[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter IV: The Snare of Preparation." by Jane Addams
(1860-1935) From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with
Autobiographical Notes. by Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan
Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 65-88.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]




CHAPTER IV

THE SNARE OF PREPARATION


The winter after I left school was spent in the Woman's Medical
College of Philadelphia, but the development of the spinal
difficulty which had shadowed me from childhood forced me into Dr.
Weir Mitchell's hospital for the late spring, and the next winter I
was literally bound to a bed in my sister's house for six months.
In spite of its tedium, the long winter had its mitigations, for
after the first few weeks I was able to read with a luxurious
consciousness of leisure, and I remember opening the first volume
of Carlyle's "Frederick the Great" with a lively sense of gratitude
that it was not Gray's "Anatomy," having found, like many another,