letter which stated: "There is no provision for the education of women in any department of this university". The following year, she hoped to attend a new medical college being established by Elizabeth Blackwell in New York, but in the same year, her father died, so she returned to England to be with her mother. A fair field and no favour In 1869, Jex-Blake's essay "Medicine as a profession for women" appeared in a book edited by Josephine Butler: Women's Work and Women's Culture. In this, she argued that natural instinct leads women to concern themselves with the care of the sick. With education of girls being restricted to domestic crafts, though, women generally could not qualify to compete with men as medical practitioners. She argued that no objective proof existed of women's intellectual inferiority to men. She said that the matter could easily be tested by granting women "a fair field and no favour" - teaching them as men were taught and subjecting them to exactly the same examinations. The campaign Sophia Jex-Blake was determined to seek medical training in the UK, and due to Scotland's already enlightened attitudes towards education, felt that if any university would allow women to study, it would be a Scottish one. She applied to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh in March 1869. and although the medical faculty and the senatus academus voted in favour of allowing her to study medicine, the university court rejected her application on the grounds that the university could not make the necessary arrangements "in the interest of one lady". She then advertised in The Scotsman and other national newspapers for more women to join her. A second application was submitted in the summer of 1869 on behalf of the group of five women initially (with two more joined later in the year to make the Edinburgh Seven - the group is Mary Anderson, Emily Bovell, Matilda Chaplin, Helen Evans, Sophia Jex-Blake, Edith Pechey, and Isabel Thorne). It requested matriculation and all that that implied - the right to attend all the classes and examinations required for a degree in medicine. This second application was approved by the university court and the University of Edinburgh became the first British university to admit women. Sophia Jex-Blake wrote in one of her letters to her great friend Lucy Sewall: "It is a grand thing to enter the very first