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228 forget the delicate point which, when overlooked, might mean the loss of precious life.11 Here, at age forty, Ellis ends her last contemporary account. All of her remarks about the New York and Philadelphia experience were in present tense. She did not take up her pen again until almost forty years later, when a very few paragraphs provided a summation of her life's experience. Besides the previously-mentioned updating of her medical knowledge, Ellis, in 1893, "spent a year in postgraduate study at the University of Michigan Medical School. As one of the best-educated physicians in Utah, male colleagues often consulted her. Ellis preferred, however, to direct her practice toward obstetrics, gynecology, and childhood diseases. 'Let men care for their own sex and do the major operations,' she wrote, 'I never had an ambition to take such responsibilities, for even men [doctors] have fatal cases and, if a woman should have them, [she] would always be condemned because 1? she was a woman!'" From the amount of vinegar there is in these remarks, we may deduce that she made them in her later life. For a glimpse of Ellis several years later, at her half-century mark (1897), we note that a rhymed invitation of her own devising brought over 60 ladies to her home. It was an evening of conversation, music, and recitation of original poems by six individuals, along with "loving and congratulatory addresses" by several friends. As reported in the Young Woman's Journal, "The hostess was becomingly arrayed in a handsome black silk gown with white roses as the only decoration, and carried off the honors of her half century |
