''Dr. Smith," she interrupted.

October 28, 2017 12:17 PM

"What!" he gasped, "the Lee Hopkins prizeman! You!" He had never seen a woman doctor before, and his whole conservative soul rose up in revolt at the idea. He could not recall any Biblical injunction that the man should remain ever the doctor and the woman the nurse, and yet he felt as if a blasphemy had been committed. His face betrayed his feelings only too clearly. "I am sorry to disappoint you," said the lady drily. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writes on Women In STEM.
posted by ChuraChura (14 comments total)

Oh, I like this bit:

"...I must say that I do not think medicine a suitable profession for women and that I have a personal objection to masculine ladies."

It was an exceedingly rude speech, and he was ashamed of it the instant after he had made it. The lady, however, simply raised her eyebrows and smiled.

"It seems to me that you are begging the question," said she. "Of course, if it makes women masculine that would be a considerable deterioration. " (Emphasis in the original.)

Must make a note of that.
posted by GrammarMoses at 1:05 PM on October 28, 2017 [11 favorites]

My favorite part was "If I had known what lt was passing in your mind I should have told you earlier that I intended to devote my life entirely to science. There are many women with a capacity tor marriage, but few with a taste for biology.
posted by ChuraChura at 1:17 PM on October 28, 2017 [8 favorites]

Hey, no spoilers! This sting in the tail is too good to give it away like that.

I've been reading it with a dread the this turns out to be a modern fan fiction, since I knew nothing about Sir Arthur's views on women, and those of his stories that I read sorely lack strong, independent women characters. I'm really happy that this is genuine Conan-Doyle!
posted by hat_eater at 1:25 PM on October 28, 2017 [4 favorites]

sorely lack strong, independent women characters.

He certainly had his share of fainting ladies but he also gave us Irene Adler, a woman who handily beat Holmes at his own game.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:17 PM on October 28, 2017 [8 favorites]

Interestingly reading the story it definitely hit the repetition of the formidable "one" note that Adler always was.

And yeah, given how terribly off so much Doyle (and his contemporaries) reads today, that was refreshing.
posted by drewbage1847 at 2:29 PM on October 28, 2017

I can't stand Sherlock Holmes but I liked this story very much. Thanks.
posted by MovableBookLady at 3:04 PM on October 28, 2017

Violet Hunter in "The Copper Beeches" also has considerable moxie, and Doyle credits his abused female characters with considerable endurance (in, e.g., "The Speckled Band" and The Hound of the Baskervilles).

The most striking move in the story is having her tend to a male patient. As Kristine Swenson reminds us, everybody agreed that that was a no-no. Support for female doctors in the Victorian period, which sometimes came from not-very-feminist men and women, partly derived from a belief that medicine was a logical outgrowth of women's traditional work in healing (middle-class women might be expected to provide low-level care for the poor as part of their Christian charitable work, for example). But a lot of it had to do with the expectation that female doctors would attend to other women, thereby providing a more salubrious moral atmosphere--especially in the context of evangelical medical missions overseas, where male doctors might have no access to female patients. (Antoinette Burton's Burdens of History includes a useful introduction to this argument in favor of female doctors.)
posted by thomas j wise at 3:07 PM on October 28, 2017 [6 favorites]

Great find. Thanks!
posted by roolya_boolya at 3:56 PM on October 28, 2017

Conan Doyle trained as a physician at the University of Edinburgh as British women were first entering the medical profession; in fact, he was at Edinburgh a few years after Sophia Jex-Blake, who had left quite an impression in her wake: "She was, by then, infamous and enshrouded in legend as would be his own Baskerville hound. Doyle was known to value independent, intelligent women like Jex-Blake – unusual in Victorian UK. He nods directly at her in his story “The Doctors of Hoyland,” where the central protagonist Dr. James Ripley is bested by a female doctor..."
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:58 PM on October 28, 2017 [11 favorites]

Since there are already spoilers in the thread, I suppose it's now appropriate to say that someone needs to write a sequel in which he follows her to the institute as her research assisstant. It could be a great romcom.
posted by Coventry at 4:57 PM on October 28, 2017 [2 favorites]

I think the best part of this story is that Dr Smith needs not the rom.

As a nice lady doctor, this is now my favourite story ever.
posted by chiquitita at 6:13 PM on October 28, 2017 [4 favorites]

This is a real Conan Doyle story? I thought it was a pitch-perfect parody. I'm speechless.
posted by medusa at 7:45 PM on October 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

chiquitita, I like that part too. Doesn't have to be requited, especially in a comedy.
posted by Coventry at 10:49 PM on October 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

Thanks for this, I enjoyed it. Hadn't come across the expression "parish face" ("plain, parish face") but it looks like it's actually "palish" (Medical Women and Victorian Fiction, which I would like to read).
posted by paduasoy at 7:37 AM on October 29, 2017