Jacobe Felicie was a woman of noble birth, and had won distinction by her success in the healing art. As the testimony at her trial revealed, she never treated the sick for the sake of gain. In nearly all cases the sick who had addressed themselves to her had been abandoned by their own physicians. All the witnesses who had been called testified that they had been cured by Jacobe Felicie, and all expressed their deepest gratitude to her for her care and devotion. But, in spite of all these facts, and in spite of the brilliant defence that this worthy woman made, she was condemned to pay a heavy fine--condemned because, as the indictment read, she had presumed to put her sickle into the harvest of others-_falcem in messem mittere alienam_--and this was a crime.[201] The faculty was a close corporation and insisted that its members should have a monopoly of all the honors and emoluments that were to accrue from the treatment of the sick and suffering. What a curious adumbration of similar proceedings within the memory of many still living! The prosecution of Jacobe Felicie recalls that of Agnodice in Greece long ages before. And the plea urged for the necessity of a female physician--that many a woman would rather die than reveal the secrets of her infirmity to a man[202]--was the same as that offered by the women of Athens before the council of the Areopagus. It was the same agonizing cry that had been heard thousands of times before and which has been heard thousands of times since. Isabella of Castile was not the first of the long list of victims who, for lack of a doctor of their own sex, have been sacrificed through womanly modesty, and, more's the pity, she will not be the last. Unfortunately for the women of France, the result of the prosecution of Mme. Felicie was the very reverse of that instituted against Agnodice; for the latter came off victorious, while the former was condemned and punished. So crushing was the blow dealt to women practitioners, outside of obstetrics, that they did not recover from its effects for more than five hundred years. For it was not until 1868 that the Ecole de Medicine of Paris opened its doors to women, and it was not until nearly twenty years later that female physicians were able to enter the hospitals of the French capital as _internes_.[203] Until quite recent years there is very little to be said of women physicians in England and Germany. Their practice, outside of that of certain herb doctors, was confined chiefly to midwifery. There was no provision made in either of these countries for the education of women in medicine and surgery, and such a thing as a college where they could receive instruction in the healing art was unknown. It is true that an ecclesiastical law of Edgar, King of England, permitted women as well as men to practice medicine, but this law was subsequently abolished by Henry V.[204]