tical wisdom of their rules and the development of
their work. From the beginning the Benedictines recognized that a
monastic career should be open to women as well as to men, and
Benedict's sister, Scholastica, established convents for them, as her
brother did the Benedictine monasteries, thus providing a vocation for
women who did not feel called upon to marry. That the members of the
order should recognize the advisability of affording women the
opportunity to study medicine, and of handing over to them the
department of women's diseases in a medical school in which they had a
considerable amount of authority, seems, then, indeed, only what might
have been expected of them.

We are prone in the modern time to think that our generation is the
first to offer to women any facilities or opportunities for education in
medicine. We are prone, however, just in the same way, to consider that
a number of things that we are doing are now being done for the first
time. As a matter of fact, it is extremely difficult to find any
important movement or occupation that is not merely a repetition of a
previous interest of mankind. The whole question of feminine education
we are apt to think of as modern, forgetting that Plato insisted in his
"Republic," as absolutely as any modern feminist, that women should have
the same opportunities for education as men, and that at Rome, at the
end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire, the women occupied
very much the same position in social life as our own at the present
time. Their husbands supplied the funds, and they patronized the
artists, gave receptions to the poets, lionized the musicians, and, in
general, "went after culture" in a way that is a startling reminder of
what we are familiar with in our own time. Just as soon as Christianity
began to influence education, women were given abundant opportunities
for higher education in all forms. In Ireland, the first nation
completely converted to Christianity,--where, therefore, the national
policy in education could be shaped by the Church without
hindrance,--St. Brigid's school at Kildare was scarcely less famous than
St. Patrick's at Armagh. It had several thousand students, and, to a
certain extent at least, co-education existed. In Charlemagne's time,
with the revival of education on the Continent, the women of the
Imperial Court attended the Palace School, as well as the men. In the
thirteenth century we find women professors