In 1850, Dr. Marion Sims, arriving as an exiled invalid from Alabama, with a brilliantly original surgical operation as his “stock in trade,”—succeeded, with the aid of some generous New York women, in founding the first Woman’s Hospital in the world. It was just seven years since the first imperfect medical school for women had been opened in Boston: six years since the first woman physician had graduated at Geneva: five years since a permanent school for women had been founded in Philadelphia. The coincidence of these dates is not fortuitous. There is a close correlation between the rise of modern gynæcology, and the rise of the movement for readmitting women to the medical profession, where they once held a place, and whence they had been forcibly extruded. While it is far from true that women physicians are intended only for obstetrics and gynæcology, it is unquestionably true that these two great branches of medicine peculiar to their sex constitute the great opportunity, the main portal, through which women have passed, and are destined to pass, to general medicine. It would have been well if those who conducted the one movement had frankly allied themselves with the leaders of the other. Unfortunately, the more important, and especially the more lucrative, the new medical spheres[57] seemed likely to be,—the more eager were those who engaged in them to keep out women. Dr. Sims thus describes the circumstances of the founding of the Woman’s Hospital: “As soon as they (the New York surgeons) had learned how to perform these operations successfully” (those that Sims had invented), “they had no further use for me. My thunder had been stolen, and I was left without any resources whatever. I said to myself, ‘I am a lost man unless I can get somebody to create a place in which I can show the world what I am capable of doing.’ _This was the inception of the idea of a woman’s hospital._”—“Story of My Life.”