In 1865, a fourth hospital for women and children was organized in Chicago, “at the request and by the earnest efforts of Dr. Mary H. Thompson, the pioneer woman physician in the city. Opened just at the close of the war, many of those to whom it afforded shelter, nursing, and medical attendance were soldiers’ wives, widows, and children, and women whose husbands had deserted them in hours of greatest need. There came from the South refugees both white and colored.”[81] Thus in the West as in the East, we find repeated for the women physicians of the nineteenth century the experience of the men of the eighteenth; it was amidst the exigencies of a great war that their opportunities opened, their sphere enlarged, and they “emerged from obscurity” into the responsibilities of recognized public function. In 1871, just as money had been collected to purchase a better house and lot for the small hospital, the great fire occurred; and when after it, “the remnants were gathered together, they were found to consist of one or two helpless patients, two housemaids, a nurse, a pair of blankets, two pillows, and a bit of carpet.”[82] The hospital “remnant,” however, profited with others by the outburst of energy which so rapidly repaired misfortune and rebuilt the city. In 1871, a building was purchased by the Relief and Aid Society, for $25,000, and given to the hospital, on conditions, one of which was that it should annually care for twenty-five patients free of charge. During the first nineteen years of its existence, up to 1854, over 15,000 patients had been cared for by the hospital, of which 4774 were house patients, 9157 were treated in the dispensary, and 1404 attended at home. The report of the hospital for 1888 gives a summary for four years.[83] There is a hospital staff, comprising attending physicians, 5; pathologist, 1; internes, 3. Annual average from four years summary: in-patients, 334; dispensary, 806; visited at home, 138. The fifth woman’s hospital was opened in San Francisco in 1875, under the name of the Pacific Dispensary, by Dr. Charlotte Blake Brown and Dr. Annette Buckle, both graduates of the Philadelphia school. During the first year, it contained but six beds. To-day, after fifteen years’ untiring work, the enlisted sympathies of generous friends have developed it to a hospital for 110 beds, to which sick children are admitted gratuitously, and adult female patients on payment of a small charge. It is under the care of six attending physicians, who serve in rotation. Finally, in distant Minneapolis, a sixth hospital has sprung up in 1882. At its latest report, only 193 patients had been received during the year. But the history of its predecessors, and the irresistible Western energy of its friends, predict for this a growth perhaps even more rapid than that possible in cities in the East. It is worth while to summarize the actual condition of these six hospitals in a tabulated form: