"All her trouble ended--where her competitors' began--at the public
examination. She passed brilliantly, and is an English apothecary. In
civilized France she is a learned physician.
"She had not been an apothecary a week, before the Apothecaries' Society
received six hundred letters from the medical small-fry in town and
country; they threatened to send no more boys to the Apothecaries', but
to the College of Surgeons, if ever another woman received an
apothecary's license. Now, you know, all men tremble in England at the
threats of a trades-union; so the apothecaries instantly cudgeled their
brains to find a way to disobey the law, and obey the union. The medical
press gave them a hint, and they passed a by-law, forbidding their
students to receive any part of their education _privately,_ and made it
known, at the same time, that their female students would not be allowed
to study the leading subjects _publicly._ And so they baffled the
Legislature, and outlawed half the nation, by a juggle which the press
and the public would have risen against, if a single grown-up man had
been its victim, instead of four million adult women.
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