filthy corpse!

The witnesses drew near her to watch her dissection at close range, while she worked in silence and with skill. In those days the complicated microscopic, bac-teriological, and chemical methods were unknown and were not used

in dissection. All that could be deduced from such an examination went no further than what the naked eye could plainly see. She gave her opinion of what she found with modest boldness, then sewed up the skin and made the body ready for burial. Afterward she washed her hands and let down her sleeves, without a single one of the doctors present being able to criticize her work or overturn any of the conclusions she had stated — indeed, they were probably angry... Then she left the hut in perfect calm, after returning the lukewarm greeting of some of the witnesses. As for the women, they sat in the lanes by their houses, watching her in silence. One old woman among them shouted at her: "God's curse upon you, Bethenia Owens-Adair! You are a disgrace to your town and your family. Better that you leave us, for not one of us can bear your staying any longer!!"

Bethenia realized after this that she would not be able to practice her work in Rosenberg, so she gathered her belongings and moved to Portland, where she opened a clinic for performing operations — or rather electrical and medical baths for her patients. It was the only branch to which a woman could then aspire. Her practice grew, and she began to climb, slowly and strivingly, the steps of success.

In 1878 she took a new step, entering the University of Michigan after Jefferson

University had refused to admit her. In the same year she enrolled her son in the very university where she was studying, to begin the study of medicine alongside his mother. She had married, at thirteen, a man who was good for nothing. After two years of exhausting study she obtained the true medical degree, and began working as a physician in a Chicago hospital with male colleagues, and joined the greatest surgeons as they worked. Then she returned to Oregon to practice her profession with men on an equal footing.

Bethenia died at eighty, after spending more than fifty years of struggle in the cause of woman's emancipation. She fought the gripping corset, denounced riding sidesaddle, demanded woman's unveiling and urged her to practice

sport; and the debate grew heated between her and President Charles Eliot, the head of Harvard University, on the other side of the American continent. He feared that higher education and sport in the open air were things that would spoil for woman her natural mission of pregnancy and childbirth. He was convinced of the soundness of her view when she married her second husband at forty-four, and conceived at forty-seven.

Bethenia Owens-Adair was able to smash the walls of ignorance and fanaticism and break the shackles of deprivation that had encircled women's necks. That terrifying hour she spent dissect-ing the countryman's body was the first spur to her struggle for the liberation of the daughters of her sex.