Her mother had been famous throughout those regions in the pioneer days for skill at "yarbs" and at nursing, and had taught her a great deal.

But she had had small chance to practice, she and her husband and her children being all and always so healthy.

All those years she had had to content herself with thinking and talking of hypothetical cases and with commenting, usually rather severely, upon the conduct of every case in the town of which she heard.
Now, in her old age, just as she was feeling that she had no longer an excuse for being alive, here, into her very house, was coming a career for her, and it the career of which she had always dreamed! She forgot about the marriage and its problems, and plunged at once into an exposition of her views of medicine--her hostility to the allopaths, with their huge, fierce doses of dreadful poisons that had ruined most of the teeth and stomachs in the town; her disdain of the homeopaths, with their petty pills and their silly notion that the hair of the dog would cure its bite.

She was all for the medicine of nature and common sense; and Madelene, able honestly to assent, rose in her esteem by leaps and bounds.

Before the end of that conversation Mrs.Ranger was convinced that she had always believed the doctors should be women.