that I want, if I can only make up my mind to meet the first resistance of custom. One of them is far more convenient to me than the others. My husband is a doctor. He devotes all his leisure time to me. With such a husband, it is an easy matter for me to try to be a doctor.
"It would be a very striking thing if there should spring up at last a class of women doctors. They would be very useful for all women. It is much easier for a woman to talk with a woman than with a man. How much suffering, death, and misfortune would be removed. I must try it."[1]
X.
Viéra Pavlovna finished her conversation with her husband by putting on her bonnet, and going with him to the hospital to put her nerves to the test, to find if she could bear the sight of blood, or be able to study anatomy. With Kirsánof's position in the hospital, of course there could be no obstacle to her experiment.
I, without the least sense of shame, have seriously compromised Viéra Pavlovna on the side of sentiment. For example, I have not concealed the fact that she dined every day, and for the most part with good appetite, and, moreover, twice a day drank tea. But I have reached such an occurrence that, in spite of all the shameless degradation of my conceptions, I am overtaken by fear; and I wonder, would it not be better to hide this thing? What will be thought of a woman who gave herself up to medicine? What coarse nerves she must have! What an unfeeling heart! She is not a woman, but a butcher. But, considering that I do not represent the characters of my story as ideals of perfection, I become calmer. Let folks judge as they please about the heartlessness of Viéra Pavlovna's nature. What business is it of mine? If she is coarse, let her be coarse.
And so I say in cold blood that she found a great difference between idle observation of things and active work in them for her own benefit and the benefit of others.
- ↑ This argument, which is comparatively familiar to the American public, though even now there is an absurd prejudice in some quarters against women doctors, was absolutely novel in Russia at the time that this book was written. It gave an immense stimulus to the study of medicine by women. As is well known, all the medical schools of Europe, especially Switzerland, draw scores of Russian women to their halls. Viéra Pavlovna was the pioneer.
