Women In Medicine

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 104, 27 January 1938, Page 5

Women In Medicine

They Arc Still Pioneers

JJAVING traced the history of the battles which women had had to fight before being allowed to take up the profession of medicine, Dame Constance D'Arcy, in the course of tier presidential address to members of the Australian Federation of University Women at the opening of their eighth biennial conference at the IV omen’s College. Sydney University, last week, said :—

“We are still pioneers. My hope and my prayer is that we shall carry the torch of enlightenment as worthily as those great women we have bepn happy to follow.” The subject of the address was: “Women in Medicine.’ Women as exponents of the medical profession had appeared in the writings of Homer and Pliny, said Dame Constance. In the early fifteenth century there was a woman professor of medicine in the University of Bologna .and at that same university iu the eighteenth century the chair of anatomy was held by a woman.

Generally speaking, by the time the teaching of medicine had been organised within universities, man had become unused to the idea of woman studying medicine, and iu Britain, for instance, for centuries women were not admitted to medical classes, Dame Constance said. Reading a list of doctors who had been threatened or put to death for failing to cure various rulers, she observed humorously that “perhaps, after all, the women weren’t missing much.” “In 1849 Elizabeth Blackwell graduated in medicine in America, and that was the beginning of modern education in the profession of medicine for women.” Dame Constance is reported by the “Sydney Morning Herald” as saying: “Iu 1850 a women’s medical college was opened in Philadelphia. Edinburgh, the first British university to open its doors to prospective women medical students, who had battled hard for this right, later temporarily revoked the permission, so that actually, with regard to Britain, it was Irish medical colleges which first gave women doctors the privilege of registration,” she said. “In 1876 the Enabling Bill, giving the 19 medical associations of Great Britain permission to admit women to their ranks as medical students, if they so wished, was passed.”