Science at this period was science, and a man was a man. He was as much entitled to study medicine, and to practise it, even without a diploma, as to study any other branch of knowledge—history, mathematics, or chemistry. To have dragged out a few years on the benches of a school is assuredly not a bad means of learning, but it is not the only one, and it ought not to be regarded as warranting for the rest of a man’s life a positive presumption of his universal knowledge and impeccability. In medicine, as in other things, so-called amateurs[47] have been known occasionally to bear the palm over professionals. Now, what science can women more naturally cultivate, what answers better to their requirements in regard to refinement and equality, what more legitimately emancipates them? The practice of medicine was their first conquest, the “great charter” of their freedom. A number of women, particularly women of distinction who had charitable hearts and leisure for study, in a certain sense practised medicine. A celebrated savant, while gently expressing his regret, dedicated to Diana of Poitiers,[48] as to a colleague, with a thousand professions of scientific esteem, a treatise on the diseases of women. Except that they watched for the propitious moment for regaining the upper hand, the physicians gave in; they left the patient in the hands of a woman, contenting themselves with writing a prescription on the particulars reported to them, thus securing at least formal recognition—and their fees. Even from professorial chairs medicine was extolled as a lovely and philosophic thing; and in an official ceremony at Paris a “prince of science” (to adopt a modern term) declared to a large audience that Nature has a certain feminine complexion, that she has been specially bountiful to women and endowed them more highly than men.