One of my students was a woman who was hoping to qualify as a medical doctor, and she was having tea with me and chatting about the events of the day. As part of her training she had been assisting the doctor in dealing with out-patients at a hospital, and a woman had brought in a miserable little baby, which wailed all the time and which the mother explained wouldn’t put on any flesh or grow into a nice, healthy baby whatever she did with it. The mother, with tears in her eyes, made an intensely earnest appeal to the doctor to tell her what was to her unaccountably wrong with the infant. She was a fine strapping woman, and thought her babies ought to be large and healthy. She said this was her third or fourth, and the others had all died when they were very little. This happened more than seven years ago. Thank God our racial attitude has changed since then. The doctor put her off with some soothing platitudes, but the woman driven to despair said: “I believe there’s something wrong with my man. If there’s something wrong with my man I won’t have babies no more--it’s just cruel to see them miserable like this and have them dying one after the other. Won’t you, for God’s sake, tell me whether there’s anything wrong with my man or not?” This appeal was met by the assurance that there was nothing wrong, and she should go on having babies and do her duty by her husband. My medical woman student said that it was glaringly obvious that the baby was syphilitic. I asked her why she did not immediately tell the mother the truth. She shrugged her shoulders and said: “I’ve got my exam. to pass; if I did a thing like that Dr. ---- would stop me going to the hospital. I can’t afford to take risks like that. Why, he might not only stop me, but it would do the other women students a lot of harm too.” This was before the war, and England was less enlightened, less eager for medical women’s assistance than the war has made her, and it was then a fight for a girl to get a footing in the hospitals for the wide experience she needed for a general practice. I vowed to myself that I would never forget that mother, and that some day I would batter at the brazen gates of knowledge on her behalf. Here was a mother with a glimmering of the truth, seeking passionately for knowledge from the one person she had a right to turn to for this knowledge, and she was put off with lies, encouraged again to bear the cost of a hopelessly doomed birth; to risk the agonies of child-birth, to bring into the world a creature who for a short spell would be tormented and then would cost her a coffin. By refusing his scientific advice, that doctor in reality sent that woman, whose desire to know was stirred, to the gossip of the slum alley and the street corner. There she would get a blurred and inaccurate, if not actually harmful, idea of what he should have been able to tell her in a clean, simple language based on scientific fact.