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While this booklet was published a year after Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman Doctor of Medicine in America – and the same year that the first national Woman’s Rights Convention was held in Massachusetts - the male author was neither sympathetic to the cause of women’s suffrage, nor did he even encourage women to follow in Dr. Blackwell’s footsteps. Rather, Gregory “disapproved of the practice of male physicians attending women at childbirth as an affront to feminine modesty”, and his Female Medical Education Society merely “sought to reinvigorate the practice of midwifery which was losing ground to the new medical specialty of Obstetrics”. Reprinted in 1854 and 1856, this original edition is rare. OCLC/WorldCat lists no copies, and only microform examples of the 1854 edition.