Page:Carnegie Flexner Report.djvu/196

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CHAPTER XIII

THE MEDICAL EDUCATION OF WOMEN

Medical education is now, in the United States and Canada, open to women upon practically the same terms as men. If all institutions do not receive women, so many do, that no woman desiring an education in medicine is under any disability in finding a school to which she may gain admittance. Her choice is free and varied. She will find schools of every grade accessible: the Johns Hopkins, if she has an academic degree; Cornell, if she has three-fourths of one; Rush and the state universities, if she prefers the combined six years' course; Toronto on the basis of a high school education; Meridian, Mississippi, if she has had no definable education at all.

Woman has so apparent a function in certain medical specialties and seemingly so assured a place in general medicine under some obvious limitations that the struggle for wider educational opportunities for the sex was predestined to an early success in medicine. It is singular to observe the use to which the victory has been put. The following tables show recent developments in coeducational and in women's medical schools taken separately:

Year Number of Coeducational
Medical Schools
Number of
Women Students
Number of
Women Graduates
1904 97 946 198
1905 96 852 165
1906 90 706 200
1907 86 718 172
1908 88 649 139
1909 91 752 129
Year Women's
Medical Schools
Number of
Students
Number of
Graduates
1904 3 183 56
1905 3 221 54
1906 3 189 33
1907 3 210 39
1908 3 186 46
1909 3 169 33
Combined
Year Number of Coeducational
Medical Schools
Number of
Women Students
Number of
Women Graduates
1904 100 1129 254
1905 99 1073 219
1906 93 895 233
1907 89 928 211
1908 91 835 185
1909 94 921 162

Now that women are freely admitted to the medical profession, it is clear that they show a decreasing inclination to enter it. More schools in all sections are open to them; fewer attend and fewer graduate. True enough, medical schools generally have shrunk; but as the opportunities of women have increased, not decreased, and within a period during which entrance requirements have, so far as they are con-