Page:Women Wanted.djvu/271

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IN THE PROFESSIONS
251

the living women! With 8000 American women doctors to-day marches the soul of Elizabeth Blackwell. Leading 3000 Russian women doctors there is the silent figure of Marie Souslova, the first medical woman of that land, who in 1865 was denied her professional appellation and limited to the title "scientific midwife." With the 1100 British women there keeps step the spirit of Sophia Jex Blake pelted with mud and denied a degree at Edinborough University, who in 1874 founded the London School of Medicine for Women.

And there is one grand old woman who lived to see the cause she led for a lifetime won at last. The turn of the tide to victory, as surely as for the Allies at Verdun or the Marne, came for the professional woman's cause when the British War Office unfurled the English flag over Endel Street Hospital, London. It floated out on the dawn of a new day, the coming of which flashed with fullest significance on the vision of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.[1] The beautiful eyes of her youth were not yet so dimmed with her eighty years but that all of their old star fire glowed again when the news of this great war hospital, entirely staffed by women, was brought to her at her home in Aldebourough, Suffolk, where she sat in her white cap, her active hands that had wrought a remarkable career now folded quietly in her lap.

Dr. Anderson was the second woman physician of

  1. Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson died at Aldebourough, Suffolk, England, Dec. 17, 1917.