EARLY PRACTICE OF MEDICINE BY WOMEN. 191 



THE EARLY PRACTICE OF MEDICINE BY WOMEK* 



Br Professor H. CAKRINGTON BOLTON, Ph. D., 



OF TRINITY COLLEGE, HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT. 



IN attempting to sketch the history of the entrance of women into 

 the medical profession, we find the earlier periods obscured by a 

 meageruess of material and a lack of sequence which our superficial 

 researches have failed to supplement. 



Isolated cases of gifted women attaining notable surgical skill and 

 successfully pursuing the divine art of healing are recorded at various 

 epochs in the history of the intellectual development of woman, but 

 they occur at long intervals of time and in widely scattered chronicles. 

 In the following pages we have not undertaken to present an exhaus- 

 tive history or catalogue of female practitioners of medicine ; we have 

 simply collected a few scattered notices, and molded them into an 

 outline to be hereafter filled up by a more competent hand. 



These notices refer to the earlier history only, and by earlier his- 

 tory we mean the period prior to the establishment of medical schools 

 for women, and to the present movement for their higher education. 

 From the earliest times women have successfully grappled with a most 

 diflicult branch of medical science, gynecology, but long-existing and 

 deep-seated prejudices prevented an extension of their practice, and 

 save in exceptional cases they were forbidden both the acquirement of 

 accurate and systematic knowledge and the exercise of their chosen 

 vocation. So long as the practice of medicine formed a part of the 

 priestly functions, as in ancient Egypt, the crafty guardians of super- 

 stition sedulously concealed their superior knowledge from an ignorant 

 and credulous people, and especially from women. Yet the story of 

 the birth of Moses shows that female gynecologists were not unknown 

 to the Egyptians. 



At a later period the Greeks thought to add dignity to the practice 

 of medicine by forbidding it to slaves and (forsooth !) to women. 

 During the middle ages, when every branch of science was more or 

 less dishonored by degrading superstitions, we find women, as well as 

 men, yielding to their influence and exercising the double calling of 

 sorceress and healer of the sick ; nor has the intelligence of the com- 

 mon people even in the nineteenth century reached such a height as 

 to render the business of medical clairvoyant nugatory and profitless. 



The invention of medicine was almost universally attributed by 

 the ancients to the gods, and it is a curious fact that in both Egyptian 

 and Grecian mythology we find female deities occupying important 



* An address delivered at the commencement exercises of the Woman's Medical 

 College of the New York Infirmary, May '27, 1880. 



