Somebody may know tne reason. LSU doesn't. But the fact is that the medical school at New Orleans has suddenly gone part-feminist.
Last year and in other years, there were about four, or more often, three, medical coeds, out of a class of 100 or so.
This year 11 representatives of the distaff side are moving in and out of the halls, dissecting rooms and laboratories. It's an all-time record.
The explanation?*' Dr. B. I. Burns, dean of the: school, hesitated a moment then shook his head,, "I don't know of any. They just applied, and we found they had the qualifications, and we took 'em in.*" How does he feel about the invasion of the women? "They are very nice." he said, with tact and diplomacy. No Distinction Made
In any event, what the faculty
thought might have nothing to do with the case, The law says that qualified Louisiahians are to be ac-cepted for the school. It makes no distinction between sexes.
The girls themselves don't have any explanation to give. "We just
studied our pre-medical courses, and applied, and they accepted us," said one member. "That's all."
Did the war have something to do with it? They grinned. "Why should, it?" one demanded. "We've been thinking about this, taking the courses, before people thought about the war," another explained. "What war?" asked a third one, obviously an isolationist. Good Students
Dr. Burns thinks they're good students, unhandicapped with the supposedly traditional attitude of the Southern worn an. toward the facts of medical life. One of his staff volunteered the information that they girls stood "the test," when they calmly accepted soft drinks, and drank them down, in the middle of their first session in autopsy.
"But that was nothing," explained one of the students. "We had cut up frogs and things in high school and college, already. This wasn't so different."
And reports from the male part of the medical student body indicate that this sector doesn't mind the change, either.
