Speculum - University of Melbourne

36 SPECULUM
emancipation. That day came in 1896,
when Freda Gamble and Janet Greig, who
had attended the Melbourne Hospital
clinical school, finished their courses in
fourth and sixth places, and applied for resident
office at the hospital. The "Argus",
which opposed the appointment of the
ladies, alleged that patients in the hospital,
whether male or female, colonial born or
English, were seething, and threatening to
leave the wards to escape the touch of a
woman. In other newspapers the ladies
stated their case ably. Dr. Gamble said
that the hospital should never have accepted
their clinical fees if it did not intend to
admit them to office once their examination
results qualified them for appointment. The
only case against them, she said, rested on
prejudice and professional jealousy: "We
have beaten the men and they do not like
it." The committee of management could
not turn away these two applicants, graduates
in its own hospital, as easily as it had
rejected Dr. Stone. Some members of the
committee had approved the appointment of
lady doctors even in 1892, when Dr. Whyte
seemed likely to apply: "If ladies . . . suffered
a number of conveniences," said a
member who supported them, "then these
were for the consideration of the ladies
themselves." This attitude became more
common in the hospital by 1896, especially
as the two ladies had proved their competence.
Others on the committee of management
may have been intimidated by Dr.
Gamble's charge that she and Dr. Greig
could be refused only if it were true that
the male rulers of the hospital resented their
success. With varying degress of enthusiasm,
the men of the hospital agreed to admit
its first female medical officers.
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Teaching at the hospital remained
neither wholly incompetent nor wholly satisfactory.
If they were attached to Williams
or Fitzgerald, students could not help being
instructed and inspired. In 1891, however,
the city coroner, Dr. Richard Youl,
who seldom criticised irresponsibility, was
still able to remark that students at the hospital
had to pick up knowledge as best they
could. The cause was well known. Despite
an improvement in its relations with
the hospital, the university still had to
choose its clinical lecturers from a body of
doctors whose election lay in the hands of
charitable subscribers. This obstacle was
finally overcome in 1910, when the right to
elect honorary medical officers passed from
subscribers to the committee of management.
The university council and the
faculty of medicine were both represented
after 1910 on an advisory board which was
established to recommend candidates for
election. The hospital and the university
could at last work closely together in the
training of doctors, for students could now
be given clinical instruction by honorary
medical officers appointed for their skill as
teachers. An official channel joined theory
and practice in the medical course.
Yet, despite the caprice of the old electoral
system, teaching at the hospital improved
remarkably between 1900 and
1910, owing to the ability and devotion of
particular teachers. Williams was no longer
very active, but there were now more men
at the hospital who shared his mastery of
two sets of techniques—who were able
practitioners and successful teachers.
Among the surgeons, G. A. Syme, G. C.
Rennie, F. D. Bird and R. A. Stirling had
replaced the men who fought out the
Listerian controversy; each of them taught
his students as capably as he tended his
patients. But it was a physician, Dr. R. R.
Stawell, who made the greatest impact on
the hospital clinical school. Like his contemporary,
Henry Maudsley, Stawell owed
much of his skill as a teaching physician to
post-graduate training at University College,
London, which had the only medical
school in England comparable with those in
Scottish and European universities. Sir
Alan Newton spoke thus of Stawell's English
training during his Stawell Oration in
1947: "He returned from England in the
'nineties of the last century, deeply