Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 July 1889 — Let Women Try if they Want to. [ARTICLE]

Let Women Try if they Want to.

“One of the most absurd arguments used against a girl who wishes to be* come a physician,” said a blue-eyed, fair haired medical student in petticoats the othey day, “is that the disagreeable sights and experiences of the dissecting room, if they do not altogether overpower her fortitude, will coarsen her feelings and destroy her delicacy. Bah, I say, to such mawkish sentimentality. No one thinks it hardens a girl to nurse a sick person, and yet I tell you that in ministering to the sick and the dying and the dead, in the capacity of a nurse, I have seen sights and performed more distasteful and exhausting labor than 1 would have been called on to do if 1 had been the physician; and all the time I knew nothing of that keen interest in the scientific part of the work which I now have, which so absorbs my attention and thoughts that what is revolting to others is by me almost unnoticed.’*—New York Tribune.