for supplying Female Medical Aid to the Women of India," which may be said to owe its existence to the direct initiative of Her Majesty the Queen-Empress, who personally commended the matter to the care of the Countess of Dufferin when she, before her departure for India, took leave of Her Majesty.
Lady Dufferin, after her arrival in India, lost no opportunity of studying the direction in which action could most readily be taken for ameliorating the condition of native women, and she came to the conclusion that the full requirements of the case could only be met by a bold attempt to arouse the conscience and the imagination of the public at large, and so to bind together in one common effort all parts of the empire and all classes of the community. To this end the National Association was started, with the object of the teaching and training in India of women as doctors, hospital assistants and nurses ; of establishing dispensaries and cottage hospitals for women and children; of instituting female wards in hospitals; and, where possible, of founding hospitals for women, and for supplying lady doctors and nurses to visit women in their own homes.
It has now been working for five years, and has obtained a large measure of success, not the least important work that it has achieved, being that it has enlisted the interest and sympathy of all races,
