To guide its deliberations the committee had sent questions to 1300 members of the State Medical Society, to which 712 answers were received; of these 550 were in favor either of admitting women to the school, or of providing in some way for their education and recognition. These answers helped to decide the affirmative character of the majority report. Upon its reception, the Board of Overseers recommended the Medical Faculty to accept Miss Hovey’s $10,000 and admit women to the school. But of the 21 members of the Medical Faculty, seven were strongly opposed to the admission of women, six were in favor of admitting them under certain restrictions, eight were more or less opposed but were willing to try the experiment. It was generally considered too rash an experiment to be tried, at the moment that the school was already embarked on certain improvements in its course of education, which threatened to cause a falling off in the number of its students. So the proposition was finally rejected by a vote of 14 to 4. The overseers of the university, having no actual control over the decisions of the Medical Faculty, were therefore compelled to decline Miss Hovey’s offer. But, in doing so, they strongly recommended as expedient that, “under suitable restrictions, women should be instructed in medicine by Harvard University.” The defeat at Harvard in May was, however, followed by a triumph in another direction in October of the same year. On Oct. 9, 1879, an editorial in the _Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_ says: “We regret to be obliged to announce that, at a meeting of the councilors held Oct. 1, it was voted to admit women to the Massachusetts Medical Society.” This society is not, like that of New York and many of the States, composed of delegates from county societies, but it comprises, and indeed consists of, all the legally qualified practitioners of the State. Refusal to enroll women among its members, therefore, meant a refusal to recognize the legality of diplomas that the authority of the State had conferred. The profession, therefore, in this matter deliberately set itself above the law, a most exceptional act in American communities. A precedent for such action had previously been established when the society refused to recognize homœopathic and eclectic physicians, who also held diplomas by legal authority, inasmuch as their schools were chartered by the State. The action of the Medical Society towards women was, in fact, intended as a means of permanently relegating women among classes of practitioners pronounced inferior and unscientific, and whose legal rights merely sufficed to save them from prosecution as quacks, and to recover their fees from such persons as were foolish enough to employ them.