In a Dissecting-room.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 933, 17 January 1890, Page 4

In a Dissecting-room.

EXPERIENCES OF A GIRL DOCTOR. ‘Yes, I can point you to the very hour when the thought came to me that I would be a doctor.’ There is hardly need of the quotation marks, for the dot of the girl, barely five feet high, with sober blue eyes and yellow curly hair told her story to the end without interruption. Listen (says a writer in The Chicago Times) as if she were telling it to you. * If I shut my eyes I can see it now—tbe laboratory of the Boston Natural History Society. There is the skeleton in the corner, the skulls of anthropoid apes grinning fiom glass cases, the broad tables under the windows where microscopes were standing and queer things swam in glass bottles, the desks in even rows where two or three dozen Hub schoolma'ams were sitting, bending with eager interest over the anatomy of. the fresh-water sponge —a nice ladylike subject for investigation —Professor Alpheus Hyatt on the platform, the most genial and kind-hearted of all American scientists, an odour of ether and carbolic acid in the air, aud myself in a long print apron stationed beside an enormous iron pan in the background. • Professor Hyatt had honoured me with a confidence. There was a secret in my keeping. ‘ Tell them it came from an ox if they ask you what you are dissecting.’ ‘“lf referred to the subject of confidence. “It ” was a “ specimen ” to be cleaned and made

READY FOR PRESERVATION IN ALCOHOL. it was large and so heavy that 1 could not turn it with my forceps, and I shrank with an odd flutter at my heart from touching it with my fingers* It was something I had never before seen or expected to see. Jt curled about in the pan a snake, and appeared to be some laige animal’s stomach and intestines. “It,” I was privately informed, came from a hospital. “It made my face like white paper, till the teachers turned and looked at me, and one of them pushed up a window and another started to support me to the air. “It” fascinated while it repelled me, and when I had conclusively proved myself a coward then I was already querying in my mind when the next term opened at the medical school. ‘No, I cannot tell you the whole story. The exact recital of a girl’3 experiences in the days, often weary days, sometimes trying and terrible days, when she is working for a diploma in medicine might make interesting reading, but it might frighten out of studying the profession many a woman who would make a good physician. It has left me convinced that no woman ought to enter a medical school before she is 25 years old, and not then unless she can draw on a large bank reserve of health and courage. I was nineteen when I enrolled myself, and I shall get into practice no sooner than if I had waited until a more matronly-looking face inspired patients with confldence.

‘ Those FIRST DAYS TN THE DISSECTING-ROOM. There were about ten or twelve other students. Two or three were as young as I, a mother and a daughter were .studying togeth'er, and one was old enough almost to be a grandmother. They wore lubber aprous that came close about the throat, reached almost to the floor, and buttoned behind. They had their hair put back very snugly, and they looked so wide-eyed and absorbed. The “ subject ” was a girl as young as the youngest of us there. She had heavy chestnut hair that dragged on the floor, and long eyelashes and fingers, oh, so white and waxen. I felt like asking her pardon for standing over her and looking at her, and when the demonstrator lifted one hand and began to pinch the different muscles with her forceps and pull them to show which one would make which finger wiggle, I could have screamed. I suppose I did scream for they all looked at me. then back at the body again, as if they were too eager to notice anything which was still living. Then the demonstrator gave me a pair of pincers and a scalpel, and told me to lay bare the extensor of the right thumb. Next me was a student who was bending over the abdomen. She was tall and dark-haired, and wore a black dress with a critason ribbon on her shoulder, ‘ “ There’s no use,” she said, “ in trying to work this out from a woman’s body. Women corset themselves till they haven’t such a thing to bless themselves with as an abdominal muscle.” * She was as impatient as if foiled in a search for diamonds. I grasped the thumb which had been assigned me gingerly with the pincers, and began to cut away the skin with the scalpel. In a day or two there was nothing left that had not been slashed and minced but the face, and I—l started with astonishment when I caught a glimpse of my own face in a glass hanging on the side of the wall ; it was staring at a long, stringy muscle ripped up and held by the forceps while the knife scraped the fibres clean, with ©yes as set and glowing as the rest of them. *1 never had much trouble in the dissect-ing-room afterwards. I got over the awful feeling that once the subject had been alive. Indeed, that is where the younger women often find the work easier than older ones. There was a woman of 50 who joined the class after me who persevered for three months before she could remain above ten minutes in the dissecting-room without fainting. ‘ To look on quietly at surgical operations was something that came still harder. The students at the women’s college are allowed on certain days to attend the New York hospital. On one of my first visits there was an operation on a painter who had. fallen from a scaffolding and broken his leg. Complications had set in, and the limb was to be removed above the knee. The patient bad been etherised, and lay as if dead, but when the knife touched the first artery THE BLOOD SPURTED UP IN STREAMS.

There were eight students looking on, four girls and four young men from the College of Physicians and Surgeons.. The room was very warm, and the smell of anaesthetics in the air was sickening. I saw the girl next me reel when a spurt of something crimson dashed against her face, but she clinched her hands till the nails entered the palm, recovered herself, and bent forward, not to lose a motion of the surgeon’s hand. Two of the youths in front of us looked shaky, and when another incision sent up a second fountain and a red drop splashed on the hand of one of them he never gasped a word, but fell in a dead faint on the floor. I’ve seen as many men as women in proportion lose heart when the knife gets bloody. ‘ In the last year of our study a student is sent outside sometimes to attend charity cases under supervision. Of course it is desired to give us as much practice in obstetrics —the department in which a large part of our work will always come—as possible. * Do I believe in women doctors ? Of course

I do. I believe it is mawkish sentimentality which objects to their fitting themselves for such labours. Many of the girl-students have been nurses, and in ministering to the sick, the dying, and the dead in that capacity have seen sights as heart-rending and as ghastly, and have peiformed far more exhausting physical labour than will be required of them as physicians. In the dissecting-room and by the surgeon’s table the science makes one forget the horror, and at the bedside one is a thousand fold repaid by the gratitude of one’s own sex at having a woman near in their extremity.’