In 1848, when the first Suffrage convention was held, twelve women were studying medicine in different parts of the country. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell was studying that year in Geneva, and when members of the convention wrote to congratulate her, she said, in the course of her reply: "Much has been said of the oppression that woman suffers; man is reproached with being unjust, tyrannical, jealous. I do not so read human life." Dr. Blackwell estimates that within ten years of that time three hundred women had been graduated in medicine. In an address delivered in 1889 before the London Medical School for women in London, Dr. Blackwell said: "I believe that the department of medicine in which the great and beneficent influence of women may be specially exerted is that of the family physician. Not as specialists, but as the trusted guides and wise counsellors in all that concerns the physical welfare of the family, they will find their most congenial field of labor." All this was the exact opposite of the spirit that prevailed in the Association with which Lucy Stone was identified. She declaimed against man's injustice; and when it was proposed, after the civil war had taught the power of organization, to have a constitution and by-laws for the Suffrage movement, Lucy Stone said that she had felt the "thumb-screws and the soul-screws," and did not wish to be placed under them again. "Our duty is merely agitation." After a stormy quarrel, she left to form a new association in New England. Elizabeth Blackwell's name is conspicuous for its absence from Suffrage annals. In the letter referred to she wrote: "The exclusion and constraint woman suffers is not the result of purposed injury or premeditated insult. It has arisen naturally, without violence, because woman has desired nothing more, has not felt the soul too large for the body. But when woman, with matured strength, with steady purpose, presents her lofty claim, all barriers will give way, and man will welcome, with a thrill of joy, the new birth of his sister spirit." The way in which barriers have fallen, and have been removed by men, in order that woman may enter the noble profession of medicine, is one of the strange stories of this half century. The Civil War, which taught us so much, helped greatly in this. There were some genuine obstacles in the way of woman's education in medicine, and that they were genuine is proved by the fact that, as rapidly as arrangements can be made so that woman can have thorough training by and with her own sex, this is being done. This trend is in opposition to Suffrage action. Dr. Clemence Lozier, who was so long at the head of the Suffrage association in New York City, was the most persistent urger of mixed clinics, and marched in to them at Bellevue, at the head of her classes, defying the delicate instincts of both men and women.