We are glad the minority was so large, for we think it was in the right. There is no reason why a lady learned in medicine should be refused a doctor's degree. Nobody would be obliged to employ a medical woman in preference to a medical man. It is very true that it is necessary that a practitioner of medicine should be endowed with reflective faculties; but perhaps reason is not quite exclusively the prerogative of man. One or two women could be named whose works exhibit undeniable evidences of some logical faculty and judgment of causation. A female Harvey or Sydenham, or Hunter, or Abernethy would possibly turn up if the portals of medicine were not shut in her face. [Sidenote: _The Medical Profession_] The rejection of Miss Elizabeth Garrett and other women candidates by the Apothecaries and other medical corporations is unsparingly condemned in the issue of February 22, 1868; but the history of the campaign is written at length in the _Life of Sophia Jex-Blake_. It may suffice here to add the most notable, and, allowing for a little pardonable optimism, the sanest of _Punch's_ contributions to the controversy in the period under review in this volume. It appeared in March, 1870, in the form of a letter, but here, as elsewhere, the views are clearly editorial:-- The necessity, Sir, of persevering study will, alone, we may be sure, suffice to keep all women out of the medical profession, but a very few. There is therefore no sort of occasion for the opposition to the movement on behalf of their eligibility to be members of that profession, offered, conceivably, by no men out of it but fools, and by none in it but trades unionists. Assuredly, _Mr. Punch_, rather should every encouragement be given to women desirous to enter the profession of medicine. Paterfamilias is a goose if he do not encourage any daughter of his, endowed with intellect, industry and resolution, who may evince a turn that way. No daughter can Paterfamilias get so thoroughly off his hands as a self-supporting one. The medical science, _Mr. Punch_, acquired by a lady doctor here and there might prove a leaven which would leaven the whole lump so to speak, with apology for calling the fair sex a lump. And the lump sadly wants leavening. When it had got properly leavened there would soon be an end to advertisements of "corsets," cosmetics and ways of being made beautiful for ever; also an end of low dresses in high life and high latitudes. The death rate from bronchitis and consumption would largely decrease. There would likewise be an end of Daffy and Dalby, and all manner of domestic quackery in those upper regions where future men and women make the noises which pious Æneas heard, the first thing, in the lower. Moreover, we should hear much less of those noises.