WOMEN DOCTORS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 71, 24 March 1928, Page 8

WOMEN DOCTORS.

Women have carried stronghold after stronghold in their struggle to secure professional recognition. One of the bitterest fights has been over the question of the admission of women to tbk medical profession. This fight is still going on in England and every effort is being made to ban further women students from five London hospitals. Yet it stands to reason that for the treatment of their own sex, and very largely for the treatment of children, women doctors are in many cases better qualified than men. It may be that for surgery men are better equipped than women, but surgery does not constitute the whole of the medical art, and many disorders in women require a knowledge of psychology as well as of physiology, and this knowledge is far more likely to be possessed by one of their own sex than by a man. A woman doctor who is a mother herself is also much more likely to understand the many little ailments of children. Medicine is not an exact science like mathematics. It cannot be learnt entirely from text books and cases. Many of the most successful physicians of the past relied far more on their understanding of the patient himself in their treatment of manv functional disorders than on their reading. If women make better nurses than men, and most people will concede that th£y do, there is no reason why, in certain respects at any rate, they should not be better Qualified to attend their own sex. The trouble is in many cases that women themselves will not go to a woman doctor, and they seem to think that men doctors are likely to be much cleverer. That is partly due to the fact that women are very seldom fair to other women. It is this that causes the real difficulty in regard to domestic service. As long as this idea persists women doctors are not likely to be more than a small minority of the profession. There may be some good reasons put forward also for separate training of men and women students in some branches of the profession. There are likely to be occasions in the lecture room of a medical school when the lecturer would feel much freer to deal with his subject fully if he were addressing either all men or all women. The growing number Of those who opposed the idea of women doctors at the start, and have since been converted to a recognition of their skill and qualifications, is itself the best answer to those critics who would place every obstacle in the way of women students in schools of medicine. —W.M.