Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World WarDaggett, Mabel Potter
History
Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World War
Daggett, Mabel Potter
Women -- Employment; World War, 1914-1918 -- Women
Here and there throughout the country, other women now began to
be admitted to examinations for internships. They exhibited an
embarrassing tendency for passing at the head of the list. Any of them
were likely to do it. The only way out of the dilemma, then was for the
hospital authorities to declare, as some did, that the institution had
“no accommodations for women doctors” which simply meant that all of
the accommodations had been assigned to men. It is on this ground that
Philadelphia’s Blockley Hospital, the first large city almshouse in the
country to open to women the competitive examination for internship,
again and again refused the appointment even to a woman who had passed
at the head of the list. It was 1914 before Bellevue in New York City
found a place for the woman intern: five women were admitted among the
eighty-three men of the staff.
This unequal distribution of professional privileges was the indication
of a lack of professional fellowship far reaching in consequences.
Among the exhibits in the laboratories to-day, there is a glass bottle
containing a kidney preserved in alcohol. In all the annals of the
medical profession, I believe, there has seldom been another kidney
just like it. For some reason or other, too technical for a layman
to understand, it is a very wonderful kidney. Now it happens that a
young woman physician discovered the patient with that kidney and
diagnosed it. A woman surgeon operated on that kidney and removed it
successfully. Then a man physician came along and borrowed it and read
a paper on it at a medical convention. He is now chronicled throughout
the medical fraternity with the entire credit for the kidney.
“And it isn’t his. It’s our kidney,” I heard the girl doctor say with
flashing eyes. “You’ll take it easier than that when you’re a little
older, my dear,” answered the woman surgeon who had lived longer in the
professional atmosphere that is so chilling to ambition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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