British University ever opened to women, isn't it?" Hostility grows and the Surgeons' Hall riot As the women began to demonstrate that they could compete on equal terms with the male students, hostility towards them began to grow. They received obscene letters, were followed home, had fireworks attached to their front door, and had mud thrown at them. This culminated in the Surgeons' Hall riot on 18 November 1870, when the women arrived to sit for an anatomy examination at Surgeons' Hall, and an angry mob of over 200 gathered outside throwing mud, rubbish, and insults at the women. The events made national headlines and won the women many new supporters, but influential members of the medical faculty eventually persuaded the university to refuse graduation to the women by appealing decisions to higher courts. The courts eventually ruled that the women who had been awarded degrees should never have been allowed to enter the course. Their degrees were withdrawn and the campaign in Edinburgh failed in 1873. Many of the women went to European universities that were already allowing women to graduate and completed their studies there. The time for a reform has come Women were eventually admitted onto degree programmes at other British Universities in 1877. James Stansfeld, who had been closely associated with the London campaign (following the failure of the Edinburgh campaign) wrote, in his brief history of the events: Dr Sophia Jex-Blake has made the greatest of all contributions to the end attained. I do not say that she has been the ultimate cause of success. The ultimate cause has been simply this, that the time was at hand. It is one of the lessons of the history of progress that when the time for reform has come you cannot resist it, though if you make the attempt, what you may do is to widen its character or precipitate its advent. Opponents, when the time has come, are not merely dragged at the chariot wheels of progress - they help to turn them. The strongest forces, whichever way it seems to work, does most to aid. The forces of greatest concentration here have been, in my view, on the one hand the Edinburgh University led by Sir Robert Christison, on the other the women claimants led by Dr Sophia Jex-Blake. Eventual qualification as a physician In 1874, Sophia Jex-Blake helped establish the London School of Medicine