Page:Pioneer work in opening the medical profession to women - autobiographical sketches (IA b28145227).pdf/192

This page needs to be proofread.

always some pleasant social gathering, or some concert or lecture attended with friends, to refresh the medical student. I often walked home from my friends in the West between twelve and one at night (being too poor to engage cabs), not exhausted, but invigorated for the next day's work. Lady Noel Byron became warmly interested in my studies. I went with her to Faraday's lectures, visited her at Brighton, and she long remained one of my correspondents.

One of my most valued acquaintances was Miss Florence Nightingale, then a young lady at home, but chafing against the restrictions that crippled her active energies. Many an hour we spent by my fireside in Thavies Inn, or walking in the beautiful grounds of Embley, discussing the problem of the present and hopes of the future. To her, chiefly, I owed the awakening to the fact that sanitation is the supreme goal of medicine, its foundation and its crown.

My acquaintance also with Professor Georgii, the Swedish professor of kinesipathy and the favourite disciple of Brandt, whose consultation-rooms in Piccadilly I often visited, strengthened my faith in the employment of hygienic measures in medicine. When, in later years, I entered into practice, extremely sceptical in relation to the value of drugs and ordinary medical methods, my strong faith in hygiene formed the solid ground from which I gradually built up my own methods of treatment. Looking back upon a long medical life, one of my