(continued)
In the personal qualities as well as professional methods of the Drs. Blackwell, the intellectual element decidedly predominates. Clear judgment, close analysis, and steady purpose mark their treatment of cases which come under their charge. They are strenuous advocates of thorough scientific attainments on the part of women who would engage in the profession; and enter continual protests against short courses of study, and low standards of acquirement in institutions for that purpose. On this account, they have refused to co-operate with any which have been organized, perhaps exacting too much from those which are confessedly imperfect at the beginning, and laboring under unavoidable disadvantages.
Their influence, however, has thus been stimulating to all who are engaged in such efforts, "provoking them to good works." A paragraph in one of their lectures expresses their spirit. "It is observation and comprehension, not sympathy, which will discover the kind of disease. It is knowledge, not sympathy, which can administer the right medicine; and though warm sympathetic natures, with knowledge, would make the best of all physicians, without sound scientific knowledge, they would be most unreliable and dangerous guides."
They are also firm in their conviction of the expediency of mingling the sexes in all scholastic training, and have very reluctantly relinquished for the present, the hope of opening the ordinary colleges to female applicants. In their mode of practice they adopt the main features of the "regular" system, while refusing to be absolutely bound by any such limitations in their examination and use of remedies. On the whole, they furnish each as complete an instance as has come under our observation among women, of cool, dignified, self-poised character, scorning shams and artifices, resolutely, with disinterested motive, set on the attainment of worthy ends. In religious connection, they are Episcopalians, though, in theology as well as medicine, they seem to be independent searchers for truth.
