80 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



professors, and the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford 

 from which women have always been and are still excluded, 

 both as students and professors. 



Contrast, also, the honors shown to women as students 

 and professors of medicine in Salerno, in the thirteenth 

 century, with the riots excited among the chivalrous male 

 students of the University of Edinburgh, when, less than a 

 half century ago, seven young women applied for the privi- 

 lege of attending the courses of lectures on medicine and 

 surgery in that institution. And contrast the sympathy 

 and encouragement of Italy with the almost brutal opposi- 

 tion which women in our own country encountered when, 

 but a few decades ago, they applied for admittance to the 

 medical schools of New York and Philadelphia. The dif- 

 ference between the Italian and the Anglo-Saxon attitude 

 toward women in the all-important matters in question re- 

 quires no comment. 1 V 



One reason for the great difference between the women 

 of Italy and those of other parts of Europe in the matter 

 of higher education during the period we have been consid- 

 ering was the old Eoman spirit of independence of the 

 former and their always insisting on what they regarded 

 as their natural and indefeasible rights. Following the 

 example of the matrons of ancient Rome, they insisted on 

 being treated as the equals of men, and, as a consequence, 

 they demanded in the intellectual order all the advantages 

 that were accorded to men. They would never admit their 

 mental inferiority to man, and woe betide the luckless 

 wight who even insinuated such inferiority. The shafts 

 of satire and ridicule were at once directed against him by 

 a score of women who were able to use the pen as well as, 

 if not better than, himself. Sometimes, however, such an 

 one was taken seriously, and then the result was a book by 



i Medical Women, p. 63, et seq., by Sophia Jex-Blake, Edin- 

 burgh, 1886, and Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession 

 to Women, Chap. Ill, by Elizabeth Blackwell, London, 1895. 



