It was by sheer force of intellect, and of the sympathetic imagination born of intellectual perception, that Elizabeth Blackwell divined for women the suitableness of an occupation whose practical details were, to herself, intrinsically distasteful. Among all the pioneer group of women physicians, hers chiefly deserves to be called the Record of an Heroic Life. For with her, the struggle with bitter and brutal prejudices in the world was not sustained by the keen and instinctive enthusiasm for medicine, which has since carried hundreds of women over impossibilities. Rather was the arduousness of the struggle intensified by a passionate sensitiveness of temperament, which, under a cold exterior, rendered her intensely alive to the hardships of the social obloquy and ostracism which she was destined to encounter in such abundance. Those accustomed to value ideas according to their intrinsive power, as shown by their originality and their fruitful result, should admit that there was real grandeur in this thought: the thought that the entire sex might be lifted upon a higher intellectual plane, by means of a practical work, for which, at the moment, not half a dozen people in America discerned the opportunity. “The thorough education of a class of women in medicine will exert an important influence upon the life and interests of women in general.” “Medicine is so broad a field, so closely interwoven with general interests, and yet of so personal a character in its individual applications, that the coöperation of men and women is needed to fulfill all its requirements.” “It is not possible or desirable to sanction the establishment of an intermediate class” [of midwives.][50] So much more broad and sound were the views of this self-taught Cincinnati school-teacher,[51] than of the kind-hearted but short-sighted men, who in Boston were then trying to establish the Female Medical Education Society! It was in 1845 that the plan of studying medicine became with Elizabeth Blackwell a settled resolution; and she was thus the first person on the American continent to whom such an idea did come. It is worthy of note, that the originality of the main idea was sustained by an almost equal originality of view in regard to the true nature of a medical education. Only a few years ago an eminent New York professor[52] showed that it was both practicable, and a common thing to do, for men to graduate, even from New York schools, after only ten months attendance upon lectures, of which the second five months was a mere repetition of the first: and without ever having seen a sick person. If this were true of New York,—where, after all, it is possible to do otherwise,—it may be imagined what would be true of the multitude of small schools scattered through the country, where the resources for either clinical or didactic instruction were confessedly inadequate. And if this were true in 1880 the status of 1850 may be divined.