A meeting was held on Monday at St. George's Hall,
Langham Place, in support of the London School of Medicine for Women, the chief object being to raise a sum of £5,000, which will be necessary to enable this Medical School for Women to associate itself with the Royal Free Hospital, Gray's Inn Road, so as to obtain for the female students a good course of clinical instruc- tion. This latter hospital has agreed to open its teaching to women students for an experimental period of five years, the London School of Medicine for Women guaranteeing in return £715 per annum to the hospital, partly by way of payment for the clinical teaching, and partly by way of contribution to the general funds of the hospital. Besides this £715, the Medical School for Women needs a good deal in excess of the students' fees to defray the cost of its lectures, so that about £1,000 a year for five years,—or £5,000 in all—will be wanted to provide women students with an efficient course of both theoretical and practical instruction. The sum, we trust, will be easily raised. People are judging very glibly on abstract grounds of what women can and cannot do in medical practice, but what we want is a little experience as to what they actually do or fail to do. Perhaps after all it may be found that the most useful aid which they bring to the treatment of women's and children's diseases will consist rather in more hardness and firmness of treatment than men have given, and not in more delicacy of sympathy. Their exprience may help them more, and their tenderness of sympathy less, in treating women, than has been supposed.
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