e higher mathematics. As she
could not afford teachers for these branches, with faithful study she
fitted herself. Mrs. Willard's was the first girls' school in which
the higher mathematics formed part of the course, but such was the
prejudice against a liberal education for woman, that the first public
examination of a girl in geometry (1829) created as bitter a storm of
ridicule as has since assailed women who have entered the law, the
pulpit, or the medical profession. The derision attendant upon the
experiment of advancing woman's education, led Governor Clinton to say
in his message to the Legislature: "I trust you will not be deterred
by commonplace ridicule from extending your munificence to this
meritorious institution." At a school convention in Syracuse, 1845,
Mrs. Willard suggested the employment of woman as superintendents of
public schools, a measure since adopted in many States. She also
projected the system of normal schools for the higher education of
teachers. A scientific explorer as well as student, she wrote a work
on the "Motive Power in the Circulation of the Blood," in
contradiction to Harvey's theory, which at once attracted the
attention of medical men. This work was one of the then accumulating
evidences of woman's adaptation to medical study.

In Ancient Egypt the medical profession was in the hands of women, to
which we may attribute that country's almost entire exemption from
infantile diseases, a fact which recent discoveries fully
authenticate. The enormous death-rate of young children in modern
civilized countries may be traced to woman's general enforced
ignorance of the laws of life, and to the fact that the profession of
medicine has been too exclusively in the hands of men. Though through
the dim past we find women still making discoveries, and in the feudal
ages possessing knowledge of both medicine and surgery, it is but
recently that they have been welcomed as practitioners into the
medical profession. Looking back scarcely a hundred years, we find
science much indebted to woman for some of its most brilliant
discoveries. In 1736, the first medical botany was given to the world
by Elizabeth Blackwell, a woman physician, whom the persecutions of
her male compeers had cast into jail for debt. As Bunyan prepared his
"Pilgrim's Progress" between prison walls, so did Elizabeth Blackwell,
no-wise disheartened, prepare her valuable aid to medical science
under the same conditions. Lady M