THE 
JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 
FEBRUARY, 1881. 
I. THE EARLY PRACTICE OF MEDICINE 
BY WOMEN. 
By Professor H. Carrington Bolton, Ph.D., 
Of Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. 
N attempting to sketch the history of the entrance of 
women into the medical profession we find the earlier 
periods obscured by a meagreness 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 exhaustive 
history or catalogue of female practitioners of medicine ; we 
have simply collected a few scattered notices, and moulded 
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 history 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 difficult 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 
VOL III. (third series). f 
