A still more significant sign of the times (in the sense of linking past with present) is the ever-increasing number of women doctors and their success.  Men for the most part have ceased to sneer or even to be more than humanly jealous, often speaking in terms of the warmest admiration not only of their skill but of their conscientiousness and power of endurance.  When I went to live in Munich (1903) a woman surgeon was just beginning to practice.  This, to Germany, was an innovation with a vengeance, and the German male is the least tolerant of female encroachment within his historic preserves.  The men practitioners threw every possible obstacle in her way, and with no particular finesse.  But nothing could daunt her, and two or three years later she was riding round in her car—­a striking red one—­while the major number of her rivals were still dependent upon the ambling cab-horse, directed off and on by a fat driver who was normally asleep.  Jealousy, however, for the most part had merged into admiration; for your average male, of whatever race, is not only philosophical but bows to success; she was both recognized and called in for consultation.  Hang on!  Hang on! should be the motto of all women determined to make their mark in what is still a man’s world.  Life never has denied her prizes to courage and persistence backed by ability.

A curious instance of man’s inevitable recognition of the places of responsibility women more and more are taking is in the new reading of the Income Tax papers for 1917.  Heretofore only married men were exempted taxation on the first $4000 but from now on, apparently, women who are also “heads of families” are likewise favored.  As thousands of women are supporting their aged parents, their brothers while studying, their children and even their husbands, who for one reason or other are unequal to the family strain, this exemption should have been made coincidentally with the imposing of the tax.  But men are slow to see and slower still to act where women are concerned.

As we all know, women have invaded practically every art, trade, and industry, but—­aside from the arts, for occasionally Nature is so impartial in her bestowal of genius that art is accepted as sexless—­in no walk of life has woman been so uniformly successful as in medicine.  This is highly significant in view of the fact that they invented and practiced it in the dawn of history, while man was too rudimentary to do anything but fight and fill the larder.  It would seem that the biological differences between the male and the female which are so often the cause of woman’s failure in many spheres preempted throughout long centuries by man, is in her case counteracted not only by her ancestral inheritance, but by the high moral element without which no doctor or surgeon can long stand the exactions and strain of his terrible profession.  No woman goes blithely into surgery or medicine merely to have a career or to make a living, although ten thousand girls to her one will essay to write, or paint, or clerk, or cultivate her bit of voice, with barely a thought expended upon her fitness or the obligations involved.