The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [240]
To have passed two medical exams, the Intermediate and the Final MB.
For the final MB she would need to have attended lectures, seen twenty certified labours (of women), practised surgery for two years, and medicine for two years, including a study of infectious diseases and lunacy.
She would need to specialise in medicine, surgery or obstetrics and be proficient in vaccination. To take the BS and become a surgeon, she must also have done a course in operative surgery and operated on a dead subject.
The London School of Medicine for Women was granted a Royal Charter in 1902 and was now a college of the University of London. So Dorothy’s way was open. It was a very hard way.
Dorothy sat in Leslie and Etta’s dark, polished drawing-room and worked it out on her fingers. At the earliest, she could qualify as a surgeon in 1910, which, for someone aged eighteen in 1902, who would be twenty-six in 1910, seemed to slice a whole segment, her youth, out of her life. She sat very still listening to the hooves and wheels in Gower Street, and thought about Dorothy Wellwood. Did she want to know all that? People were married at twenty-one or twenty-two. They had passions and dramas which she could not afford to have. She looked down at her moving fingers in her lap, and thought, after all, how interesting flesh and bone is, how interesting the growth of a child from a seed is—is knowing better than doing?
Leslie Skinner said “You are pensive.”
“It’s such a long time. So much of—of my life, of anyone’s life. Particularly a woman.”
“There are easier ways of helping people.”
Dorothy continued to look at the skin, the knuckles, the slightly bitten nails, the lifeline in her palm. She said “It isn’t really helping people. It’s knowing.” “A rare thing in a young woman.”
“Why should women not know things?”
“It is generally believed that they prefer to feel, to care for others …”
“Are you telling me not to try to be a doctor?”
“I have been a teacher long enough to know when that is no use. Even if I have not taught many young women. And I have to say, those women I have taught are self-selected for willpower and—intent. The decision is yours. But I will help—I should like to help—if you feel you must go ahead.”
Nothing is final, Dorothy thought pragmatically, and made a final decision.
Time passing, for most young women, was to do with finding a husband, or being sought as a wife. In 1902, Griselda, like Dorothy, was eighteen, Florence Cain was nineteen, Phyllis was sixteen, Hedda was thirteen, Imogen Fludd was twenty-three, and Pomona was twenty. Of all these young women, only one, Florence, was “in love,” and she was in love with her brother’s lover, Gerald, which was an unsatisfactory state of affairs for all three of them. It was possible, Philip Warren thought, that Pomona was in love with him. She followed him around, and once or twice began sentences with “When we are married…” which he pretended not to hear. He did not like her touching him, though she was beautiful, in her childish way. She might be what in the Potteries was known as “simple” but he thought also she might be acting a part. He didn’t want to have to think about her. He wished Elsie would think about her, but Elsie thought about Ann, and house-cleaning, and her programme of reading. She simply didn’t like Pomona, although she was perfectly polite. But politeness and dislike combined can be deadly. Pomona pretended not to notice, but made no advances to Elsie.
Phyllis thought less about being in love than about preparing to be married. Like many children of shifting, insecure Bohemian households, she had a romantic vision of an ordinary, comfortable household, that kept strict hours and was warmly predictable. She dreamed more of quilts and counterpanes and table-linen than of male bodies, or even chaste kisses. She didn’t talk to anyone much—except Violet, who encouraged