physicians is, in its last analysis, only one of the more recent manifestations of this universal social instinct. So true is this, that in the strife physicians have abandoned the sentiments proper to their own profession, and have not hesitated to revile and defame it, in order to prove that it was unfit for the delicacy or virtue of woman. They have forgotten the tone of mind, the special mode of vision that becomes habitual to every one who has really crossed the threshold of the sublime art; they have talked of “revolting details” and “disgusting preliminaries,” like the veriest outside Philistine. There are horrors in medicine, because there are horrors in life. But in medicine these are overcome or transformed by the potency of the Ideal; in life they must be borne unrelieved. The women, who, equally with men, are exposed in life to the fearful, the horrible, the disgusting, are equally entitled to access to those regions of knowledge and ideas, where these may be averted, or relieved, or palliated, or transformed. Again: A mother occupied with her young child offers a spectacle so beautiful and so touching, that it cannot fail to profoundly impress the social imagination. Contemplating this, it is easy to feel that all the poetry and romance, all the worth and significance of women are summed up in the exquisite moments of this occupation; easy to dread the introduction of other interests lest the women be unduly diverted from this, which is supreme. Yet nothing is more obvious than that diversion comes, a thousand times, from frivolity, but never through work; and that these moments are preceded by many years, and followed by many years, and for many women, through no fault of their own, never come at all. The seventy years of a life-time will contain much waste, if adjusted exclusively to the five or six years of even its highest happiness. The toiling millions of women of every age of the world have not been permitted to make such an adjustment, even if they should wish to do so. They have always worked; but they demand now, and simply, some opportunity for a free choice in the kind of work, which, apart from the care of children, they may perform. The invasion of the medical profession is one of the more articulate forms of this demand.