Reports regarding practicability of giving instruction to female students within the wards of the Royal Infirmary.

Date:
[1872?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Reports regarding practicability of giving instruction to female students within the wards of the Royal Infirmary. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    tinental Schools. But the Committee have their doubts, whether the experience of continental countries, whose habits and customs are diflerent from our own, may be a safe guide for those who direct medical education in this country. Moreover, there is no sufficiently positive evidence from any continental school of the expediency of joint instruction in Medicine for Males and Females. At one con- 'tinental school, indeed, it has been publicly announced, such “ex- cesses” arose, that the monarch was induced to issue an edict, restricting medical practice by Females to midwifery, vaccination, and some other branches coming properly under the province of mere dressers, and providing for part at least of their instruction separately from Male Students. No reference Iras been made to the experience of the United States, where,-however, the ultimate result of the contention, which has existed much longer than anywhere else as to the education of Females for Medical practice, has been the establishment of Colleges for the education of Females apart alto- gether from Males. There can be no doubt, too, that even many friends of Female medical education in this country disapprove alto- gether of Males and Females being taught promiscuously ; and that the general sense of the educated classes of the community is quite opposed to promiscuous teaching. The three Medical Officers above mentioned, who anticipate no serious difficulty in teaching Males and Females promiscuously, forget that their teaching must qualify students for examination and licence by the Medical Boards of the country ; and that the Females who ask the Managers to provide'such teaching for them have an eye specially to the Examining Board of the University of Edinburgh, —whose regulations in favour of women, as laid down by the superior authority, the “ University Court,” positively forbid promiscuous teaching,—in so much that the fact of Males and Females being taught together in any class, would disqualify attendance on that class equally for Females and Males also. The sixteen Medical Officers who have separately declared them- selves opposed to the clinical instruction of Females in the Royal Infirmary,—viz., Drs Laycoch, Maclagan, and Sanders, Pi’ofessors of Clinical Medicine; Drs Haldane, Matthews Duncan, Stewart, Muir- head, and Fraser, Ordinary Physicians and Assistant-Physicians ; Messrs Spence and Lister, Professors, the latter of Clinical Surgery ; Drs Bell, John Duncan, Chiene, &ndi Robertson, and Messrs Annandale and Walker, filling various Surgical offices in the Hospital,—have,