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Abstract
This article examines two of the three American missionary medical schools for Chinese women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the Soochow Woman’s Medical College in Suzhou and the Hackett Medical College for Women in Guangzhou. The article uses these medical schools to challenge the concept of “cultural imperialism.” These schools offered less elite women the chance to acquire some skills associated with “Western medicine,” especially skills in surgery, even if they did not have the educational background necessary to study the “scientific medicine” that was becoming hegemonic. The article argues that, rather than seeing these schools as simply an export from the United States to China, it is important to look at how the Chinese involved with these schools influenced their development. Central to the argument is an emphasis on regional diversity within both the United States and China. The evidence presented suggests that some areas of China may have been more receptive to medical education for women than some areas of the United States, particularly the American South. American missionary medical schools for Chinese women were therefore not simply an export from the United States to China, but influenced medical education for women within the United States as well.
Notes
1 Harriet Love, I Saw it Happen to China, 1913–1949 (Baton Rouge: Claitor’s Book Store, 1960), 14.
2 See, for example, Carol Chin’s analysis of a missionary letter in “Beneficent Imperialists: American Women Missionaries in China at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Diplomatic History, 27 (June 2003), 327–52, 327–28.
3 Love, I Saw it Happen to China, 14.
4 A good contemporary example of this portrayal can be seen in American Missionary Medical Society, A Great Field for Women (Chicago: American Medical Missionary Society, [188–?]). I discuss this kind of portrayal in more depth in Connie Shemo, The Chinese Medical Ministries of Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu: On a Cross-Cultural Frontier of Gender, Race, and Nation (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, Lanham, Md.: Rowan and Littlefield, 2011), 32–33. This portrait has been accepted even by scholars generally critical of the imperialism of American women missionaries. See, for example, Jane Hunter, Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 15; Duan Qi, “Qingmo Minchu Meiguo nü Chuanjiaoshi zai Hua de Chuanjiao Huodong ji Yingxiang (The Activities and Influence of American Female missionaries in China in the Late Qing Dynasty and Earlier Republican Years),” Jidujiao yanjiu (Studies in Christianity), 3, (1994), 32–40.
5 Hunter, Gospel of Gentility, 252.
6 For some classic works on the struggles women faced in becoming physicians in the United States, see Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Mary Roth Walsh, “Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply”: Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835–1975 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). For a comparative look at women becoming physicians in the United States and in Europe, see Thomas Bonner, To the Ends of the Earth: Women’s Search for Education in Medicine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). For a global comparison, see Ellen S. More, Restoring the Balance: Women Physicians and the Profession of Medicine, 1850–1995 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
7 This justification has been discussed in, for example, Hunter, Gospel of Gentility; Dana Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996); Marjorie King, “Exporting Femininity, Not Feminism: Nineteenth Century U.S. Missionary Women’s Efforts to Emancipate Chinese Women,” in Leslie Fleming, ed. Women’s Work for Women: Missionaries and Social Change in Asia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985), 117–36.
8 Ryan Dunch, ““Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global Modernity,” History and Theory, 41 (October 2002), 301–25 (307).
9 Booklet on “Mary Black Bishop Hospital in Soochow,” undated but probably 1916 from internal evidence; Ethel Polk to “Dear Friend,” July 9, 1918, Ethel Polk Peters, Alumnae File, Special Collections and Archives on Women and Medicine, Medical College of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa (hereafter SCAWM). The most thorough and accessible discussion of the beginning of Hackett comes in Sara Tucker, “The Canton Hospital and Medicine in Nineteenth Century China, 1835–1900” (Ph.D. diss,, Indiana University, 1982).
10 “North China Union Medical College for Women, 1921,” pamphlet, “Mission Pamphlets,” Box 377, RG 31, Yale Divinity School Library, New Haven, CT (hereafter YDS).
11 Yi-Li Wu, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (Berkley: University of California Press, 2010), 18–19.
12 Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Francesca Bray, Technologies of Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
13 Wu, Reproducing Women, 20.
14 “Sara Tucker, A Mission for Change in China: The Hackett’s Women’s Medical Center of Canton, China, 1900–1930,” in Leslie Fleming, ed., Women’s Work for Women: Missionaries and Social Change in Asia (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989); “North China Union Medical College for Women, 1921;” Josephine Lawney, “Our Graduates,” n.d. but 1934 from internal evidence, Josephine Lawney, Alumnae files, SWCM; “Proposed Constitution of the Woman’s Medical College of Shanghai,” Folder 2550, Box 377, RG 31, YDS.
15 Henrietta Harrison, “Rethinking Missionaries and Medicine in China: The Miracles of Assunta Pallotta, 1905–2005,” Journal of Asian Studies, 71 (February 2012), 127–48 (128–29).
16 The literature on this transition is voluminous. See, for example, Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Deborah Brunton, Medicine Transformed: Health, Disease, and Society in Europe, 1800–1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
17 Bonner, To the Ends of the Earth, ch. 1.
18 Starr, Social Transformation of American Medicine, 115–16; Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science, 85–87.
19 Morantz-Sanchez, 254–55, 349–50.
20 Kristin Gleeson, “Healers Abroad: Presbyterian Women Physicians in the Foreign Mission Field” (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1996).
21 Tucker, Canton Hospital, 216–17.
22 Ethel Polk to Executive Committee, June 21, 1908, Ethel Polk-Peters Alumnae file, SCAWM.
23 Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 3.
24 Dunch, “Beyond Cultural Imperialism,” 316.
25 Prasenjit Duara, The Global and Regional in China’s Nation-Formation (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 2. See also Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
26 For more on these women, see Weili Ye, Seeking Modernity in China’s Name: Chinese Students in the United States, 1900–1927 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Hu Ying, “Naming the First ‘New Woman,’” in Rebecca Karl and Pater Zarrow, eds., Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Shemo, The Chinese Medical Ministries of Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu. For the most prominent Chinese contemporary treatment (of Kang and Shi), see Liang Qichao, “Chi Chiang-hsi K’ang nu-shi (An Essay on Miss Kang of Jiangxi),” in Yin-ping shih ho-chi, i.i (Shanghai: Chung-hau shu-chu, 1932), 119–20; Ryan Dunch, Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China, 1857–1927 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 44–45, 193–94.
27 Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty Port China (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004).
28 For more on these schools, see Hsiu-yun Wang, “Stranger Bodies: Women, Gender, and Missionary Medicine in China, 1870s to 1930s” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2003).
29 For more descriptions of this school, see “Mary Black Bishop Hospital in Soochow,” undated but probably 1916 from internal evidence; Love, I Saw it Happen to China; Anne Fearn, My Days of Strength: An American Woman Doctor’s Forty Years in China (New York and London: Harper Brothers and Publishers, 1939).
30 Margaret Polk and Ethel Polk Peters, Alumnae Files, SCAWM.
31 Undated, untitled manuscript, Ethel Polk-Peters Alumnae file, SCAWM.
32 Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science, 49, 77–79, 259–61.
33 Fearn, My Days of Strength, 12.
34 Fearn, My Days of Strength, 19.
35 Margaret Polk to Dr. Marshall, July 15, 1906, Ethel Polk Peters Alumnae file, SCAWM.
36 The Methodist Episcopal Church had split into Northern and Southern sections over the issue of slavery before the Civil War and did not reunite until 1939.
37 Tucker, Canton Hospital, 209–10.
38 Tucker, Canton Hospital, 220, 227–28.
39 Tucker, Canton Hospital, 271–72.
40 Love, I Saw it Happen to China, 15; Tucker, Canton Hospital, 260.
41 Shi Meiyu, one of the women physicians trained abroad, was particularly intent on creating nursing as a respectable profession for Chinese women. See Shemo, The Chinese Medical Ministries of Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu, especially chapters 3 and 6.
42 Mary H. Fulton, Inasmuch: Extracts from Letters, Journals, Papers, Etc. (West Medford, Mass.: The Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions, date uncertain), 84–85.
43 “Education of Women Physicians” in “Report of the China Medical Commission of the Rockefeller Foundation,” China Medical Board, Historical Record, Folder 242, Box 27, vol VII RG 1, Series 601 A; “Mary Black Bishop Hospital in Soochow”; Ethel Polk to “Dear Friend,” July 9, 1918, Ethel Polk Peters, Alumnae File, SCAWM.
44 Ralph Croizer, Traditional Medicine in Modern China: Science, Nationalism, and the Tensions of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1968), 24–26; Wu Lien-teh and K. Chimin Wong, History of Chinese Medicine: Being a Chronicle of Medical Happenings in China from Ancient Times to the Present Period, 2nd ed. (Shanghai: National Quarantine Service, 1936).
45 Elizabeth Reifsnyder alumnae file, SCAWM.
46 Fulton, Inasmuch. For the observation that much of her later operations were performed by her “assistants,” see “Canton,” in “Dr. Peabody’s Report on Schools and Hospitals,” 601 A China Medical Board, Historical Record, vol. VII RG 1, Series 601, Rockefeller Archives Center.
47 Bray, Technologies of Gender; Wu, Reproducing Women.
48 Love, “I Saw it Happen to China,” 14.
49 Simon Flexner, “Central China,” 1915 Report, Rockefeller Archives Microfilm, roll 23.
50 Fulton, Inasmuch, 94.
51 Croizier, Traditional Medicine in Modern China, 40.
52 Fulton, Inasmuch, 88, 93–94.
53 Ibid.
54 Starr, Social Transformation of American Medicine, 118–21.
55 Rosemary Stevens, American Medicine and the Public Interest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971); E. Richard Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979).
56 Mary Brown Bullock, An American Transplant: Peking Union Medical College and the Rockefeller Foundation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
57 “The Medical Education of Chinese Women,” 3, Report of the Second China Medical Commission to the China Medical Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, 1915, Folder 245, Box 27, series 601, RG 1·1, Rockefeller Archives Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York.
58 “Memorandum of Capital Funds of the Woman’s Committee of Cheloo University,” Folder 3987, Box 243, RG 11, YDS; Tucker, “Mission for Change in China.”
59 “Proposed Constitution of the Woman’s Medical College of Shanghai.”
60 Starr, Social Transformation of American Medicine, 123–127.
61 Judy Tzu-chun Wu, Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 20–21; More, Restoring the Balance, 99.
62 Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science; Walsch, Doctors Needed, No Women Need Apply.
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Connie Shemo
Connie Shemo is an Associate Professor at Plattsburgh State University. She is the author of The Chinese Medical Ministries of Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu: On a Cross-Cultural Frontier of Gender, Race, and Nation (2011) and the co-editor of Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960 (2010), along with a number of articles.