Page:Women Wanted.djvu/267

 for internships. They exhibited an embarrassing tendency for passing at the head of the list. Any of them were likely to do it. The only way out of the dilemma, then was for the hospital authorities to declare, as some did, that the institution had "no accommodations for women doctors" which simply meant that all of the accommodations had been assigned to men. It is on this ground that Philadelphia's Blockley Hospital, the first large city almshouse in the country to open to women the competitive examination for internship, again and again refused the appointment even to a woman who had passed at the head of the list. It was 1914 before Bellevue in New York City found a place for the woman intern: five women were admitted among the eighty-three men of the staff.

This unequal distribution of professional privileges was the indication of a lack of professional fellowship far reaching in consequences. Among the exhibits in the laboratories to-day, there is a glass bottle containing a kidney perserved in alcohol. In all the annals of the medical profession, I believe, there has seldom been another kidney just like it. For some reason or other, too technical for a layman to understand, it is a very wonderful kidney. Now it happens that a young woman physician discovered the patient with that kidney and diagnosed it. A woman surgeon operated on that kidney and removed it successfully. Then a man physician came along and borrowed it and read a paper on it at a medical convention. He is now chronicled throughout the