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Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
have some bits to look at. We had quite a rush of babies just then—
four born on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.—When we were
going round the wards on Christmas Day Dr. Sewall ordered of
course ‘light diet’ for the new Mothers,—so I said laughingly to
console them, ‘Well, I guessed the babies were worth losing a dinner
for, weren’t they?’ ‘Humph!’ says one of the Mothers, ‘a good
dinner’s worth more to poor folks!’
To tell the truth I was too much taken aback to reflect what a
sensible woman she was!—What would you have said, dear?
Darling, I come more and more to the conclusion that anyone who
wishes to preserve intact all romantic ideas about ‘Mother’s love,’
etc., had better not live in a Lying-in Hospital. It’s a grand and
blessed thing when it does come, but that isn’t always. We had two
of the babies born here found deserted in the streets a few days
ago,—the day after their mothers were discharged.”

On March 4th, 1866, she writes to her Mother:

“I have given up my Sunday service, or at least have resigned it
into the hands of a minister who already had a service in the medical
wards. I found it very hard to find time to prepare properly for it,
and sometimes it tried my nerves very much, and besides it got to
be a great weight upon me in the way of responsibility and absolute
honesty in what I said. Things seem so very un-clear to my own
mind that it rather weighs upon me and worries me to be trying to
say much about them to others. Perhaps this state may just pass
away again, but in the meantime I like best to ‘be true to every
honest thought’ and, till I’m sure, to be silent.
Much love to Daddy and Carry, and such a lot of kisses for my
darling.
Yours lovingly,
Soph.”

To understand the inner history of this change one

must revert to the diary,—the most intimate friend of
all—and this takes us back for a moment to the time
of her arrival in America.
“June 18th. How thoughts and plans and possibilities rush upon
me! The opening of the bar to women here,—Mr. Sewall’s wish for a
female pupil. ‘Ah,’ as I said to L.E.S. last night, ‘if I had been an
American, I believe I should not have doubted to be a lawyer.’ She
thinks one should be, if one has the powers and will.
Yes, but is the ‘dedication’ and vocation of years nothing? Have I
believed rightly or wrongly that God meant me to do something for
teaching,—and that in England,—to the almost certain exclusion of
all other life-work? Rightly, I think.
Then, again, the ministry. What seems to draw me so irresistibly
that way? Is it pride or wish of note, or is it vocation? Is it partly Dr.
Arnold’s belief that Headmaster ought also to be chaplain?...
One seems at crossways,—‘the tide’ perhaps. Well, look,—and
surely the kindly Light will lead.”

Anyone who had gone through all S.J.-B.’s papers

up to this date with an open mind would have said
that the choice really lay between teaching and
preaching. All her life she had been more interested
in religious subjects than in any others, and her gifts
of exposition and of public speaking were far above
the average in either sex. In later years, when she
was addressing thousands of people, she could make
all hear without seeming to raise her voice; it
remained full, mellow, easy, perfectly controlled, just
as when she sat at the head of her own dinner-table.
She might have spent some considerable part of the
day in “wishing somebody would shoot her,” but no
one would have guessed it when the moment came.
“My mind is perfectly at ease when she rises to
speak,” said one of her patients in Edinburgh, many
years later, “one feels then that humanly speaking
nothing can go wrong.” As a matter of fact it was
when she was addressing a large audience that she
looked most radiantly happy.
In many ways, then, she would have made a good
minister; we know that she wrote a number of
sermons that were appreciated by her colleagues,
and she went so far as to preach at Weymouth
(Mass.) for the Rev. Olympia Brown. “On seeing Him
who is invisible” was the subject she chose, and,
judged by ordinary standards, the sermon seems to
have been a success.
The main reason why she did not follow it up was
(as indicated in the last-quoted letter to her Mother)
the change that took place in her religious views
after she had lived some time in America. In England
she had been considered an advanced thinker on
religious subjects: in America—the America in which
her lot happened to be thrown—she was amazingly
orthodox and conservative. For the first time she
found herself among people who really did not care
about religion as she understood it.
“July 2nd. Very nice these people are,” she writes in her diary,
“and very nice Mrs. Rogers’ deep clear interest about the poor and
wicked,—refuges, etc.
Yet is there not in them the sort of un-religiousness which half jars
on one in Unitarians? I wonder why. I hope I shan’t get into it. ‘More
of reverence in us dwell.’ Yet so difficult in throwing off old bonds of
sentiment not to lose something of the real feeling,—and, as Miss
Cobbe says, if our religion is not a synthesis of all the good and
beauty we know, we are less, not more, by rejecting errors.”

And again:
“A new psychical study in the shape of Mrs. F., who ‘can believe in
Providence but not in God,’ and who ‘means to say that there is
absolute right and wrong, but not good and bad people. People were
born with certain notions and acted accordingly; they did the best
they could and could do no more.’
Mr. F. allowing and accepting the consequence that men differed
no more from brutes than by finer organization, no more than the
elephant from the fish! It is really good to contrast opposite
extremes of thought,—it gives one a certain sense of stability and
reality to have to defend one’s castle on both sides, and so to feel
sure that it is one’s own at least....
Talking of struggle as the only root of good, I quoted ‘perfect
through suffering,’ and spoke of my belief in Christ’s struggle in
those 30 years as the only possible root of his accordance of will
with God’s.
July 16th. Curious how the things most living to me are just simple
absurdities to another. Talking of tombstones, Mrs. H. doesn’t like
them, as preventing the dead rising—in idea. Mrs. F.—‘Well, you
don’t expect them to, do you?’ (as a sort of reductio ad absurdum).
‘Certainly I do: the Bible says so.’ ‘Oh—aw—ah!’ with such a face,—‘if
I thought so, I’d take to Banting at once.’”

Curious how none of them seem to have seen that

the frivolous remark involved a great principle!
 There were many stories and jokes on biblical
themes, and—though S. J.-B. even at this time was a
touchstone in the matter of jokes, never allowing one
to pass which was not funny enough or clever
enough to justify its breadth or its seeming
irreverence—her sense of humour was keen.
“Suggestion to read the prayer for fair weather,—‘Lor, sir,—not a
bit of good with the wind in this quarter.’”

But she was constantly reverting to the old

religious intensity:
“How reading of any spiritual conflict—even such an ‘ébauche’ as
in Agnes of Sorrento—rouses one’s whole nature in a sort of
enthusiasm of longing and half prophecy!...
Sometimes I feel such intense sympathy and pity for Christ
because of his very deification. That after spending his whole life to
learn and tell men about his Father, he should find them, after his
death, trying to set him up himself to obscure that Father,—making
God a foil to Christ!”

With that extraordinary frankness that does such

credit to both, she writes to her Mother at this time,
—“I was thinking the other day how curious it was
that I really never read one Unitarian book till I was
[38]
altogether Unitarian, —never one but the Bible at
least, if that counts.”
“It is strange,” says someone, “that, in all our talk
of the evolution of the individual, we fail to recognize
the evolution of the medium.” S. J.-B. seems to have
thought—as so many earnest spirits thought in those
days—that she stood practically alone. “It has so
been,” she says in the same letter to her Mother, “(I
can’t say chanced) that I have had next to no human
sympathy or help on my way. I do not remember
that anyone but Mrs. Ballantyne has given me much
of either in this one strife, and before I knew her the
worst was over.”
One must bear this in mind in reading the passage
that follows:
“To realize more and more that my life will be one—for years if not
to the end—of struggle and perhaps obloquy, certainly outcasting
from the synagogue,—struggle theological and social: and will it
even succeed at last? Yes, surely,—inasmuch as Robertson says how
to fall in the gap is success,—to be one of the conquering army, if
not of the conquerors.”

The next entry in the diary is the quotation of a

flippant joke about the Californians who “when they
go to a certain warm abode have yet to send back
for their blankets.”
“July 30th. A very interesting talk with the Fs. ... trying hard to
show Mrs. F., who longs so to believe in a loving God, ‘Thou wouldst
not seek me, hadst thou not found me,’—and that to long is almost
to believe. Also to show her that Christ’s Christianity is a strong true
manly thing,—that what she deprecates is the letter not the spirit,
and that her willingness to live, and yet fear to die, without
Christianity is of the essence of Calvinism.
With him, still more interesting, (except that one pities and longs
to help her) about origin of evil, free will, etc. I arguing that God
could not give men the possibility of virtue without the possibility of
evil,—he arguing a higher state where evil not possible. I say—then
you exclude the idea of goodness from God.
With some effort cleared ideas so far as to detect the
‘undistributed middle term,’ to distinguish between the possibility of
evil and the wish toward evil. Saying that the very truth we prized in
Unitarianism was that it said ‘Christ, if God, was no example’ and
that Christ’s very goodness consisted in that he had the possibility of
evil and no wish for evil.
Illustrating with May forbidden sugar, in a room with and without
it. In one case unable to disobey, in the other restrained from the
wish to disobey.
The two, confused in one, being absolute opposites.
Is this all part of my training ‘for the ministry’? Please God. One
does so gain a clearness never, one trusts, to be lost.
He asked me tonight if I did not find I had a clearness of thought
and language very rare; and she said I was the first person who had
made her feel the intense reality of the invisible and long after it.
Please God, a prophecy.
I said I had won through infinite struggle—almost ‘to blood’—a
certainty to which the visibility of the outer was nothing. And, please
God, it is deeply true.”

Ah me, Prometheus! The audacity of us small

mortals all!
But the words that follow are indeed ‘a prophecy.’
“I have such a conviction of infinite struggle and contest in the
future,—yet please God, of earnest, on-pressing struggle, and in the
end, victory and Rest....
Oh, dear, the ‘religious’ people and their effects!—very nearly
making L. E. S. hate the name. So far from all good being ‘in the
name of our Lord Jesus Christ’ or rather in God’s, there is actually
room for the reverse to be said;—not wholly truly, I trust though.
But she said, ‘If I want help for those poor things in or out of
hospital, I never go near the pious people. I have and I know them.
Go to atheists, and you are never refused.’
Oh, dear!”

Knowing the spiritual history of earnest souls in

that generation, one is not surprised to come a
couple of months later upon the entry:
“I am wonderfully unsettled and uneasy somehow.... I do believe
this terrible sort of logical doubt of Theism that enters in—not un-
faith, but a failure of the abiding surety—an entrance of the
admission how possibly reasonable Atheism may be—hurts horribly.
And then isn’t the whole world void?
Oh for the ‘I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not‘!—and
doubtless one has it,—both in ’Neither pray I for these alone,’ and
also in those who live and love one, Mother and Octa....
L.’s absence of sympathy weighs heavily. Hitherto all my friends
have met me here,—she does not. ‘All the help she ever got, she got
from herself and her will.’ Not from the Bible or hymns, etc. She calls
herself a theist, but it seems to me to run close to practical
atheism....”
“Oct. 29th. She is so good! Told her something of today’s pain,
she so sympathizing and good! Believed that the struggle was part
of the sequence of early training and later reaction into ‘wider
faith’—what many had to go through one time or another. I spoke of
herself,—asked her what practical difference she would find if an
atheist. ‘Not much generally,’ she thought, but in trouble she did
pray. She couldn’t help it, and believed it was good, and when her
friends died she was happier. ‘When she thought of it, she felt very
sure about God, but very seldom did stop to think. She was sure her
first duty was her work, etc. and then she had small time and sense
left.
I said lives not continually lived as seeing Him who is invisible
would be worth but little; she said Then her’s was so, and many
others. So I retracted hastily. ‘At least mine would be.’
 Perhaps her’s is actually higher and more childlike. ‘He will care for
my soul,’[39] as it were.”
“Nov. 13th. Looking at p. 253, ‘the Ministry?’, I ask whether the
sort of spiritual speechlessness—almost deadness—is not perhaps a
merciful answer to that question. Clearly I can’t preach now.”
“Nov. 24th. This temptation to medicine is pretty strong in some
ways, both as to present study and future life.... But ‘not each on all’
come the claims,—this is surely already responded to, and will surely
grow without me.
I feel as if my work would not [how little she knew!] as if, at least,
it was given me to do and needed most of all my labour.
So ’Traveller, hold thy cloak’!
While it was identical with life interests and labour am I to claim
‘vocation,’ and then when others open, forsake it?
‘Shalt not excel.’”
“Nov. 25th. I cannot but believe that if God enables me ... to do
my work as I have believed and planned it, it will do wider, deeper
good for England than the addition of one woman doctor can.[40]
And then if I say,—‘Ah, but see how my theology will impede me!
—well, would you have everyone give up working but those who
hold the popular views?—is it not just those whose views have
changed who need to work and justify them, and not hide light
under a bushel at call of indolence or cowardice? You know that you
believe in the horrible harm of leaving education to Calvinists,
downtreading and hardening earth round the root,—that you believe
in children being taught ‘the two commandments’ and no more,—
and yet, because you would so teach them, you half shrink from the
battle through which you must do it.
L. E. S. says, ‘If you feel you can and wish to be a doctor, you
ought.’ Ah, but I can do the other too. And if it is only selfish or
worldly considerations that sway you to medicine—if it is the interest
or the power or the success, mainly or wholly—if it is the difficulties
present or future that make you half yearn to turn from the other—
surely these are no reasons.
Surely, having presented ourselves, our souls and bodies, a
reasonable sacrifice, these things no longer enter in.”
 In view of all that was to follow, it is interesting
that, in turning to Medicine, she should suspect
herself of ‘half shrinking from the battle.’ Here is
proof, if proof were needed, that while half of her
enjoyed the fray, the other half had to be dragged,
an unwilling captive, begging always to lie down and
be at peace.
“The Medicine fascinates me.... If I resume teaching, it will be
grand to have an M.D. for head of College: if not, why Medicine is a
‘good work,’ and if I am led up to it, it may be mine after all.
But won’t E.G. be cross?”

Here are two pleasant little sidelights on the

situation—from letters to her Mother:
“(Jan. 21st. 1866.) And, darling, do you know that the doctor has
such a splendid temper, and is so infinitely gentle, that I really
believe she is improving mine,—because I’m absolutely ashamed to
be cross to anybody so good. Suppose I come home angelic, dear?”

Her best friends would have said there was no

great cause for anxiety on that score.
“(Feb. 6th.) Yes, dear, I mean to be a thoroughly good nurse for
you at any rate, if ever you need me; as to ‘Doctor too,’ I can’t say. I
should like to be enough of one at least to know how to save you
some pain. I listen to and learn specially everything that I think can
ever help my darling,—it would be grand to be of some use and
comfort to her if she was ill.”

A few weeks later she wrote to Mrs. Unwin:

 “13 Pleasant Street, Boston.
March 3rd. 1866.
My dear Lucy,
I hope you are quite prepared to renew your invitation to me
for next summer, for I’m beginning to think seriously of my visit
home, and I want very much to see you! I say my ‘visit’ for I have
been so well and strong since I came to America, and have found so
much to interest me, that I think it very likely I may come back here
after seeing all my home folks....
I am so glad to hear that you have got Alice with you, and expect
to like her. She is a real friend of mine, and a very true and valuable
one.... I only hope you will let her take as good care of you as she
used to do of me....
Whenever you feel energetic enough to enjoy a chat by pen and
paper, I shall be very pleased to hear of your doings. Pray tell me all
about the Baby—of course the most wonderful of his kind—and be
sure, dear child, that I shall care very much to hear and know about
everything that concerns you.
Please give the enclosed lines to A. I shall enjoin her to feed you
up no end, and whenever we do meet, be sure I shall ask if you let
yourself be taken proper and sensible care of. I believe in food and
rest as just the best doctors in creation—with all my new medical
lights!
Goodbye, dear child. With every good wish for you in the New
Year, I am,
Yours affectionately,
S. L. J.-B.”

All through this time her happy letters had been

giving no small pleasure to the “old folks” at home.
“Brighton. 18th Dec. 1865.
Dearest,
Your welcome letter arrived a day or two before the 17th., but
dear Mother kept it back till the morning. Thanks for all your good
wishes. One thing you can always do,—pray for me,—and that, I
trust, you will do daily. I have constant faith in prayer simply offered
up to our heavenly Father through the one mediator between God
and man. I believe it never fails.
I am rejoiced you are so quiet at Boston, and have employment
that interests you, but even that work will hurt you, remember, if
you have too much of it. You want rest, dearest child, and only light
agreeable work on your hands. I wish I could see Dr. Sewall, to give
her a Father’s heartfelt thanks for all her loving kindness to you. She
is indeed an invaluable friend. If I am to see her, she must come to
Europe, for I shall never cross the Atlantic.... I am very glad you are
so well, and your letters are so cheery that they are a great
pleasure.
We are all, thank God, fairly well, and are to have Tom and his
wife, and four (I think) of the children here after Christmas. On
Thursday last, at 2 a.m. their house was on fire, and till 2.30 a.m. he
did not expect to save the house; and had there been a high wind,
nothing could have saved it probably. Mercifully it was a still night
and everything went well. Two engines were on the spot rapidly, in
perfect order,—plenty of water close by, and the superintendent very
active and intelligent. No crowd, and the entrances kept clear by
respectable known men: and by three o’clock every spark was out.
The children were sent off rapidly to the school-house, and all five
(baby being put elsewhere) put in Miss Temple’s bed! Nobody has
been hurt,—a few colds and that seems all. Our God be praised.
How different it might have been!
Your affecte Father,
T. Jex-Blake.”

And the Mother writes:

“Jan. 29th. 1866.... You were very good and very right not to
attempt to enter yet as a student....
I had much rather know you well and happy there than see you ill
and know you worried here. If they would only have the Cable, I
think Boston no distance. I should certainly like the Cable,—but I
don’t hear a word about it. Couldn’t you apply to Government?”
“Feb. 20th. I hope your medical education is progressing, and that
you don’t addle your brains. I shall expect you to make something
on the way home by your medical knowledge.”
“Mar. 5th. It is such a repose and joy to me to hear of your being
occupied so usefully and happily, and feeling comparatively well,
though I suspect sometimes my little one is a wee overdone.”

The medical study was more or less of a joke so

far to her friends at home, and many are the
enquiries as to when she means to return and go on
with her life after this interesting digression.
“I am very glad you find things and people pleasant in America,”
writes Mrs. Unwin. “I hope they won’t be so nice that they will tempt
you to stay there very long, for I shall be very glad when I can think
of you again without that great sea between us. I do so want a long
talk with you about no end of things. I don’t think I ever wanted you
more than when I was ill.”

And Mr. Unwin expressed the view of many when

he wrote:
“If I told you of the estimate in which I hold the purpose to which
you are devoting your life, you would suspect me of flattery, so I
abstain; but, barring all that, your friends in England are in great
need of you, and I think it is very horrid that you should leave them
all, to whom you would be of infinite service, on God knows what
outlandish errand. They all grudge you to Boston entirely, so pray be
quick and come back.”

Dr. Sewall, on the other hand, had become not a

little dependent on her competent helper, and,
although this friendship too was not without the
“cataracts and breaks” to which S. J.-B. so often
refers in her diary, there is no doubt that the older
and gentler woman found it not only a pleasure but a
great asset. “How I wish I had you here: I do so
want your strength! So few people are strong,” is a
sentiment that recurs in her letters many times from
now to the end of her life.
So in June 1866, S. J.-B. returned to England to
see her parents, and to talk over the whole question
of her future career with them and with other
friends.
“Most people are much more in favour of Medicine than I
expected,” she writes, “except Miss Garrett, who thinks me not
specially suited, and E. S. M., who thinks it indecent of unmarried
women knowing all about these things.”
“July 8th. Sunday. ‘Taller,’ say Laurence, Mother and self. ‘More
firmly knit,’ say do. ‘Muscles like iron, as if rowing all morning and
prize-fighting all afternoon,’ says Nigger.
Well done America and L. E. S.!—bless her.”

Almost at the same moment Dr. Sewall was

writing:
“I really feel quite well satisfied with the increase in my practice,
and if it continues to increase for the next two years as well, we
shall be able to take a fine house and live in style. I cannot tell you
how much pleasure I get out of anticipating our house-keeping.
When I am too tired to do anything, I lay on the sofa and plan and
plan and think what a good time we are going to have, and am as
happy as a cricket.”
 So America won the day, though not without many
questionings.
“August 12th. Sunday. On Sunday last at Mrs. Hyde’s suggestion
wrote to Macmillan. On Tuesday heard from him, and had a ‘book—
not too short’ warmly accepted by him, at ‘no risks and half profits.’
So we gradually come to our wishes when we have ceased to look
for them. I accept it almost as I did the preaching,—because I had
so longed for it.
This day three weeks on the Atlantic,—5 weeks, home to L. E. S., I
trust. Study Medicine? ... or push on in literary career now opening
apparently?
How about conflicting interests and powers hereafter? If my book
—inter alia—brings me to notice of Commission,[41] etc.,—cry off
from my chance because too busy as a doctor?
Ah, well,—long way off yet! Do the work ‘lies nearest thee’ and
leave the rest!”
 CHAPTER XV
PIONEER WORK IN AMERICA

On September 1st, 1866, S. J.-B. sailed again for

America. A warm welcome awaited her, and she
speedily fell back into her niche at the Women’s
Hospital. Her main interest for the first month or two
was the writing of her book on A Visit to Some
American Schools and Colleges, the manuscript of
which was duly despatched to Macmillan in
November. Based though it avowedly was on
somewhat limited observations, and dealing with a
transient stage of a great subject, the book was
extraordinarily fair and clear, and was greeted with
genuine respect by those who were qualified to form
an opinion. What was equally important, it made
really excellent reading. At the close of a four column
review the Athenaeum said:
“An English teacher, whose special avocations enabled her to gain
prompt attention from American instructors, and qualified her to
detect the true worth and significance of the facts brought under her
notice, Miss Jex-Blake has written a sensible and entertaining book
upon an important subject; and, while we thank her for some
valuable information, we venture to thank her also for the very
agreeable manner in which she imparts it.”
“Redolent with common sense and practical suggestions,” said The
Stationer.

How sane a view she took of the whole subject

may be gathered from the quotations given in the
[42]
appendix.
Having happily despatched her book, she was free
to give her whole mind to the subject of Medicine,
and she seems
now to have enrolled formally as a medical
student. In any case we hear of her dissecting—
when material could be got—and finding, in the
stimulus this gave to her work, a new interest and
fascination.
Excellent work was done at that Women’s Hospital
in Boston, as a number of our English women
doctors have had reason to testify: sickness was
relieved, and—what is quite as much to the point—
competent and able doctors were turned out year by
year. But of course the scholastic side of the work
was on a very different level. Even for those days,
the practical scientific education, and, above all, the
sheer supply of material, were inadequate in the
extreme. Then as now, of course, it was true that “la
carrière ouverte aux talents,” and when women
doctors were so rare there was little doubt that a
competent woman would make her way. Certainly it
was not the hallmark of a good University degree
that helped her, for good Universities existed for the
male sex only. Graduation in America to this day may
mean a great deal or it may mean just nothing at all.
It was not the fault of the woman doctor of that
period if her “degree” was one that failed to inspire
the enthusiasm of those that understood.
Now S. J.-B.’s entry on any new sphere in life could
seldom be fitly described as the addition of a little
more of the same stuff. For better or worse, she was
apt to come somewhat as the yeast comes to the
dough, and yet that metaphor, too, falls short, for
the medium reacted upon her as intensely perhaps
as she acted on the medium. In the present case she
had drifted into medical work all uncritical and full of
[43]
admiration ; but a visit to England brought her back
as an outsider with her critical faculty fully awake.
She saw that the need of adequate Graduation—
urgent though it might be—was as nothing compared
to the need of adequate Education. It was hard to
make bricks without straw. In America women
doctors had proved, against heavy odds, that women
doctors were wanted. Why not give them a fair field?
One heard on every side of the splendid advantages
laid, so to speak, at the feet of men students at
Harvard.
Why should not women be admitted to Harvard?
 Why not ask?
In April, 1867, the following correspondence was
published in The Boston Daily Advertiser:
“March 11th. 1867.
Gentlemen,
Finding it impossible to obtain elsewhere in New England a
thoroughly competent medical education, we hereby request
permission to enter the Harvard Medical School on the same terms
and under the same conditions as other students, there being, as we
understand, no university statute to the contrary.
On applying for tickets for the course, we were informed by the
Dean of the Medical Faculty that he and his coadjutors were unable
to grant them to us in consequence of some previous action taken
by the corporation, to whom now therefore we make request to
remove any such existing disability. In full faith in the words recently
spoken with reference to the University of Harvard,—‘American
colleges are not cloisters for the education of a few persons, but
seats of learning whose hospitable doors should be always open to
every seeker after knowledge’—we place our petition in your hands
and subscribe ourselves,
Your obedient servants,
Sophia Jex-Blake.
Susan Dimock.[44]
To the President and Fellows of the University of Harvard.”

“Harvard University. April 8th. 1867.

My dear Madam,
After consultation with the faculty of the Medical College, the
corporation direct me to inform you and Miss Dimock that there is no
provision for the education of women in any department of this
university.
Neither the corporation nor the faculty wish to express any opinion
as to the right or expediency of the medical education of women,
but simply to state the fact that in our school no provision for that
purpose has been made, or is at present contemplated.
Very respectfully yours,
Thomas Hill.
Miss S. Jex-Blake.”

A few days later the following paragraph appeared

in The Advocate:
“The Beginning of the End. A correspondence between the
President and two lady applicants for admission to the Medical
School was published some days since in the ‘Boston Advertiser.’ We
understand that the friends of female education have no notion of
resting satisfied with their first rebuff; and that prominent Alumni of
Boston are already taking measures for the prolonged agitation of
the question.”

A month later S.J.-B. had obtained introductions to

each of the professors in the Medical Faculty at
Harvard, and to each member of the staff of the
Massachusetts General Hospital and of the Eye and
Ear Infirmary: as well as to many people of standing
connected with these various institutions: and she
now proceeded to canvass them systematically. In
addition to a number of influential friends, she was
ably supported by Miss Dimock.
On the whole their reception was encouraging. The
individual letters, indeed, are so favourable, that the
hopes of the inexperienced young applicants must
have run high. The following from Dr. Oliver Wendell
Holmes is typical of some half dozen at least:
 “I should not only be willing, but I should be much pleased, to
lecture to any number of ladies for whom we can find
accommodation in the anatomical lecture room, always provided that
any special subject which seemed not adapted for an audience of
both sexes should be delivered to the male students alone.”

Dr. Brown-Séquard is even more emphatic in a

letter to Dr. Holmes:
“My dear Professor,
Miss Blake, who will hand you this note, wishes me to say that
I am strongly in favour of the admission of persons of her sex at the
Medical College. As such is my decided opinion, I write very willingly.
Very faithfully yours,
C. E. Brown-Séquard.”

The corporation of Harvard, however, exerted its

power to veto any such inclinations on the part of
individual professors.
S. J.-B. quotes the above and a number of similar
letters in the diary, and adds the comment:
“All which ends in ... smoke!”

There were always flashes of humour to temper

the various disappointments.
“Those wise men of Gotham at the Eye and Ear think it ‘the
kindest and most gentlemanly thing’ to shut us out after all!”
“Dr. A. ‘not afraid of responsibility, of course’—only—he’d rather
not admit us till other people do”!
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