From this time the question of the official “recognition” of women might be regarded as settled. Another question of equal, if not greater importance, now came to the front,—namely, the extension to women of opportunities for study and practice in great hospitals, opportunities absolutely indispensable both to obtaining and maintaining a valid place in medical practice and the medical profession. The discussion of this question belongs to the seventh period of the history. For this purpose the small hospitals conducted by women were (and are) quite insufficient. There is such a demand upon their slender accommodations and resources for obstetric and gynæcological cases, and the claims of such cases to the special advantages of these hospitals are so paramount, that they have so far tended to a specialism, which, though useful for the patients, is detrimental to the physicians who must find all their training in them. Efforts, therefore, have constantly been made to widen the range for women, by securing their admission as students, internes, or visiting physicians to the great hospitals, which constitute the medical treasure-houses of the country.[120] In describing the actual condition of the medical schools, mention has been made of the hospital advantages which have been, little by little, secured for their undergraduate students. In Boston, where there is no school for women but the homœopathic school of the Boston University, fewer opportunities exist than anywhere else. The Massachusetts General Hospital is reserved exclusively for the students of the Harvard Medical School. But the City Hospital remained unappropriated, and in 1886, the President and Trustees of the Boston University petitioned for permission for their female students to visit there, on the same terms as the young men. A committee was appointed to consider the matter, and after an elaborate report on the contemporary usage in ninety-one hospitals throughout the United States, advised that the request be granted. This enabled the female students to attend the public lectures given and the operations performed in the hospital amphitheatre about once a week.[121]