W&M ScholarWorks Undergraduate Honors Theses Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 5-2020 Imperial Professionals: American Protestant Female Medical Missionaries to China, 1880-1930 Yutong Zhan William & Mary Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses Part of the Cultural History Commons, Social History Commons, United States History Commons, and the Women's History Commons Recommended Citation Zhan, Yutong, "Imperial Professionals: American Protestant Female Medical Missionaries to China, 1880-1930" (2020). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 1530. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/1530 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Undergraduate Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Imperial Professionals: American Protestant Female Medical Missionaries to China, 1880-1930 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in History from The College of William and Mary by Yutong Zhan Accepted for Highest Honors (Honors, High Honors, Highest Honors) Adrienne Petty, Director Joshua Hubbard Leisa Meyer Williamsburg, VA May 1, 2020 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………………...2 Illustrations ………………………………………………………………………………………3 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………5 Chapter I. “The Benefit of [...] the Western World”: Female Medical Missionaries and the Motivations for Missions ……………………………...19 Chapter II. “Something That One Knows She Has Time and Ability to Do”: Professionalism in Female Medical Missionary Work …………………………………….......37 Chapter III. “The Chronic Discouragement of Trying, and Failing”: Cultural Negotiation and the Limits of Cultural Imperialism…………………………………. 64 Chapter IV. “A Physician Can Not Do It All”: Female Medical Missionaries and the Contradictions in Christian Missions ………………….89 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………….… 110 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………... 114 Acknowledgements The guidance and support of my wonderful professors, friends, and family made the completion of this thesis possible. First, I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Professor Adrienne Petty, for her incredible dedication at every stage of the project. Her advice is instrumental for the development of this project and her constant encouragement helped me get through the long archival research and writing process. I would also like to thank Professor Joshua Hubbard and Professor Leisa Meyer for serving on my committee and offering their inspiring insights. My friends also helped me in many ways during the past year. Their kind offering of lodgings made it possible for me to have extended archival visits during the summer. Their keen interest in my project and constant inquiries also motivated me to work hard on my research and writing. I am also grateful for my parents’ unwavering support for my aspiration to be a historian. They made my archival search in Fuzhou go more smoothly by putting me in touch with professors and staff at the archives. My mother, who volunteered to join me during my archival research in Fuzhou, also contributed to the Chinese-language source base that my project drew from. Finally, I want to give credit to the global pandemic we are living through right now. All the moments of uncertainty and anxiety I experienced due to COVID-19 made me realize how precious it is to be able to sit down and write. The changes associated with this pandemic also pushed me to work on this project in a way that I would never have imagined being possible. So, I would like to acknowledge the new appreciation that COVID-19 brought me during the course of this project. 2 Figure 1 Map of the Foochow Mission, Province of Fuh-Kien, China (1905). From Rev. C. C. Baldwin, D. D., The Foochow Mission, 1847-1905: A Condensed Sketch (Boston: 1905). Courtesy of Yale University Divinity School Special Collections. 3 Figure 2 Methodist Episcopal Church in China (1939). From Seventieth Anniversary General Executive of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society Methodist (Episcopal) Church, 1869- 1939. Courtesy of the United Methodist Archives and History Center, Madison, New Jersey. 4 Introduction “The medical profession offers many rewards to the young women of to-day,” Dr. Pauline Root, an American Congregationalist missionary to India, wrote in the mission magazine, “not in money… but in love and esteem when they reap a hundred folds.”1 Offering a glimpse of the fulfillment female medical missionary work could bring, Root continued, “Beside the leper, they tell of a land where there will be no more sickness and no outcasts; tenderly dressing the sore aching body of the little child dying with smallpox, they win the love of the patient, sad-eyed mother.”2 She then appealed to readers to join the medical mission, asking, “What women are wanted for this work? Careless, materialistic, worldly doctors? No! But the cheerful, thoroughly in earnest Christian girl, trained mentally, and strong physically, with a courageous and sympathetic heart? Yes! We want her.”3 Root then added, “You need thorough medical training and a hospital year. And while you are studying—for you are not ignorant of Satan’s devices— you should know the missionary ladies.”4 Referring to both the spiritual influences and necessary medical qualifications, Root pointed to the two aspects that were intimately linked to female medical missionaries in the late nineteenth century—their role as ambassadors of cultural imperialism and as emissaries of medical professionalism. To examine the importance of female medical missionaries’ double-sided role, this thesis focuses on the transnational experiences of American female medical missionaries to Foochow, China from the 1880s to the 1920s. By analyzing missionaries’ writings, this thesis 1 Pauline Root, “Young Women as Medical Missionaries,” Medical Missionary Record, 9:6 (June 1894), 133. The physical copy of this document is located at Archives and Special Collections, Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 2 Ibid., 133, 134. 3 Ibid., 134. 4 Ibid. 5 argues that female medical missionaries played an equally important role in their capacity as medical professionals. Aiming to convert people in foreign lands to both evangelical culture and western medical approaches, female medical missionaries constituted a distinctive group of transnational professional women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More specifically, this thesis pays special attention to female medical missionaries’ professional role, that is, their role as physicians, and how professionalism impacted their work. Few historians have systematically examined female medical missionaries and their role as medical professionals in an international context. However, historians have written quite extensively in two related topics: women in Christian missions and women in the medical profession in the United States. Since the 1970s, the call for situating women at the center of religious history has drawn scholarly attention to female missionaries and their role in the spread of Christianity and American culture. 5 In the expanding field of women in Christian world missions, historians have started to devote more attention to female medical missionaries as a distinctive group in woman’s missions. Among the earliest works is Sara Tucker’s article, “A Mission for Change in China: The Hackett Women’s Medical Center of Canton, China, 1900- 1930,” in which she traces the development of Hackett Women’s Medical Center, a female medical educational institution for Chinese women.6 Tucker argues that the separate female institution 5 For a more comprehensive overview of American Protestant women in world mission, see Barbara Reeves- Ellington, “Woman, Protestant Missions, and American Cultural Expansion, 1800 to 1938: A Historiographical Sketch,” Social Sciences and Missions, 24, No.2-3 (2011): 190-206, DOI 10.1163/187489411X587070. For more details on American woman’s missionary movement, see, for example, Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of the Thought and Practice (Macon.: Mercer University Press, 1998); Patricia R. Hill, The World Their Household: The American Woman’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870-1920 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985); R. Pierce Beaver, American Protestant Women in World Mission: A History of the First Feminist Movement in North America, (Grand Rapids.: WB Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1980). 6 Sara W. Tucker, “A Mission for Chang in China: The Hackett Women’s Medical Center of Canton, China, 1900- 1930,”in Women’s Work for Women: Missionaries and Social Change in Asia, ed. Leslie A. Flemming (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), 137-157. 6 offered both Chinese and Western women a chance to carry out the more public-oriented medical work within a traditionally acceptable framework in the early years of the institution’s establishment; growing unafraid of the mixed-sex world, these women obtained personal success in their work which contributed to the decline and the eventual disappearance of this institution.7 With a similar focus on the Hackett Medical Complex, Shing-ting Lin in her dissertation, “The Female Hand: The Making of Western Medicine for Women in China, 1880s–1920s,” examines the transmission and professionalization