Women -- Employment -- United States; Women -- Social and moral questions
Future advance for the education of women in medicine must be in the
line of their admission to the schools where the highest standard of
education is maintained; and to such affiliation of their own schools
with universities, as may bring them under the influence of university
discipline. There is no manner of doubt that, with a few unimportant
restrictions, co-education in medicine is essential to the real and
permanent success of women in medicine. Isolated groups of women cannot
maintain the same intellectual standards as are established and
maintained by men. The claim of ability to learn, to follow, to apply
knowledge, to even do honest original work among the innumerable details
of modern science, does not imply a claim to be able to originate, or to
maintain by themselves the robust, massive intellectual enterprises,
which, in the highest places, are now carried on by masculine strength
and energy.
Whether, as has been asserted,[96] the tendency to quackery among women
is really more widespread than among men, may well be doubted. It is
true that their lesser average strength peculiarly inclines women to
follow the lines of the least resistance. On that very account, it is
singularly unfortunate that the greatest, indeed in this country an
invincible, resistance has been offered to woman’s entrance at the best
schools, while inferior and “irregular” colleges have shown an odd
readiness to admit them. It would seem that co-educational anatomy is
more easily swallowed when administered in homœopathic doses! Evidently,
however, for the maintenance of these irregular schools,[97] the women
are not responsible: and they only have two of their own.
Because women require the intellectual companionship of man, to be able
to recognize the highest intellectual standards, or to attain them in
some cases, and to submit to their influence in others,—it does not
follow that they have no special contributions of their own to offer to
the work of medicine.
The special capacities of women as a class for dealing with sick persons
are so great, that in virtue of them alone hundreds have succeeded in
medical practice, though most insufficiently endowed with intellectual
or educational qualifications. When these are added, when the tact,
acuteness, and sympathetic insight natural to women become properly
infused with the strength more often found among men, success may be
said to be assured.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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