proper, the number of women students enrolled in the medical colleges in 1904 was 4.3 per cent., and in 1914, 3.8 per cent., of all the students enrolled; and the number of female graduates in medicine was 4 per cent. of the entire number of graduates in 1904, and 3.4 per cent. in 1914. The number of female medical students in attendance upon the medical colleges was 1,129 in 1904 and only 631 in 1914. Of these only about 20 per cent. were in attendance at the two women's medical colleges, while the larger number attended coëducational institutions.

An expert in medical education, commenting upon these figures, says: "Now that women are freely admitted to the medical profession, it is clear that they show a decreasing inclination to enter it. More schools are open to them; fewer attend and fewer graduate. True enough, medical schools generally have shrunk; but as the opportunities for women have increased, not decreased, within a year during which entrance requirements have, so far as they are concerned, not materially altered, their enrollment should have been augmented, if there were any strong demand for women physicians or any strong ungratified desire on the part of women to enter the profession. One or the other of these conditions is lacking, perhaps both."

The president of one of the state medical associations, upon being interviewed, summed up the whole matter somewhat as follows:

"There are fields of medicine for which women are peculiarly adapted; the foreign mission field, the school inspection service, especially where the work is with girls, the examination of women factory employees, the personal and social hygiene service of public health

In preceding chapters, reference has been made to the work which women are doing in medical laboratories. The natural conservatism of women may explain why larger numbers have not entered this field. The woman who must plan for herself a wage-earning career cannot often command the funds to make the outlay which preparation for medicine demands; nor is she often in a position to regard with equanimity the long years of unremunerative work. Furthermore, on account of the comparative small number of female candidates who apply to the hospital for service, it has been difficult to persuade the hospital authorities to mke those changes which are necessary to provide for a mixed staff of internes and house physicians.

In conclusion, it may be said that there never was a time when it was so easy for a woman to prepare herself for this field, and when there were fewer obstacles placed in her path.

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE FUTURE OF MEDICINE.

In these days of rapid changes, a young man does not care to make large investments of time and money in preparing for a life work without considering what changes are likely to occur during his active period of life in the particular field under consideration. Of course all prophecy is but speculation and must be accepted as such; and every man is privileged to indulge his own fancies in this direction.

Through the greater part of the nineteenth century, medical men insisted that the public should regard them as possessing a field of knowledge exclusively their own and that they were endowed with superior wisdom, much of which they tried to conceal in the technical language of the profession; and through the adoption of their own code of ethics they protected the members of their craft from the judgment of the lay public. However, they reserved to themselves the right to determine who should be admitted to their own ranks and under what conditions they should be received. They, however, failed to establish a standard of education by which the general average of practitioners was kept apace with the advances made by their best men. As a result the state stepped in and made laws for the regulation of medicine through the special examining boards which were constituted to determine the qualifications of those who desired to enter the profession.