In connection with this subject, it may be of interest to note that to-day the presence of medical women at the hospital is evidently found by the authorities to be an important means of gaining the sympathy of the general public, for appeals for funds may frequently be seen in London omnibuses stating, as the ground for an appeal, the fact that this is the only general hospital in London where women medical students are trained.

The medical school which began in a small Georgian house has now a fine block of buildings with all modern appliances, and the hospital is, at the time that this book goes to press, undergoing extensive alterations and additions, including enlargement of the students’ quarters.

The success of this pioneer work has been sufficiently amazing, but it is most important that every one should realise that the fight is still going on.  Not a day passes but somebody tries to get medical women to work either for less pay or under less honourable conditions than those required by their medical brethren, and one of the most trying parts of work in this profession at the present time is the constant alertness required both for detecting and defeating these attempts.  That they should be made is not surprising, when we remember the lower market value attached to women’s work in almost every other occupation.  Practical examples of the sort of attempts made, may be of service.

Example 1.—­A medical woman went as locum tenens for a practitioner in a country town during the South African War.  The practitioner himself was at the time absolutely incapacitated by a severe form of influenza, complicated by ocular neuralgia which made work absolutely impossible.  Owing to the War, he was quite unable to get a man to act as locum tenens.  A woman consented to help him in his extremity, at considerable inconvenience both to herself and to the people with whom she was working at the time.  She carried on the practice during the depth of the winter, having on some occasions to go out in the snow-sleigh and frequently to drive in an open trap at night in the deadly cold.  She carried on the work with such conspicuous success that her “chief” asked her to stay on as his assistant when he was convalescent.  For this he offered her L85 a year, living in, saying, without any shame, that he knew that this was not the price that any man would command, but that it was plenty for a woman.  He was bound to admit that he had lost no patient through her, that he charged no lower fees when she went to a case than when he did, that she did half the work while acting as his assistant, and that she had kept his practice together for him while he was ill.  Fortunately, owing to the fact that she had behind her means of subsistence without her salary, she was able to refuse his unsatisfactory offer, although at considerable violence to her feelings, for she had made many friends in the neighbourhood.