Page:Address on the Medical Education of Women (1864) - Blackwell.djvu/11

 mother in the family, will help them to sympathize with and understand family needs as physicians; this is true, I grant fully the value of such knowledge, and yet it must ever be borne in mind, that medicine is a science as well as an art; it needs knowledge as well as feeling. Let us give all due weight to sympathy, and never dispense with it in the true physician; but it is knowledge, not sympathy which can administer the right medicine; it is observation and comprehension, not sympathy, which will discover the kind of disease; and though warm sympathetic natures, with knowledge, would make the best of all physicians, without sound scientific knowledge, they would be most unreliable and dangerous guides. This want of mental discipline is then a very serious difficulty which women have to contend with in any scientific study, and is an evident and potent reason wheywhy [sic] they need, not less, but much more careful training than men, in any such study.

The second difficulty under which women specially labor, is poverty. As a general rule, women are poorer than men, and in addition to this fact of greater relative poverty, it will for a long time, be a relatively poorer class, of women than men who will study medicine. It is the young man of some means, who is apt to enter upon the expensive study of medicine, whose father is able to assist him during the years which must necessarily elapse, before he gains a remunerative practice; but experience has already shown, that they are the young women without means, who endeavour to become physicians. They come from a class notoriously poor, viz teachers; out of nineteen young ladies who have resided in the N. Y. Infirmary as students of medicine, eighteen had been teachers. We have found these students eager to learn; glad to spend any amount of time that might be required to qualify themselves for their new duties; their patient perseverance was admirable—but they had no money—the little fund they had scraped together by saving or borrowing was soon spent and they were compelled to hurry