The women physicians of America share, while rather intensifying, the main characteristics of their medical countrymen. They have, as a rule, little erudition; but they have great capacity for bringing to bear all available and useful knowledge upon practical issues. They certainly do not read enough; and there is, therefore, a noticeable thinness in their discussions of medical topics when they meet in isolated council. But they have a resolute helpfulness in dealing with the individual cases entrusted to their care, and a passionate loyalty to those who have put their trust in them. They are possessed of abundant motive power for concrete intellectual action, though they might lack this power, if the work depended exclusively on abstract intellectual interest. And, after all, it is this habit of mind which most distinctively marks the modern practicing physician, and without it the advances in medical science would be of little profit to the sick; indeed, would often not be made. And, what is often overlooked, it is precisely these mental habits here described which have been usually considered as particularly characteristic of women. Thus the introduction of women into medicine demands no modification of the typical conception traditionally held of women, but only an enlargement of the applications which may be made of this characteristic type.[145] In nothing are popular views about women more at variance with fact than in regard to their capacity for operative surgery. The popular conception of surgery is itself entirely false, being inherited from a by-gone period, when hospital operations were conducted in the wards, filled with shuddering patients awaiting their own fate; amid clouds of steam from burning irons, torrents of blood, and the groans and shrieks of the victim.[146] But to-day, with anæsthetics, hæmostatics, and antiseptics, the surgeon may operate as calmly as on an insensible wax figure; and, moreover, with a reasonably correct technique, be assured of success in a vast majority of cases whose result was formerly, even under the best skill, always doubtful. The very greatness of the achievements of surgical genius have lessened the amount of ability requisite to perform many surgical operations; and especially have the modern conditions of operating removed the perturbating influences which female nerves might be supposed unable to resist. Moreover, the technique has become so precise that it can be taught; and women, even when defective in power of original thought, are extremely susceptible of being trained by exact drill. On this very account the model of a practical medical school should be that of a military academy, where every operation, mental or manual, that the graduate is subsequently expected to perform, will be rehearsed before graduation.