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Frances Power Cobbe

Frances Power Cobbe Books

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“It is now nearly a quarter of a century since I was startled into a review of my own work on the surgery of the arteries, and led to the humiliating recognition of the fact that the conclusions obtained from a series of experiments on animals could not be applied to man, and that our efforts to adapt them were leading us into serious surgical blunders. An extended investigation into which I was further attracted by the rising discussion of this question forced upon me the opinion that Syme and Fergusson were right when they stoutly asserted that surgery had in no way been advanced by experiments on animals. I knew these two men intimately. . . . They were the two greatest surgeons I have ever known. . . . I decide altogether against vivisection, because it is inherently objectionable from my religious point of view, because it is clumsy and inexact, and because it has very frequently, if indeed it has not always, been found altogether misleading.— Prof. LAWSON TAIT (1896)”

“Every woman who has any margin of time or money to spare should adopt some one public interest, some philanthropic undertaking,or some social agitation of reform, and give to that cause whatever time and work she may be able to afford.”

“I think it is worse to be poor in mind than in purse, to be stunted and belittled in soul, made a coward, made a liar, made mean and slavish, accustomed to fawn and prevaricate, and "manage" by base arts a husband or a father,--I think this is worse than to be kicked with hobnailed shoes.”

“I have often thought how strange it is that men can at once and the same moment cheerfully consign our sex to lives either of narrowest toil or senseless luxury and vanity, and then sneer at the smallness of our aims, the pettiness of our thoughts, the puerility of our conversation!”

“It is in the faculty of noble, disinterested, unselfish love that lies the true gift and power of womanhood,--a power which makes us, not the equal of men (I never care to claim such equality), but their equivalents; more than their equivalents in a moral sense.”

“This specter of the female politician, who abandons her family to neglect for the sake of passing bills in parliament, is just as complete an illusion of the masculine brain, as the other specter whom Sydney Smith laid by a joke,--the woman who would forsake an infant for a quadratic equation.”

“So immense are the claims on a mother, physical claims on her bodily and brain vigor, and moral claims on her heart and thoughts, that she cannot ... meet them all and find any large margin beyond for other cares and work. She serves the community in the very best and highest way it is possible to do, by giving birth to healthy children, whose physical strength has not been defrauded, and to whose moral and mental nature she can give the whole of her thoughts.”