question was discussed with every member of the medical staff, and the discussions ended in their unanimous assent. The agreement between the school and the hospital, involving certain not inconsiderable financial obligations on the part of the school, was worked out to its present shape with equal patience and candour on the part of the hospital authorities, and with identical results; it was signed on the 12th of June last. This timely conclusion, so fortunate for the interests of women desiring to study and practise medicine in this country, and so vital to the interests of the school, is mainly due to the conviction of the justice of the claim and to the admirable patience and tact of Mr. James Hopgood, the chairman of the Weekly Board.

This record of progress would not be complete without referring to the resolution of the Senate of the London University to admit. women to medical examinations and degrees.

The adoption of that resolution was shortly followed by a proposal in Convocation to request the Senate to suspend action upon it, until they had considered the question of admitting women to other than medical examinations and degrees. The proposal was adopted in Convocation by a small majority. But at its meeting on Wednesday, the 20th of June, the Senate decided, by a vote of 16 against 11, to carry out their original resolution without delay.

What is the women's case against which medical prejudice has fought so stoutly if not so long?

The common law of this country knows no distinction of sex in these respects. The field of labour is, at common law, open alike to women and to men. Natural and social conditions affecting the character and relations of the sexes have given men a priority in remunerative employ. The man is by nature the bread-winner, the woman the manager of the home. But there are many exceptions. The woman may have an especial call to play the part ordinarily undertaken by the man. She may be single and have to earn her living and, it may be, that of others dependent upon her. She may be married, and her husband may be incapable of work or unwilling. She may be a widow with children to support. If you take the census in hand, you will find how considerable is the number of women engaged in trade or in agricultural pursuits.

The thing settles itself by other than Parliamentary law. No one is the worse; and most certainly no one would dream of the need of aiding nature to keep up the difference of sex by the enactment of a law forbidding a woman to engage in the ordinary business occupations of life.

What is the case for their exclusion here either by law or by the practice of the examining bodies through whom alone they can obtain admission on to the Register and become duly qualified' under the act of 1858? It cannot be put higher than the words of the Medical

Council itself-viz., that 'the study and practice of medicine and surgery, instead of affording a field of exertion well fitted for women, do, on the contrary, present special difficulties which cannot be safely disregarded.' Let that be granted for the sake of argument. What then? Is not that also and at least equally true of many of the business occupations which women are free or, it may be, sometimes compelled to follow, and yet which no one seeks to interdict to them by law? Or can this be held by reasonable people to be a sufficient reason for their forcible exclusion? Clearly not in the opinion of the Medical Council in their report of the 8th of June, 1875, from which date the position of the opponents of medical women became untenable, and the legalised admission of women to the ranks of the profession only a question of time. This is enough; but this is not all. Independent of the general question of freedom and of right, there are special reasons why men should not be permitted to exclude women from the practice of medicine; and as these reasons had no inconsiderable effect, I think, upon the mind of Parliament, I will state them here. The claim of women to this admission was in fact a double claim. First there was the claim of women to study and to practise medicine; and secondly there was the claim of women to be medically attended, if they chose, by persons of their own sex. The latter claim, especially, has been, I believe, deeply and sensitively taken to heart by many men in the profession and outside; to me it has always seemed, I must confess, a claim almost impossible for a man of justice or delicacy long to refuse. I have heard more than once this honourable sentiment uttered by the lips of a medical man: 'If there be one woman who desires to study and to practise medicine, and one other woman who desires to be medically attended by her, it is enough for me; law ought not to forbid or practically to prevent.' No one can at this moment answer the question-neither the advocates of this 'woman's right' nor those who have opposed it-how great that desire and demand may prove to be. It will now be a question of demand and of consequent supply; but at least the door is open and the road clear, and, under the conditions which I have described, the next few years will furnish a practical and conclusive answer to this question.

I have written of this case as really at an end, as won, and I believe it to be so; but medical antagonism is not yet allayed, although I am not without hope that the time is rapidly approaching when medical men will smile at it themselves. I must note some instances of it curiously enough connected with that branch of surgery, the practice of midwifery, wherein women might be supposed to have an exceptionally strong claim to the services of persons of their own sex.

In December 1875 a motion was brought forward by a member of the Council of the College of Surgeons to admit women to the license in midwifery of the college, which is a registerable license.

In January 1876 three ladies made application to be examined. They handed in certificates of attendance upon a four years' course of complete medical and surgical instruction, which were referred to a committee for inspection and report. The opinion of counsel was taken; it was to the effect that the college was bound to admit the applicants to examination. The committee reported that the certificates were satisfactory; the council by resolution admitted the candidates, whereupon Dr. Barnes, one of the examiners in midwifery, immediately resigned. Next came an official letter from the college to the three ladies promising them admission to the next examination, which in its turn was followed by the resignation of Drs. Farre and Priestley, i.e. of the whole examining board. Since then there have been no examiners and no examination; but there was immediately a meeting of the Obstetrical Society, at which a vote of thanks to the members of the examining board was carried by 'universal acclamation.' The Obstetrical Society would appear to be still of the same mind and spirit in 1877; for they have, it would appear, submitted to Her Majesty's Government proposals for imposing special conditions on women who desire to act in England as professed midwives, which the Medical Council has not been able to endorse, because, amongst other reasons, the society propose, in respect of midwives, that the mere act of unqualified practice should be a misdemeanour, which would be an exception to the spirit of the present law respecting unqualified medical practice for gain, and because they would reserve liberty to male persons to do what the law would forbid female persons to do under the same conditions!

The cause is won, I doubt not, but we shall none the less hear of it again as a matter of dispute, and that probably ere long, and in consequence of the acts of examining bodies themselves. I have referred to the constitution of a conjoint examining board, by the cooperation of all or several of the examining bodies, under the powers of the act of 1858. It appears that a scheme has now been matured for the constitution of a joint examining board for all the English (as distinguished from the Scotch and Irish) examining bodies, and that the scheme received the sanction of the Medical Council at its meeting on the 24th of May last. The scheme provides for a conjoint examination entitling the successful candidate to the license of the Royal College of Physicians of London, the diploma of member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and the license of the Society of Apothecaries. The English examining bodies are to undertake to abstain, so far as allowed by law, from the exercise of their independent privilege of giving admission to the Medical Register; and there is a special provision that if women be admitted to examination by the conjoint board, they shall not, on passing, be entitled to become licentiates or members of any of the cooperating authorities without the special permission of such authority.

It would appear, therefore, that under this scheme each English examining body proposes to deprive itself, so far as allowed by law, of the power of admitting women, through its license, to the Medical Register, whilst the conjoint board binds itself to make the results of its own examinations to a certain extent inoperative in the case of women, without the special permission of each of such authorities. I do not desire to regard these provisions as evidence of an unfavourable disposition towards medical women. I think that they may be otherwise explained. The undertaking of the separate bodies to abstain from the exercise of their independent privilege is evidently conceived in the interest of the maintenance of an uniform as well as a high standard of examination in all the branches of a complete medical education. The reserve so far as allowed by law' ap parently has reference to sections fortunately introduced in committee of the House of Commons into the Apothecaries Act Amendment Act of 1874, and the Medical Acts Amendment (College of Surgeons) Act of 1875, reserving any existing rights of women as far as Apothecaries' Hall and the College of Surgeons are respectively concerned; and these bodies are, I believe, at this moment bound to admit women to examination upon conditions which the arrangement between the London School of Medicine for Women and the Royal Free Hospital will now secure. On the other hand, the provision that the examination of the conjoint board shall not entitle women to the ordinary diplomas without the consent of the cooperating body is a mere deduction from the permissive character of Mr. Russell Gurney's bill. Undoubtedly it would have been to be preferred that each of these examining bodies should have reserved its right under the Recorder's act to place the names of women on the Register; but that such may be the intention, though not yet expressed, of the conjoint scheme, I am disposed to infer from the facts that the University of London is a party to it, and that the Senate of that university has determined to admit women to its medical degrees.

The name of Sir James Paget, chairman of the conference of representatives of examining authorities upon the subject, which subscribes the scheme, will be taken as conclusive proof of the absence of any intention, by a side wind, to deprive women of the advantages to which they have just attained; and I entertain little doubt that the scheme will eventuate in their examination by the proposed conjoint board itself with the sanction of the Royal College of Physicians of London, as well as of the College of Surgeons and Apothecaries' Hall, whose sanction, in my view, may be assumed.

I desire now to go back upon this sketch of events for the sake of a few words upon the various parts which persons and institutions have played.

And first for the University of Edinburgh and its parte Women have been in this movement immensely indebted to that university

in more ways than one. They are indebted to those members of the university (a majority of the non-medical professors) who have stood by them from the first, who helped them to and through the conflict whose function, historically speaking, will be held to have been that of preparing for the wider parliamentary issue which was to come, and who have constantly testified in their favour to the end. They are also indebted, hardly less so albeit in a different sense, to those other members of the university who made of themselves the local and personal concentration and embodiment of professional prejudice, and who did the movement the exceptional service, quoad the public mind, of enabling the case to be presented to Parliament, not only as a question of public policy and right, but as a case of private and personal injury by the evasion on the part of a public body of an honourable engagement. And these obligations on the part of medical women have been continuous; for the University of Edinburgh, not content with obtaining a decision from the Court of Session that they had exceeded their powers in matriculating and undertaking to admit our five ladies to medical education and to their degree of M.D., and with saddling the five complainants with all costs, carried their opposition further into the High Court of Parliament itself, which they petitioned not to enable them, by a permissive enactment, to redeem their word.

Both Senate and University Court, under the same signature of A. Grant, Principal,' petitioned the House of Commons against Mr. Cowper-Temple's enabling bill; the Senate prayed that no legislation might take place until the subject had been inquired into by a Royal Commission or otherwise; the University Court was of opinion that so wide and important a question as the admission of women to academical degrees should not be referred for decision to small local boards like the university courts of Scotland. In 1875, as I have shown, Mr. Cowper-Temple's bill was reintroduced, and the University Court again petitioned that the university might not be enabled and relieved, but that inquiry by a Royal Commission or otherwise should precede any attempt at legislation. In 1876 a Royal Commission on Scotch Universities was appointed, but the case of these lady students was refused a hearing. But the subject has been inquired into otherwise,' as prayed-inquired into, as far as medical degrees are concerned, by Parliament itself, which has thought fit to 'enable' the University of Edinburgh in spite of itself. What use that 'local body' may now make of the powers which it has ended by obtaining remains as yet, as far as my knowledge goes, neither decided nor ascertained.

The part of the General Medical Council has been altogether different. That body could not but represent to a considerable extent the dislike of the profession to the invasion by women of their own preserves. But the Medical Council contains in large proportion the