Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/479

Rh the character of women, and is not the result of education. Mungo Park tells us that, when sick and thirsting, and maltreated by the natives of Africa, the women of the savage tribe visited him and supplied his wants. I will give one instance, which is a type of character, and shows how sympathy and natural feeling may interfere with professional advancement.

The wife of a practising physician, being of a scientific tendency of mind, acquired a theoretical knowledge of her husband's profession. The husband died, and left the widow poor and with several children, some of them so young as to demand much of her time and thought. She continued the study of medicine with the design of making it the means of support for herself and children. To this end she attended lectures at a woman's medical college. Before she obtained her diploma, an old, superannuated Presbyterian clergyman excited her sympathy by his forlornness. She gave him a home in a very womanly way—she made him her husband. Here was a double burden—an old man, and little children. This physician, although laden with her great, womanly heart, was prosperous in a small way. She secured the position of house-physician in the hospital connected with the college, with a small salary, and with sufficient time to attend to private patients. Her pecuniary prospects were better than those of young physicians of the other sex. The husband soon died. At this point in the history occurred an incident which seems to me to be phenomenal, and yet is typical. A second old clergyman, equally forlorn and wretched as the first, accepted the charity of this woman by becoming her husband. Her practice slowly increased; her children were well clad and well educated. A daughter married, and moved, with her husband, to a distant city. A son studied medicine, and the last husband died. The next act in this singular history reveals an intensity of maternal feeling entirely opposed to a business success in a difficult profession. Gifted with a fine mind, as thoroughly educated in her profession as the majority of medical men, with good health, and having reached that time of life when she was functionally at rest, and with every encouragement to remain at her post, yet she made a better mother than doctor. She resigned her position in the hospital; abandoned her private practice; and moved to the city in which her daughter resided, in order to be near her child and grandchildren—and there, in a strange community, recommenced the difficult occupation of a female physician. This history is truly a physiological study, and reveals the intensity of feeling which may exist in all women upon subjects which lie near the heart.

The common standard of professional success is a pecuniary one. Public opinion will apply this standard to women as rigidly as it does to men. It is a common experience to meet men of the highest mental training in their professions, yet who fail completely in a business sense, owing to idiosyncrasies of mind. In this way the sympathies