It was against handicaps like this that the women in medicine were making progress. Dr. Gertrude B. Kelly’s name, in New York, is at the top in the annals of surgery. Dr. Bertha Van Hoesen is a famous surgeon in Chicago. Dr. Mary A. Smith and Dr. Emma V. P. Culbertson are leading members of the medical profession in Boston. Dr. Lillian K. P. Farrar was in 1917 appointed visiting surgeon on the staff of the Women’s Hospital in New York, the first woman in New York City to receive such an appointment. Dr. S. Josephine Baker, who established in New York the first bureau of child hygiene in the world, is probably more written of than is any man in medicine. As chief of this department, she has under her direction 720 employés and is charged with the expenditure annually of over a million dollars of public money. She is a graduate of Dr. Blackwell’s medical college in which social hygiene first began to be taught with the idea of making medicine a preventive as well as a curative art. It was the idea that Harvard University a few years later incorporated in a course leading to the degree “Doctor of Public Health.” And though a woman had thus practically invented “public health” and another woman, Dr. Baker is the first real and original doctor of public health, Dr. Baker herself was refused at Harvard the opportunity to take their course leading to such a title. The university did not admit women. But a little later the trustees of Bellevue Hospital Medical College, initiating the course and looking about for the greatest living authority to take this university chair, came hat in hand to Dr. Baker, even though their institution does not admit women to the class rooms. “Gentlemen,” she answered, “I’ll accept the chair you offer me with one stipulation, that I may take my own course of lectures and obtain the degree Doctor of Public Health elsewhere refused me because I am a woman.” Like this the woman who has practically established the modern science of public health, in 1916 came into her title. It is probably the last difficulty and discrimination that the American woman in medicine will ever encounter. The struggle of women for a foothold in the medical profession is the same story in all lands. It was the celebrated Sir William Jenner of England who pronounced women physically, mentally and morally unfit for the practice of medicine. Under his distinguished leadership the graduates of the Royal College of Physicians in London pledged themselves, “As a duty we owe it to the college and to the profession and to the public to offer the fullest resistance to the admission of women to the medical profession.” Well, they have. The medical fraternity in all lands took up the burden of that pledge. A WORLD-WIDE RECONSTRUCTION