The value to women of this State recognition, and of opportunity to study at a university school, was immense. There were numerous disadvantages due to the youth and undeveloped character of the school, and still more to its control by a popular legislature, unversed in the requirements of learned professions. Yet there was promise of indefinite growth in the future, and in all the development of the future, women might hope to share. At first the course of instruction was limited to two years; it has lately been extended to three; though it still has the serious defect of demanding no thesis from students as a condition of graduation. Clinical instruction has been necessarily inadequate in a small country town. It has been lately proposed to transfer this part of the curriculum to Detroit, where large hospitals furnish clinical material in abundance. In Chicago, application to admit women was made in 1865 to the Rush College, where Emily Blackwell had studied during the winter of 1851. The appeal was refused. In 1868, application was made at a rival school, the Chicago Medical College, and was accepted. For a year female students attended the lectures and clinics in company with young men. “The women,” observes a Chicago writer, “were all right; but the men students were at first embarrassed and afterwards rude. The mixed classes were therefore abandoned, but the woman’s movement, being essentially just and correct,”[91] was not abandoned, but led to the founding of a special school for women in 1869.