Page:Address on the Medical Education of Women (1864) - Blackwell.djvu/6

 This is a matter on which we have had a good deal of experience. We were engaged in the effort made by the Woman's Central Relief Association at the beginning of the war, to provide nurses for the first military hospitals. Several of our students also have been engaged in these hospitals. Moreover, we are well informed of the results of Miss Nightingale's efforts, both before and since her labors in the Crimea. The result of our experience has been to strengthen our long-entertained conviction, that there must be women physicians to raise up the class of nurses the public require. It is the doctor who must train the nurse; and we have found that men, with the best intentions, find it very difficult to adapt themselves to their instruction; and moreover, that though feeling strongly the necessity, they do not take the same interest in instructing nurses that they do in teaching students. We feel, therefore, that it would be a much easier and more practicable thing to organize good instruction for nurses, after we have formed a medical school, and have drawn together intelligent women, students and assistants, than to form the school for nurses with the hope that the medical school would follow. In fact, we need the higher class to educate the lower, and without them it seems to us impossible to accomplish the work satisfactorily.

We wish it, therefore, to be distinctly understood that a radical improvement in the character and training of nurses, in private service and in connection with public charities, will be the direct result of a superior class of educated women being engaged in medical service—that is of Women Physicians.

Let us then take up the main question, and that we may realize that the practice of medicine by women is a growing influence, and cannot be overlooked, allow me to state a few facts drawn from personal experience.

In 1845 when I resolved to become a physician, six eminent physicians, in different parts of the country were written to, for advice. They all united in dissuading me, stating, "That it