Page:Women Wanted.djvu/265

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245
IN THE PROFESSIONS
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that, at a meeting of the councillors held Oct. 1, it was voted to admit women to the Massachusetts Medical Society."

Syracuse University, recovering from the censure visited upon it for receiving Elizabeth Blackwell, was the first of the coeducational institutions to welcome women on equal terms with men to its medical college. Other coeducational colleges in the West later began to take them. In 1894 when Miss Mary Garrett endowed Johns Hopkins University with half a million dollars on condition that its facilities for the study of medicine be extended to women equally with men, a new attitude toward the woman physician began to be manifest. From that time on, she was going to be able with little opposition to get into the medical profession. Her difficulty would be to get up. Now no longer was a woman doctor refused office facilities in the most fashionable residential quarters in which she could pay the rent. Her problem however was just that—to pay the rent. A medical diploma doesn't do it. And to practise medicine successfully, therapeutically and financially, without a hospital training and experience is about as easy as to learn to swim without going near the water. The most desirable opportunities for this hospital experience were by the tacit gentleman's agreement in the profession quite generally closed to women.

Until very recently, internships in general hospitals were assigned almost exclusively to men. Dr. Emily Dunnung Barringer in 1903 swung herself