Dr. Elsie Inglis. Lady Frances Balfour

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ