Although, according to the census of 1880, there were 2432 women registered as physicians throughout the United States, and several hundred must have graduated in the last ten years, it is probable that many of them have received an education too irregular and imperfect to justify their claim to the title in any serious sense. Thus the numbers are still too small, the time too short, to begin to estimate the work of women physicians. A large number of the women recorded in the census tables will not be found among the graduates of any suitable colleges, or on the registered lists of regular physicians, and these cannot be counted in an estimate like the present. Thus the census of 1880 records 133 women physicians in New York, but the medical register of ten years later contains the names of but 48. There seem to be about fifty at present in Philadelphia, twenty or thirty in Boston. Eighteen are said to be practicing in Detroit. The great majority are scattered through the country in small towns or country villages. It is irrelevant to inquire with Waldeyer, “What women have done?” from the scientific standpoint, because the problem given was to enable them to become observant, faithful, and skillful practitioners of medicine, and this is possible without the performance of any really scientific work. It is premature to make such inquiries, except for single cases which serve to illustrate the possibility, for it is but little more than a generation that the first school was opened to women; it is not more than a dozen years since the official education attainable has approached any degree of effectiveness. What women have learned, they have in the main taught themselves. And it is fair to claim, that when they have taught themselves so much, when they have secured the confidence of so many thousand sick persons, in the teeth of such vigorous and insulting opposition, and upon such scanty resources and such inadequate preparation; when such numbers have been able to establish reputable and even lucrative practice, to care for the health of many families over long terms of years, to sustain medical institutions of their own, almost exclusively dependent upon the good-will of citizens who have closely watched their work,—to serve in public hospitals in competition with men, to care for many thousands of sick poor, to whom abundant other medical aid was accessible, had it been preferred,—to restore to health many thousand women who had become helpless invalids from dread of consulting men physicians, or from delay in doing so,—to hold their own in private practice, in matters of judgment, diagnosis, medical and operative treatment, amidst the incessant and often unfair rivalry of brother competitors,—to do all this, we repeat, itself demonstrates a very considerable, indeed an unexpected amount of native ability and medical fitness on the part of women. With longer time, with more solid and varied opportunities, and