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Reade, Charles, 1814-1884

"A Woman-Hater"

He declined to believe, without a particle of evidence, that any
science could elevate the higher sex and degrade the lower. What evidence
we had ran against it. Nurses are not, as a class, unfeminine, yet all
that is most appalling, disgusting, horrible, and _unsexing_ in the art
of healing is monopolized by them., Women see worse things than doctors.
Women nurse all the patients of both sexes, often under horrible and
sickening conditions, and lay out all the corpses. No doctor objects to
this on sentimental grounds; and why? Because the nurses get only a
guinea a week, and not a guinea a flying visit: to women the loathsome
part of medicine; to man the lucrative! The noble nurses of the Crimea
went to attend _males only,_ yet were not charged with indelicacy. They
worked gratis. The would-be doctresses look _mainly to attending women,_
but then they want to be paid for it: there was the rub--it was a mere
money question, and all the attempts of the union to hide this and play
the sentimental shop-man were transparent hypocrisy and humbug.
"A doctor justly revered in Edinburgh answered him, but said nothing new
nor effective; and, to our great joy, the majority went with us.


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