LITMIR.BIZ

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at the gate-house.” I remarked to Miss M., “I am certainly not going to trot after Dr. T. for casual messages like that. He can put up a notice if he wants me.” We were going upstairs to Dr. R. when another porter ran up and said, “Dr. T. is in his office. He would be much obliged if you would speak to him.” So we laughed, and said that was more polite anyhow, and went into the office. So he hummed and hawed, looked everywhere except at us, and then said the Infirmary Managers said we were not to go to mixed classes. So I promptly said, “Then I shall come for my fees to-morrow,” and walked out of the room. I was angry. I went straight back to Dr. K., who said he was awfuly sorry and angry, and he would see Dr. T., but he was afraid he could do nothing.

      ‘So here is another fight. But you see we cannot be beat here, for the same reason that we cannot beat them in Edinburgh. Were the managers, managers a hundred times over, they cannot turn Mr. MacEwan off.

      ‘The Glasgow Herald had an article the other day, saying there was a radical change in the country, and that no one was taking any notice of it, and no one knew where it was to land us. This was the draft ordinance of the Commissioners which actually put the education of women on the same footing as that of men, and, worse still, seemed to countenance mixed classes. The G. H. seems to think this is the beginning of the end, and will necessarily lead to woman’s suffrage, and it will probably land them in the pulpit; because if they are ordinary University students they may compete for any of the bursaries, and many bursaries can only be held on condition that the holder means to enter the Church! You never read such an article, and it was not the least a joke but sober earnest.

      ‘I saw Dr. P. about my surgery. The chief reason I tried to get that prize was to pay for those things and not worry you about them. I want to pass awfully well, as it tells all one’s life through, and I mean to be very successful!

      ‘Dr. B. has the most absurd way of agreeing with everything you say. He asked me what I would do with a finger. I thought it was past all mending and said, “Amputate it.” “Quite so, quite so,” he said solemnly, “but we’ll dress it to-day with such and such a thing.” There were two or three other cases in which I recommended desperate measures, in which he agreed, but did not follow. Finally, he asked Mr. B. what he would do with a swelling. Mr. B. hesitated. I said, “Open it.” Whereupon he went off into fits of laughter, and proclaimed to the whole room my prescriptions, and said I would make a first-rate surgeon for I was afraid of nothing.

      ‘It is one thing to recommend treatment to another person and another to do it yourself.

      ‘Queen Margaret is to be taken into the University, not affiliated, but made an integral part of the University and the lecturers appointed again by the Senators. That means that the Glasgow degrees in everything are to be given from October, Arts, Medicine, Science, and Theology. The “decrees of the primordial protoplasm,” that Sir James Crichton-Browne knows all about, are being reversed right and left, and not only by the Senatus Academicus of St. Andrews!’

      The remaining letters are filled with all the hopes and fears of the examined. Mr. MacEwan tells her she will pass ‘with one hand,’ and Elsie has the usual moan over a defective memory, and the certainties that she will be asked all the questions to which she has no answering key. The evidences of hard and conscientious study abound, and, after she had counted the days and rejoined her father, she found she had passed through the heavy ordeal with great success, and, having thus qualified, could pass on to yet unconquered realms of experience and service.

      CHAPTER V

      LONDON

      THE NEW HOSPITAL FOR WOMEN

      DUBLIN

      THE ROTUNDA

      1892–1894

‘We take up the task eternal and the burden and the lesson, Pioneers, O Pioneers.’ – Walt Whitman

      After completing her clinical work in Glasgow, and passing the examination for the Triple Qualification in 1892, it was decided that Elsie should go to London and work as house-surgeon in the new Hospital for Women in the Euston Road. In 1916 that hospital kept its jubilee year, and when Elsie went to work there it had been established for nearly thirty years. Its story contains the record of the leading names among women doctors. In the commemorative prayer of Bishop Paget, an especial thanksgiving was made ‘for the good example of those now at rest, Elizabeth Blackwell, and Sophia Jex Blake, of good work done by women doctors throughout the whole world, and now especially of the high trust and great responsibility committed to women doctors in this hour of need.’ The hearts of many present went over the washing seas, to the lands wasted by fire and sword, and to the leader of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, who had gained her earliest surgical experience in the wards of the first hospital founded by the first woman doctor, and standing for the new principle that women can practise the healing art.

      Elsie Inglis took up her work with keen energy and a happy power of combining work with varied interests. In the active months of her residence she resolutely ‘tramped’ London, attended most of the outstanding churches, and was a great sermon taster of ministers ranging from Boyd Carpenter to Father Maturin. Innumerable relatives and friends tempted her to lawn tennis and the theatres. She had a keen eye to all the humours of the staff, and formed her own opinions on patients and doctors with her usual independence of judgment.

      Elsie’s letters to her father were detailed and written daily. Only a very small selection can be quoted, but every one of them is instinct with a buoyant outlook, and they are full of the joy of service.

      It is interesting to read in these letters her descriptions of the work of Dr. Garrett Anderson, and then to read Dr. Louisa Garrett Anderson’s speech on her mother at the jubilee of the hospital. ‘I shall never forget her at Victoria Station on the day when the Women’s Hospital Corps was leaving England for France, early in September 1914. She was quite an old woman, her life’s work done, but the light of battle was in her eyes, and she said, “Had I been twenty years younger I would have been taking you myself.” Just twenty-one years before the war broke down the last of the barriers against women’s work as doctors, Elsie Inglis entered the New Hospital for Women, to learn with that staff of women doctors who had achieved so much under conditions so full of difficulties and discouragements.

‘New Hospital for Women,‘Euston Rd., 1892–3.

      ‘My own dearest Papa, – Here we begin another long series of letters. The people in the carriage were very quiet, so I slept all right. Of course they shut up all the windows, so I opened all the ventilators, and I also opened the window two or three times. I had breakfast at once, and then a bath, and then came in for a big operation by Mrs. Boyd. Her husband came up to help her. Mrs. Scharlieb and Mrs. de la Cherois were up too – both of them visiting doctors. I have been all round the wards and got a sort of idea of the cases in my head, but I shall have to get them all up properly. The visiting physicians seem to call all over the day, from nine o’clock in the morning till three in the afternoon. Some of the students from the School of Medicine are dressers and clerks. I believe I have to drill them, but of course they are only very senior students, because their real hospital is the Royal Free. There are four wards, two of them round, with two fireplaces back to back in the middle. The other two wards are oblong, and they are all prettily painted, and bright. Then there are two small wards for serious cases. I have not arranged my room yet, as I have not had a minute. I am going out to post this and get a stethescope. Mrs. de la Cherois has been here; she is a nice old lady, and awfully particular. I would much rather work with people like that than people who are anyhow. Mrs. Scharlieb is about forty, very dark and solemn. The nurses seem nice, but they don’t have any special uniform, which I think is a pity; so they are pinks and greys and blues, and twenty different patterns of caps. I think I shall like being here very much. I only hope I shall get on with all my mistresses! And, I hope I shall always remember what to do.

      ‘The last big operation case died. It was very sad, and very provoking, for she really was doing well, but she had not vitality enough to stand the shock. That was the case whose doctor told her and her husband that she was suffering from hysteria. And that man, you know, can be a fellow of the colleges, and member of any society he likes to apply to, while Mrs. G. Anderson and Mrs. Scharlieb cannot! Is it not

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