A good deal of feeling is rising over the announcement
of certain London hospitals that they will not in future receive new female students for co-education with the male students. We quite agree that nowadays cold reason points to no discrimination between the sexes. But we feel strongly that other things besides reason entered into the problem. It is not only that we approve any claim of a Hospital Committee to be master in its own house, but anyone who knows anything of medical education in the Universities or Hospital Schools knows that, reasonably or not, an undesirable self-consciousness must be thrust upon young men and maidens who to- gether attend some of the oral teaching and the practical anatomy. Though we realize the value of sport in forming the esprit de corps of the Hospital Schools, the plea that they want men and not women carries no weight with us. There is more force in what the teaching staffs feel, namely, that while their teaching of men gives full value in the future, half their teaching of women is rendered much less valuable because so many give up the practice of medicine upon marriage. They urge that the women's schools, into which no men are admitted, are ample for the teaching of the women who will give their lives to medicine.
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