“You find a way.”
“Hell, Christian, you’ve heard the views held by Dr.
McKinnette and the great Dr. Banefield Jones and Dr. Stille.
That women haven’t the disposition or the stomach for medicine, and especially surgery.”
“They harp the belief of the general population.”
“Fools all!”
“Unfortunately, yes, but Jane, that was years ago, my dear.”
“Not for me, sir. For any woman in medicine, that is today.”
They sat silent, each thinking of the vile words of McKinnette, Jones, and Dr. Alfred Stille, that day at the sympo-sium; words leveled at the few women in the room, including Emily Blackwell, sister to Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell.
“Rush Medical College refused Emily Blackwell permission to allow her to finish her medical studies. Rush—your medical school—in 1852, and why? The Illinois State Medical Society censured the school for admitting a woman!” “That was 1852. This is 1893, Jane.”
“And the problem of training women in medicine continues unabated. My Gabrielle faces it every day at Northwestern, the same narrow-minded pig-swallop that constitutes the average doctor’s attitude toward us, that we are as mentally unfit as we are physically unfit for—” “You needn’t recount—”
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“—for even a business profession.”
“I know. I know all this.”
“But you left the room when Dr. Stille finished his remarks during his presidential address to the American Medical Association.”
“You’ve read the minutes, and I suppose you’re right to condemn me, but I was only eighteen. Have you carried Stille’s words with you since?”
“I have, yes. Shall I recite?”
“Please don’t.”
She did. “ ‘All experience teaches that woman is characterized by a striking uncertainty of rational judgment, capri-ciousness of sentiment, fickleness of purpose, and indecision of action—which makes her totally unfit for professional pursuits.’ ” Fenger knew the truth of it. What women in medicine faced. Prejudice, backward beliefs, amazingly parochial attitudes. Not only were women, in the eyes of most medical professionals, mentally unsuited for professional study, but in the case of medicine, there were additional “reasons” to bar them. These had to do with modesty and morality that caused awkwardness during physiological discussions and in dissections—both of which felt like venues no lady ought attend. Quite unladylike is how Dr. Byford had phrased it. “But Jane, more recently . . . was it sixty-nine?
Bill Byford at Chicago Medical solicited and accepted young women to—”
“Yes and again the male students petitioned at close of term that women be removed!”
“Making idiotic charges against Byford and other faculty as I recall.”
“Claimed they’d prudishly omitted a number of observations and clinical techniques due to the presence of women.”
Jane paused. “Damn, some of the leading physicians of Chicago are still the biggest blowhards and the loudest opponents of women in medical education.”
“I remember when Nathan Smith Davis advocated sepa
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rate female colleges for medicine, and for halting women from gaining a foothold in the American Medical Association,” said Fenger. He laughed.
“What?”
“Sarah Hackett Stevenson took him and the status quo on.”
“Now there was a hell of a woman.”
“Your greatest advocate, Jane.”
“Aside from you, but true enough, she kept me on my game.”
“The first seat in the AMA ever occupied by a woman.
Courageous lady.”
“A student of Darwin and Huxley at the famous South Kensington Science School in London.”
With gnashing teeth, he shook his head. “Has she returned to Europe?”
“Not quite. She’s removed to Springfield. Point is for all the eyes women’ve opened, the problems persist.”
“I’m not blind, but this is a societal problem, dear, and it persists in all areas of commerce and business—not just medicine.” Fenger lifted his drink for a sip.
She drank a second Amaretto.
He shook his head, gathering his thoughts. “I recall once we got a cadaver in, and the man, kind enough to leave his body for scientific study, had one stipulation else his body goes to the earth.”
“Let me guess. Rush Medical must preserve the body from any and all indignities. Meaning no female medical student could work over him.”
“Even in death, a man remains modest.” He held up a finger. “Look, Jane, Sarah Stevenson graduated from the Woman’s Hospital Medical College, an outgrowth of a hospital established in 1865 by—”
“Mary H. Thompson, a hospital for indigent women and children—”
“—which only last year became a department of—”
“I know, Gabby is studying at the Thompson School at Northwestern University now, but as I said, she’s having CITY FOR RANSOM
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similar problems as any woman in medicine has for the past sixty years! Mary Thompson herself finished for her degree during that one-year experiment for the Chicago Medical College, the same year three other women were stranded in their studies. Now it’s 1893 and soon it’ll be 1900, Christian, and you want me to believe things have improved?” “By degrees, yes.”
“Degrees?”
“Women are now admitted into competition for internships at Cook County Hospital and Asylum.”
“And how many of those internships’ve gone to women at your precious medical facility?”
“The numbers improve each year, I assure you. Hopefully, by the turn of the century coeducation in medicine will be an accepted reality.”
“Do you know what happened to my reality, sir, when I was no longer at ease at Rush, made to feel that way by the male students?”
“You disappeared.”
“Not entirely, no. I first wound up at the Hahnemann Medical College.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“That place occupying several rooms over a drugstore?
On South Clark?”
“The one that prospered last during the Civil War, yes.”
He bit back a show of anger.
“Not long there, I moved on to the Bennett College of Eclectic Medicine and Surgery, where the systematic teaching of pathology and bacteriology has only now begun. I got some smattering of laboratory work in chemistry, a bland education in surgery, histology and nothing of physiology.” “Little wonder you ran to Europe, but you might’ve come to me first. Why didn’t you?”
“Pride perhaps . . . anger . . . the anger of youth.” She failed to say she feared he’d fallen in love with her.
“Ahhh . . . fire of stubborn youth,” he replied.
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“I’ve no regrets of going abroad. I returned with a medical degree and my Gabrielle.”
“A good thing, I’m sure.”
“Look, Doctor, you ask that I deal with reality now. Deal with it was your most oft repeated admonition to all your med students.” She indicated her disguise. “I dress in drag to fit the reality that makes it a man’s world.”
“It’s ethically wrong, Jane.”
“And you? How do you deal with reality? You torture yourself for countless years?”
A brief stunned look as if struck by a sudden pain and Fenger calmly replied, “Me . . . me and reality . . . how do I deal with it?”
“Your hands’re in it each day.”
“While I find beauty in the human body, I also find suffering. Yes, I suppose I do recreate this thing we call reality in my work every day . . .”
“Yes, in order to do what you do.”
“. . . in order to remain standing and doing surgery for eighteen, twenty, thirty hours at a stretch at times.”