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was presented as a fundamental right of women by those involved in the women’s
movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jex-Blake felt that
medicine should be no exception. She even made the argument that there was
historical evidence in favour of the medical education of women and that, ‘those
learned in Greek literature will remember that Homer speaks of medical women
both in the Iliad and in the Odyssey’ and that Euripides represents the nurse as
reminding Queen Phaedra that if her disease ‘is such as may not be told to men’,
there were skilled women at hand to whom she could turn. 60 Ethel Lamport also
drew attention to Queen Phaedra and other medical women in Greek literature as
well as mentioning figures from the Middle Ages in various European countries who
were successful female doctors. 61 Despite the historical precedence of women
healers, opponents of women in medicine claimed that women could have a role in
caring for the sick but without becoming doctors. Mater argued:
Let women then be nurses, tenders of the sick, free from the very faintest taint
of prudery or affectation in anything and everything that comes in their way
when helping and sustaining the sufferings of those around them; but let there
be a line beyond which they sink from treading. 62
It may appear to be a paradox that nursing was deemed suitable for women, while
medicine was not, but the answer is that nursing was not seen as a proper career
for a middle class woman at the time. In Ireland, aside from that carried out by
nuns, in the late-nineteenth century nursing was undertaken mostly by poor women
without training who carried out their work in return for maintenance within their
institution. 63 Lee Holcombe has argued that in the nineteenth-century, young middle
class ladies in Britain would have been revolted by the idea of becoming nurses. 64
Nursing work at the time was considered ‘a particularly repugnant form of domestic
service for which little or no education and special training were necessary’ and as
60
Jex-Blake, ‘The medical education of women’, p.5.
61
Lamport, ‘Medicine as a profession for women’, pp.278-86.
62
‘A lady on lady doctors’, p.680.
63
Maria Luddy, Women and philanthropy in nineteenth-century Ireland, (Cambridge
University Press, 1995), p.51.
64
Lee Holcombe, Victorian ladies at work: middle-class working women in England and
Wales, 1850-1914, (Connecticut: Archon Books,1973), p.68.
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