The influence of women in the profession of medicine : address given at the opening of the winter session of the London School of Medicine for Women / by Elizabeth Blackwell.

  • Elizabeth Blackwell
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The influence of women in the profession of medicine : address given at the opening of the winter session of the London School of Medicine for Women / by Elizabeth Blackwell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    But the physician, whose faculties of observation have been thoroughly drilled, has learned this lesson, viz., that no two cases of illness are exactly alike, and that it is of the utmost importance to our future success, as practitioners, to note these individual differences, their results, and why some die whilst others recover. It is far more important to our success, as practical physicians, to thoroughly master measles and whoop- ing-cough, scarlet fever and porrigo, than to study an isolated case of hydrophobia or leprosy. Moreover, I hold it to be a special duty of our profession to extirpate these common diseases—not to accept them hopelessly as necessary evils. And it is only by a profounder and more comprehensive clinical study of the ordinary diseases of domestic life, that we can hope to do this. There are two great branches of medicine, whose importance will, I hope, more and more engage the attention of women physicians. These are midwifery, which introduces us to the precious position of the family physician ; and sanitary or preventive medicine, which enables us to educate a healthy generation. These two departments of the healing art will never cease from amongst us. I consider it a radical defect in our present system of medical education, that these subjects are not brought more prominently forward, and both of them raised into first-class professorial chairs.
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