"I will tell you how they got in. The act of Parliament makes two
exceptions: first, it lets in, _without examination_-- and that is very
unwise--any foreign doctor who shall be practicing in England at the date
of the act, although, with equal incapacity, it omits to provide that any
future foreign doctor shall be able to _demand examination_ (in with the
old foreign fogies, blindfold, right or wrong; out with the rising
foreign luminaries of an ever-advancing science, right or wrong); and,
secondly, it lets in, without examination, to experiment on the vile body
of the public, any person, qualified or unqualified, who may have been
made a doctor by a very venerable and equally irrelevant functionary.
Guess, now, who it is that a British Parliament sets above the law, as a
doctor-maker for that public it professes to love and protect!"
"The Regius Professor of Medicine?"
"No."
"Tyndall?"
"No."
"Huxley?"
"No."
"Then I give it up."
"The Archbishop of Canterbury."
"Oh, come! a joke is a joke."
"This is no joke. Bright monument of British funkyism and imbecility,
there stands the clause setting that reverend and irrelevant doctor-maker
above the law, which sets his grace's female relations below the law,
and, in practice, outlaws the whole female population, starving those who
desire to practice medicine learnedly, and oppressing those who, out of
modesty, not yet quite smothered by custom and monopoly, desire to
consult a learned female physician, instead of being driven, like sheep,
by iron tyranny--in a country that babbles Liberty--to a male physician
or a female quack.
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