The Employments of Women: A Cyclopædia of Woman's WorkPenny, Virginia
General
The Employments of Women: A Cyclopædia of Woman's Work
Penny, Virginia
Women -- Employment
nearly all the cities and villages of our land--certainly in Eastern
Pennsylvania; but in choosing a physician, people must have confidence
in the sound judgment, good character, and professional ability of those
they employ. A woman settling among strangers is more liable to
suspicion than a man; and in such a case it takes _time_, and a long
continuance in well doing, to become established in a lucrative
practice. It also requires _means_; and unless these are abundant, it is
much better for the lady physician to settle where she is already known
and respected, and where, among her friends, she can live at small
expense. Still, in one or two cases, our students have gone
_successfully_ among strangers, earning enough to bear their expenses
during the first two years. The cost of fitting a lady of moderate
abilities for the practice of medicine varies. The whole cost of two or
more courses of lectures and graduation is $175. Board here is from $3
to $5 a week for students, everything included. The needful text books
would cost from $20 to $25; then travelling expenses, clothes, &c. I
have known ladies commence with only one or two hundred dollars in
advance, teach school during the summers, and graduate in three or four
years. Sometimes these have come as beneficiaries. Still it is much more
comfortable to have six or seven hundred to depend upon during the
course of study. The time also varies, but we think no person should
graduate who has not studied two years and upward. A large proportion of
our graduates have studied medicine three years, and several have spent
the next year in the hospital in New York. We are about opening a
hospital here, which, in case of some, will obviate this necessity. I
believe ladies in practice here generally make the charges common among
men physicians; and several of them realize a handsome competence, and
are gladdened by seeing, year by year, that prejudice is passing away,
and that medicine is proving a fitting and glorious sphere for the
exercise of woman's best powers." There are several regularly educated
female physicians engaged in the practice of medicine in Philadelphia,
some in New York, and some in Boston, with a few in other cities of the
North, South, and West, and here and there scattered through towns,
villages, and the country. There is an opening for one or two
well-qualified physicians in New Orleans that can speak the Italian and
Spanish languages. Many physicians find it an advantage to have a
knowledge of the French and German languages, on account of the large
foreign population in our country. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell writes: "It
is very difficult by letter to answer your question about medical
education. It is almost impossible for a lady to get a _good_ medical
education without going to Europe. Philadelphia or Boston would give a
woman the _legal right_ to practise medicine, and that is the chief
value of what is given, for the exclusively theoretical instruction of
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