this great cause, as their best chance of arriving at truth, they are actually enacting the ignoble part of churls and misers, if not of quacks. For are they not well enough aware that often their women patients are so utterly beyond them that they do not know what to do with them! The diseases of the age are nervous diseases, and women are growing more nervously high-strung and uncontrollable every day, yet the doctors stand helplessly by and cannot stop it. When, however, there shall be a school of doctresses of high culture and thorough medical education going in and out among the sex with the proper medical authority, they will see, and will be able to prevent, much of the moral and physical neglect and imprudence which, now unchecked in school and home, make such havoc of the vital forces of the present generation.” “_Co-operative Housekeeping_,” by Mrs C. F. Pierce. NOTE E, p. 53. For the edification of the next generation, to whom all this bigotry will probably appear almost incredible, I subjoin the passage alluded to in the text. I am sorry to say it is by no means the worst I might have quoted from the same paper.