THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON AND MEDICAL WOMEN.
THE Trades-Union feeling against women Doctors is making a hard fight in the University of London. Not many weeks ago, the Senate of that University decided by a majority of two to one to avail itself of the Act of Parliament passed last year enabling the Universities at their discretion to grant medical degrees to women, as they do to men. And we do.not suppose there is the least reason to fear that that decision will be reversed. Still a very great effort is being made by the offended doctors to get it re- versed. A petition, signed, we believe, by more than two hundred and thirty medical graduates of the University, has been presented to the Senate, entreating it to reconsider and rescind its resolve ; and a great effort will be made at the meeting of Convocation next Tuesday to obtain from that body a resolution reversing all its frequent former decisions on this subject, and so prepare the way for a similar recantation on the part of the Senate. We do not think there is any real reason for alarm. It is true that the Medical men of the University have this advantage over the Arts men,—that a much larger proportion of them are resident in London, and that being deeply, and as some of their number assure us, even pecuniarily interested in this question, they may possibly make a greater effort to attend than the more disinterested graduates who look at the matter solely as a public question. Stall, we will trust public spirit to secure as much earnestness on the one side as powerful prejudice and worldly interest com- bined, can secure on the other, and we do not really doubt the result, though we warn all who take any deep interest in the matter that it will take an effort to secure the right result. For-
tunately there are quite enough medical men who see the great advantage of securing the aid of women in medicine, as well as the great injustice of excluding them from a noble career, to lend a very high professional authority to the view generally adopted by the great majority of the Arta and Laws graduates in the University of London.
Were it not that we know by our own experience that the Trades-Union policy is openly assigned by some of the medical
graduates as one of the explanations of the medical feeling in
regard to this movement, we should hardly credit the assertion that such an argument, however much of unconscious influ- ence it might exert on that underside of the mind of whose workings we know very little, would be openly put forward, for it is putting a tremendous weapoit into the hands of the Liberals. If young medical men are likely to have their prospects of work and success injured by the entrance into the field of these female competitors,
it is clear enough that there must be a real desire for the advice
of these female competitors, and a real sphere of usefulness for them. That is the only question at issue concerning the reply to which we ourselves have ever entertained any very serious doubt, and we have always recognised that it is not a question which, even if it were answered in the negative, should affect in any way our practical course as to throwing open this new career to such women as choose to enter upon it. But if it be true, as the fear entertained of this competition seems to
imply, that a great many women really will qualify themselves for medical practice, and will be welcomed into the profession by the acclamation of the public,—then, indeed, the resistance to this
measure seems to lose all pretence of plausibility. It is hardly in the present day that a number of highly-instructed men will listen to the advocates of a new monopoly, and exclude women from the exercise of a beneficent profession because their earnings are likely to diminish the wages of men. Literary men might just as well apply for an Act to prevent women from writing novels, or criticisms, or leading articles ; yet if they did, what contempt the more educated physicians would feel for such a strange vagary of selfish fear on their part. The argument from medical students' self-interest is indeed as crazy as it can be. Either they have nothing to fear, and then it should not be urged ; or they have something to fear, and then the interests of the public are opposed to theirs, and their selfish claims must give way.
We are, however, well aware that it is only the weaker vessels among the opponents of women doctors, who will take this very untenable ground. The stronger opponents will put the case on the ground of public interest, not on the ground of professional monopoly, and will argue that the introduction of women to all the miserable secrets and the sickening fatigues of medical practice, will injure the character of women as such, impose on them burdens to which their strength is quite unequal, and violate the modesties of the higher feminine life. Now we should attach great weight to this kind of argument, if the experience of centuries were not a sufficient refutation of it. Women have already been initiated as nurses into all the miserable secrets and sickening fatigues of medical practice, and instead of suffering from them, either morally or physically, every good doctor regards their aid as abso- lutely indispensable. Can any sensible man maintain that that
aid will be rendered either less delicate or less efficient by ample scientific training ? The mere suggestion is absurd. We
do not say and do not think that every intelligent woman is fit for such duties, any more than that every intelligent woman is fitted to be a good nurse. The number of efficient women doctors will always be, in all probability, rela- tively small, as compared with the number of efficient doctors of the other sex. But no one proposes, or has ever proposed, to force into the medical profession a single woman who does not make it her deliberate personal choice. All that is proposed is to remove a most unreasonable and unjust restriction on those,—be they few or many,—who know that they are fitted for such duties, and believe that by the help of a scientific education they can perform well a far higher class of these duties than any which they could perform as mere nurses. If there were only a dozen women in England competent to follow, in the steps of such a woman as Mrs. Garrett Anderson, we should say that it was just as obligatory on the Universities to enable them to follow in her steps, as if there were,—as there very well may be,— hundreds of such women. But certainly the more there are, the more imperative a duty it is to admit them. And therefore we fully expect the Convocation of the University of London on Tuesday to ratify its many previous decisions, and to be con- firmed in that course by the Trades-Union plea urged on the other side, if any advocate of restriction be so unwise as to press, in public, an argument which has highly distinguished sponsors in private.
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