The University of Edinburgh decided yesterday week by a large
majority to admit women to the course of medical study, and the triumph of Professor Masson and Professor Bennett, who advocated their admission, was so complete, both intellectually and as regards the actual voting, that we only wish they bad gone a step further and carried the admission of women to the ordinary courses of lectures, instead of permitting the very needless and unmeaning compromise which requires special courses to be delivered to the women separately. This has not been found in any degree neces- sary either at Zurich, where sixteen women have been educated for the profession of medicine, or in the London hospitals, where, we believe, Miss Garrett attended the ordinary lectures ;—and it involves three very considerable evils. First, it vastly enhances the expense, since the women who attend must amongst themselves make up a sufficient sum to render it worth the professor's while to deliver a separate course ; secondly, it leaves the women at the mercy of any professor who, from prejudice or any other cause, does not choose to add to the number of his courses of lectures,—no imaginary case ; lastly, it cuts off women from the most important of all the parts of their education, the clinical teaching by the bedsides of the hospital patients, which, if they do not attend with the ordinary students, they must miss altogether. Any one of these reasons against the separate system would be singly sufficient. Taken together, they are final. Nor do we know a single objection to the common system which is not quite as applicable to the other. As for the delicacy of the lecturer, we should have thought it more likely to be tried in a class of women only than in a mixed class. But the truly scientific treatment of every subject is, and cannot but be, delicate.
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