THE STUDENT DAYS
1885-1892
EDINBURGH--GLASGOW
‘Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,
But vaster.’
‘I remember well the day Elsie came in and, sitting down beside
father, divulged her plan of “going in for medicine.” I still see and
hear him, taking it all so perfectly calmly and naturally, and setting
to work at once to overcome the difficulties which were in the way, for
even then all was not plain sailing for the woman who desired to study
medicine.’ So writes Mrs. M‘Laren, looking back on the days when the
future doctor recognised her vocation and ministry. If it had been a
profession of ‘plain sailing,’ the adventurous spirit would probably
not have embarked in that particular vessel. The seas had only just
been charted, and not every shoal had been marked. In the midst of
them Elsie’s bark was to have its hairbreadth escapes. The University
Commission decided that women should not be excluded any longer from
receiving degrees owing to their sex. The writer recollects the
description given of the discussion by the late Sir Arthur Mitchell,
K.C.B., one of the most enlightened minds of the age in which he lived
and achieved so much. He, and one or more of his colleagues, presented
the Commissioners with the following problem: ‘Why not? On what theory
or doctrine was it just or beneficent to exclude women from University
degrees?’ There came no answer, for logic cannot be altogether
ignored by a University Commission, so, without opposition or blare
of trumpets, the Scottish Universities opened their degrees to all
students. It was of good omen that the Commission sat in high Dunedin,
under that rock bastion where Margaret, saint and queen, was the most
learned member of the Scottish nation in the age in which she reigned.
Dr. Jex Blake had founded the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women,
and it was there that Elsie received her first medical teaching.
Everything was still in its initial stages, and every step in the
higher education of women had to be fought and won, against the forces
of obscurantism and professional jealousy.
University Commissions might issue reports, but the working out of them
was left in the hands of men who were determined to exclude women from
the medical profession.
Clinical teaching could only be carried on in a few hospitals.
Anatomy was learnt under the most discouraging circumstances. Mixed
classes were, and still are, refused. Extra-mural teaching became
complicated, on the one hand, by the extra fees which were wrung from
women students, and by the careless and perfunctory teaching accorded
by the twice-paid profession. Professors gave the off-scourings of
their minds, the least valuable of their subjects, and their unpunctual
attendance to all that stood for female students. It will hardly
be believed that the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh refused to admit
women to clinical teaching in the wards, until they had raised seven
hundred pounds to furnish two wards in which, and in which alone, they
might work. To these two wards, with their selected cases, they are
still confined, with the exception of one or two other less important
subjects. Medicals rarely belong to the moneyed classes, and very
few women can command the money demanded of the medical course, and
that women should have raised at once the tax thus put upon them by
the Royal Infirmary is an illustration of how keenly and bravely they
fought through all the disabilities laid upon them.
Women had always staunch friends among the doctors. The names of
many of them are written in gold in the story of the opening of the
profession to women. It has been observed that St. Paul had the note of
all great minds, a passion to share his knowledge of a great salvation,
with both Jews and Gentiles. That test of greatness was not conspicuous
in the majority of the medical profession at the time when Elsie Inglis
came as a learner to the gates of medical science. That kingdom, like
most others, had to suffer violence ere she was to be known as the good
physician in her native city and in those of the allied nations.
There are no letters extant from Elsie concerning her time with Dr.
Jex Blake. After Mrs. Inglis’ death, Mr. Inglis decided to leave their
home at Bruntsfield, and the family moved to rooms in Melville Street.
Here Elsie was with her father, and carried on her studies from his
house. It was not an altogether happy start, and very soon she had
occasion to differ profoundly with Dr. Jex Blake in her management
of the school. Two of the students failed to observe the discipline
imposed by Dr. Jex Blake, and she expelled them from the school.
Any high-handed act of injustice always roused Elsie to keen and
concentrated resistance. A lawsuit was brought against Dr. Jex Blake,
and it was successful, proving in its course that the treatment of the
students had been without justification.
Looking back on this period of the difficult task of opening the
higher education to women, it is easy to see the defects of many of
those engaged in the struggle. The attitude towards women was so
intolerably unjust that many of the pioneers became embittered in soul,
and had in their bearing to friends or opponents an air which was often
provocative of misunderstanding. They did not always receive from the
younger generation for whom they had fought that forbearance that must
be always extended to ‘the old guard,’ whose scars and defects are but
the blemishes of a hardly-contested battle. Success often makes people
autocratic, and those who benefit from the success, and suffer under
the overbearing spirit engendered, forget their great gains in the
galling sensation of being ridden over rough-shod. It is an episode on
which it is now unnecessary to dwell, and Dr. Inglis would always have
been the first to render homage to the great pioneer work of Dr. Jex
Blake.
Through it all Elsie was living in the presence chamber of her father’s
chivalrous, high-minded outlook. Whatever action she took then, must
have had his approval, and it was from him that she received that keen
sense of equal justice for all.
These student years threw them more than ever together. On Sundays
they worshipped in the morning in Free St. George’s Church, and in the
evening in the Episcopal Cathedral. Mr. Inglis was a great walker, and
Elsie said, ‘I learnt to walk when I used to take those long walks with
father, after mother died.’ Then she would explain how you _should_
walk. ‘Your whole body should go into it, and not just your feet.’
Of these student days her niece, Evelyn Simson, says:--
‘When she was about eighteen she began to wear a bonnet on Sunday. She
was the last _girl_ in our connection to wear one. My Aunt Eva who is
two years younger never did, so I think the fashion must have changed
just then. I remember thinking how very grown up she must be.’
Another niece writes:--
‘At the time when it became the fashion for girls to wear their hair
short, when she went out one day, and came home with a closely-cropped
head, I bitterly resented the loss of Aunt Elsie’s beautiful shining
fair hair, which had been a real glory to her face. She herself was
most delighted with the new style, especially with the saving of
trouble in hairdressing.
‘She only allowed her hair to grow long again because she thought
it was better for a woman doctor to dress well and as becomingly as
possible. This opinion only grew as she became older, and had been
longer in the profession; in her student days she rather prided
herself on not caring about personal appearance, and she dressed very
badly.
‘Her sense of fairplay was very strong. Once in college there was an
opposition aroused to the Student Christian Union, and a report was
spread that the students belonging to it were neglecting their college
work. It happened to be the time for the class examinations, and the
lists were posted on the College notice-board. The next morning,
the initials C.U. were found printed opposite the names of all the
students who belonged to the Christian Union, and, as these happened
to head the list in most instances, the unfair report was effectually
silenced. No one knew who had initialed the list; it was some time
afterwards I discovered it had been Aunt Elsie.
‘She was a beautiful needlewoman. She embroidered and made entirely
herself two lovely little flannel garments for her first grand-nephew,
in the midst of her busy life, then filled to overflowing with the
work of her growing practice, and of her suffrage activities.
‘The babies as they arrived in the families met with her special love.
In her short summer holidays with any of us, the children were her
great delight.
‘She was a great believer in an open-air life. One summer she took
three of us a short walking tour from Callander, and we did enjoy it.
We tramped over the hills, and finally arrived at Crianlarich, only to
find the hotel crammed and no sleeping accommodation. She would take
no refusal, and persuaded the manager to let us sleep on mattresses in
the drawing-room, which added to the adventures of our trip.
‘On the way she entertained us with tales of her college life, and
imbued us with our first enthusiasm for the women’s cause.
‘When I myself began to study medicine, no one could have been more
enthusiastically encouraging, and even through the stormy and somewhat
depressing times of the early career of the Medical College for Women,
Edinburgh, her faith and vision never faltered, and she helped us all
to hold on courageously.’
In 1891 Elsie went to Glasgow to take the examination for the Triple
Qualification at the Medical School there. She could not then take
surgery in Edinburgh, and the facilities for clinical teaching were all
more favourable in Glasgow.
It was probably better for her to be away from all the difficulties
connected with the opening of the second School of Medicine for Women
in Edinburgh. The one founded by Dr. Jex Blake was the Edinburgh School
of Medicine for Women, and the one promoted by Elsie Inglis and other
women students was known as the Medical College for Women. ‘It was with
the fortunes of this school that she was more closely associated,’
writes Dr. Beatrice Russell.
In Glasgow she resided at the Y.W.C.A. Hostel. Her father did not
wish her to live alone in lodgings, and she accommodated herself very
willingly to the conditions under which she had to live. Miss Grant,
the superintendent, became her warm friend. Elsie’s absence from home
enabled her to give a vivid picture of her life in her daily letters to
her father.
‘GLASGOW, _Feb. 4, 1891_.
‘It was not nice seeing you go off and being left all alone. After I
have finished this letter I am going to set to work. It seems there
are twelve or fourteen girls boarding here, and there are regular
rules. Miss Grant told me if I did not like some of them to speak to
her, but I am not going to be such a goose as that. One rule is you
are to make your own bed, which she did not think I could do! But I
said I could make it beautifully. I would much rather do what all the
others do. Well, I arranged my room, and it is as neat as a new pin.
Then we walked up to the hospital, to the dispensary; we were there
till 4.30, as there were thirty-six patients, and thirty-one of them
new.
‘I am most comfortable here, and I am going to work like _anything_. I
told Miss Barclay so, and she said, “Oh goodness, we shall all have to
look out for our laurels!”’
‘_Feb. 7, ’91._
‘Mary Sinclair says it is no good going to the dispensaries on
Saturday, as there are no students there, and the doctors don’t take
the trouble to teach. I went to Dr. MacEwan’s wards this morning. I
was the first there, so he let me help him with an operation; then I
went over to Dr. Anderson’s.
‘_Feb. 9._
‘This morning I spent the whole time in Dr. MacEwan’s wards. He put me
through my facings. I could not think what he meant, he asked me so
many questions. It seems it is his way of greeting a new student. Some
of them cannot bear him, but I think he is really nice, though he can
be abominably sarcastic, and he is a first-rate surgeon and capital
teacher.
‘To-day, it was the medical jurists and the police officers he was
down on, and he told story after story of how they work by red tape,
according to the text-books. He said that, while he was casualty
surgeon, one police officer said to him that it was no good having him
there, for he never would try to make the medical evidence fit in with
the evidence they had collected. Once they brought in a woman stabbed
in her wrist, and said they had caught the man who had done it running
away, and he had a knife. Dr. MacEwan said the cut had been done by
glass and not by a knife, so they could not convict the man, and there
was an awful row over it. Some of them went down to the alley where
it had happened, and sure enough there was a pane of glass smashed
right through the centre. When the woman knew she was found out, she
confessed she had done it herself. The moral he impressed on us was to
examine your patient before you hear the story.
‘A. is beginning to get headaches and not sleep at night. I am
thankful to say that is not one of my tricks. Miss G. is getting
unhappy about her, and is going to send up beef-tea every evening.
She offered me some, but I like my glass of milk much better. I am
taking my tonic and my tramp regularly, so I ought to keep well. I am
quite disgusted when girls break down through working too hard. They
must remember they are not as strong as men, and then they do idiotic
things, such as taking no exercise, into the bargain.
‘Dr. MacEwan asked us to-day to get the first stray £20,000 we could
for him, as he wants to build a proper private hospital. So I said he
should have the second £20,000 I came across, as I wanted the first
to build and endow a woman’s College in Edinburgh. He said he thought
that would be great waste; there should not be separate colleges. “If
women are going to be doctors, equal with the men, they should go to
the same school.” I said I quite agreed with him, but when they won’t
admit you, what are you to do? “Leave them alone,” he said; “they will
admit you in time,” and he thought outside colleges would only delay
that.
‘This morning in Dr. MacEwan’s wards a very curious case came in. Some
of us tried to draw it, never thinking he would see us, and suddenly
he swooped round and insisted on seeing every one of the scribbles.
He has eyes, I believe, in the back of his head and ears everywhere.
He forgot, I thought, to have the ligature taken off a leg he was
operating on, and I said so in the lowest whisper to M. S. About five
minutes afterwards, he calmly looked straight over to us, and said,
“_Now_, we’ll take off the ligature!”
‘I went round this morning and saw a few of my patients. I found one
woman up who ought to have been in bed. I discovered she had been up
all night because her husband came in tipsy about eleven o’clock.
He was lying there asleep on the bed. I think he ought to have been
horse-whipped, and when I have the vote I shall vote that all men who
turn their wives and families out of doors at eleven o’clock at night,
especially when the wife is ill, shall be horse-whipped. And, if they
make the excuse that they were tipsy, I should give them double. They
would very soon learn to behave themselves.
‘As to the father of the cherubs you ask about, his family does not
seem to lie very heavily on his mind. He is not in work just now, and
apparently is very often out of work. One cannot take things seriously
in that house.
‘In the house over the Clyde I saw the funniest sight. It is an Irish
house, as dirty as a pig-sty, and there are about ten children. When
I got there, at least six of the children were in the room, and half
of them without a particle of clothing. They were sitting about on the
table and on the floor like little cherubs with black faces. I burst
out laughing when I saw them, and they all joined in most heartily,
including the mother, though not one of them saw the joke, for they
came and stood just as they were round me in a ring to see the baby
washed. Suddenly, the cherubs began to disappear and ragged children
to appear instead. I looked round to see who was dressing them, but
there was no one there. They just slipped on their little black
frocks, without a thing on underneath, and departed to the street as
soon as the baby was washed.
‘Three women with broken legs have come in. I don’t believe so many
women have ever broken their legs together in one day before! One of
them is a shirt finisher. She sews on the buttons and puts in the
gores at the rate of 4½d. a dozen shirts. We know the shop, and they
_sell_ the shirts at 4s. 6d. each. Of course, political economy is
quite true, but I hope that shopkeeper, if ever he comes back to this
earth, will be a woman and have to finish shirts at 4½d. a dozen, and
then he’ll see the other side of the question. I told the woman it was
her own fault for taking such small wages, at which she seemed amused.
It is funny the stimulating effect a big school has on a hospital. The
Royal here is nearly as big and quite as rich as the Edinburgh Royal,
but there is no pretence that they really are in their teaching and
arrangements the third hospital in the kingdom, as they are in size.
_The_ London Hospital is the biggest, and then comes Edinburgh, and
this is the third. Guy’s and Bart.’s, that one hears so much about,
are quite small in comparison, but they have big medical schools
attached. The doctors seem to lie on their oars if they don’t have to
teach.
‘_Feb. 1892._
‘I thought the Emperor of Germany’s speech the most impertinent piece
of self-glorification I ever met with. Steed’s egotism is perfect
humility beside it. He and his house are the chosen instruments of
“our supreme Lord,” and anybody who does not approve of what he does
had better clear out of Germany. As you say, Makomet and Luther and
all the great epoch-makers had a great belief in themselves and their
mission, but the German Emperor will have to give some further proof
of his divine commission (beyond a supreme belief in himself) before
I, for one, will give in my submission. I never read such a speech. I
think it was perfectly blasphemous.
‘The _Herald_ has an article about wild women. It evidently thinks
St. Andrews has opened the flood-gates, and now there is the deluge.
St. Andrews has done very well--degrees and mixed classes from next
October. Don’t you think our Court might send a memorial to the
University Court about medical degrees? It is splendid having Sir
William Muir on our side, and I believe the bulk of the Senators are
all right--they only want a little shove.’
In Glasgow the women students had to encounter the opposition to ‘mixed
classes,’ and the fight centred in the Infirmary. It would have been
more honest to have promulgated the decision of the Managers before
the women students had paid their fees for the full course of medical
tuition.
Elsie, in her letters, describes the toughly fought contest, and the
final victory won by the help of the just and enlightened leaders in
the medical world. ‘So here is another fight,’ writes the student, with
a sigh of only a half regret! It was too good a fight, and the backers
were too strong for the women students not to win their undoubted
rights. Through all the chaffing and laughter, one perceives the thread
of a resolute purpose, and Elsie’s great gift, the unconquerable facing
of ‘the Hill Difficulty.’ True, the baffled and puzzled enemy often
played into their hands, as when Dr. T., driven to extremity in a weak
moment, threatened to prevent their attendance by ‘physical force.’
The threat armed the students with yet another legal grievance. Elsie
describes on one occasion in her haste going into a ward where Dr.
Gemmel, one of the ‘mixed’ objectors, was demonstrating. She perceived
her mistake, and retreated, not before receiving a smile from her
enemy. The now Sir William MacEwan enjoyed the fight quite as much as
his women students; and if to-day he notes the achievements of the
Scottish Women’s Hospitals, he may count as his own some of their
success in the profession in which he has achieved so worthy a name.
The dispute went on until at length an exhausted foe laid down its
weapons, and the redoubtable Dr. T. conveyed the intimation that the
women students might go to any of the classes--and a benison on them!
The faction fight, like many another in the brave days of old,
roared and clattered down the paved causeways of Glasgow. Dr. T., in
his gate-house, must have wished his petticoat foes many times away
and above the pass. If he, or any of the obstructionists of that day
survive, we know that they belong to a sect that needs no repentance.
They may, however, note with self-complacency that their action trained
on a generation skilled in the contest of fighting for democratic
rights in the realm of knowledge. It is a birthright to enter into that
gateway, and the keys are given to all who possess the understanding
mind and reverent attitude towards all truth.
‘_Nov. 1891._
‘Those old wretches, the Infirmary Managers, have reared their heads
again, and now have decided that we are not to go to mixed classes,
and we have been tearing all over the wards seeing all sorts of people
about it. I went to Dr. K.’s this morning--all right. Crossing the
quadrangle, a porter rushed at me and said, “Dr. T. wants to see
all the lady students at the gate-house.” I remarked to Miss M.,
“I am certainly not going to trot after Dr. T. for casual messages
like that. He can put up a notice if he wants me.” We were going
upstairs to Dr. R. when another porter ran up and said, “Dr. T. is
in his office. He would be much obliged if you would speak to him.”
So we laughed, and said that was more polite anyhow, and went into
the office. So he hummed and hawed, looked everywhere except at
us, and then said the Infirmary Managers said we were not to go to
mixed classes. So I promptly said, “Then I shall come for my fees
to-morrow,” and walked out of the room. I was angry. I went straight
back to Dr. K., who said he was awfuly sorry and angry, and he would
see Dr. T., but he was afraid he could do nothing.
‘So here is another fight. But you see we cannot be beat here, for
the same reason that we cannot beat them in Edinburgh. Were the
managers, managers a hundred times over, they cannot turn Mr. MacEwan
off.
‘The _Glasgow Herald_ had an article the other day, saying there
was a radical change in the country, and that no one was taking any
notice of it, and no one knew where it was to land us. This was the
draft ordinance of the Commissioners which actually put the education
of women on the same footing as that of men, and, worse still,
seemed to countenance mixed classes. The _G. H._ seems to think this
is the beginning of the end, and will necessarily lead to woman’s
suffrage, and it will probably land them in the pulpit; because if
they are ordinary University students they may compete for any of the
bursaries, and many bursaries can only be held on condition that the
holder means to enter the Church! You never read such an article, and
it was not the least a joke but sober earnest.
‘I saw Dr. P. about my surgery. The chief reason I tried to get that
prize was to pay for those things and not worry you about them. I want
to pass awfully well, as it tells all one’s life through, and I _mean_
to be very successful!
‘Dr. B. has the most absurd way of agreeing with everything you say.
He asked me what I would do with a finger. I thought it was past
all mending and said, “Amputate it.” “Quite so, quite so,” he said
solemnly, “but we’ll dress it to-day with such and such a thing.”
There were two or three other cases in which I recommended desperate
measures, in which he agreed, but did not follow. Finally, he asked
Mr. B. what he would do with a swelling. Mr. B. hesitated. I said,
“Open it.” Whereupon he went off into fits of laughter, and proclaimed
to the whole room my prescriptions, and said I would make a first-rate
surgeon for I was afraid of nothing.
‘It is one thing to recommend treatment to another person and another
to do it yourself.
‘Queen Margaret is to be taken into the University, not affiliated,
but made an integral part of the University and the lecturers
appointed again by the Senators. That means that the Glasgow degrees
in everything are to be given from October, Arts, Medicine, Science,
and _Theology_. The “decrees of the primordial protoplasm,” that Sir
James Crichton-Browne knows all about, are being reversed right and
left, and not only by the Senatus Academicus of St. Andrews!’
The remaining letters are filled with all the hopes and fears of the
examined. Mr. MacEwan tells her she will pass ‘with one hand,’ and
Elsie has the usual moan over a defective memory, and the certainties
that she will be asked all the questions to which she has no answering
key. The evidences of hard and conscientious study abound, and, after
she had counted the days and rejoined her father, she found she had
passed through the heavy ordeal with great success, and, having thus
qualified, could pass on to yet unconquered realms of experience and
service.