In France, the earliest official document extant relative to the profession (dated 1311) forbids the practice of surgeons, or female surgeons, who have failed to pass the required examinations; and an edict of 1352 refers to female practitioners. In Spain, the Universities of Cordova, Salamanca and Alcala bestowed doctor’s degrees on |14| many women. In Germany, also, a number of the fair sex successfully cultivated the science of medicine, and practised it, in the last century and in the early part of this. In England, as has already been seen, in early days women practised the healing arts. Henry VIII. checked them for a time, but in his old age, changing his mind on this, as on almost every other subject, gave them liberty to minister to the outward and less serious ailments of his people.
Crossing the Atlantic an entry is found, under the date of March, 1638, which tells a tale. It is this: “Jane Hawkins, the wife of Richard Hawkins, had liberty till the beginning of the third month, called May, and the magistrates (if she did not depart before) to dispose of her: and in the meantime she is not to meddle in surgery or phisick, drinks, plaisters or oyles, nor to question matters of religion, except with the elders for satisfaction [8].” But now woman is no longer regarded as too good or too stupid to study medicine in America; in nearly every State in the Union she has free access to Medical Colleges [9]. The Council of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario admit to registration and practice any person who complies with their requirements, without regard to sex. And the Imperial Parliament, by an Act passed in 1876, affirmed the principle that women are entitled to become registered practitioners of medicine.
The Roman Law considered the services of an advocate and of a physician as strictly honorific; and, as in the Roman age, practitioners in law and medicine, were usually men of leisure and wealthy, who did not practise for the sake of a livelihood, remuneration for their services could not be recovered in the ordinary way. Although owing to the Utopian ideas concerning the honour of a liberal profession then in vogue it was considered that any mention of a “fee,” or a “salary,” by that name would soil and disgrace the robe of a practitioner, still it was an established fiction of the Civil Law that the promise of an _honorarium_ always accompanied the employment of a professional man, and that such promise created one of those obligations that might be enforced by action [10]. The Common Law of England adopted the theory of the Civil Law as to the high standing of the profession, but afforded no remedy for the recovery of the charges. Surgeons and apothecaries were enabled to recover by law remuneration for their services, but a physician was presumed to attend his patient for an _honorarium_ (something left to the honour of the patient to pay or not to pay), and could not maintain an action for his fees until the passing of the Medical Act, 1858, put an end to his anomalous position in this money-making age, and gave him as free an entrance into the courts of law to recover compensation for his work and labour, time and |16| skill bestowed, as the worker in any other path of life. Before this a physician could not recover even expenses out of pocket, such as those incurred in travelling to visit a patient, unless there had been an agreement specially made to that effect [11].