Page:Women Wanted.djvu/272

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WOMEN WANTED

modern times, the first in England. When as Elizabeth Garrett she came to London to be a doctor in 1860, there was no University in her land that would admit her. Physicians with whom she wished to study, were some of them scornful and some of them rude, and some were simply amazed. "Why not become a nurse?" one more tolerant than the rest suggested. The girl shook her head: "Because I mean to make an income of a thousand pounds a year instead of forty." The kindly old doctor who finally yielded to her importunities and admitted her to his office, also let her in to the lectures at the Middlesex Hospital with the specific arrangement that she should "dress like a nurse" and promise earnestly "not to look intelligent." Her degree she had to go to Paris for. Like that she got into the medical profession in 1871 a year before her marriage to the director of the Orient steamship line. Dean of the London School of Medicine for Women and founder of the New Hospital for Women, she came through the difficult days when it was only in "zenana" practice in India that English women doctors had a free field. Russia too dedicated her pioneer medical women to the heathen, modestly designing them for the Mussulman population and at length permitting them the designation "physician to women and children." That idea lingered long with civilisation. As late as 1910 a distinguished British surgeon in a public address allowed that there was this province for the woman physician, the treatment of women and children. But any medical