'An army of women': The medical ministries of Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu, 1873--1937 (China)

This dissertation explores the medical ministries of Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu, two Chinese women Christian medical missionaries who were both born in 1872 and grew up close to the American Methodist missionary community in Jiujiang, Jiangxi province. After graduating from the medical school of the University of Michigan in 1896, both came to run mission hospitals for women and nursing schools in China, Kang in Nanchang until her death in 1931, Shi first in Jiujiang and then in Shanghai until the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Their medical ministries provide a lens through which we can explore the cultural interfaces created by both the American missionary enterprise and American attempts to export Western scientific medicine. The dissertation illuminates the complexity of power relations on these cultural interfaces. It is ultimately a study of the movement of ideas and the creation of institutions across national boundaries, emphasizing the fluidity of these boundaries and focusing on the process of interpretation and adaptation by people in the host culture. It thus serves to integrate U.S. history with a broader global history.; The dissertation begins by exploring the childhoods of Kang and Shi, suggesting that, simultaneously participating in but marginalized by both the missionary community and their local Chinese society, they became skilled “cultural interpreters.” I then argue that they used these skills in building their medical ministries, synthesizing ideas from American women's evangelical political culture and the rhetoric of Chinese nationalist reformers to formulate a vision of Chinese Christian women participating in the creation of a strong and healthy nation. The dissertation then analyzes Kang's and Shi's relationship with the China Medical Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, which became a primary force in introducing Western medicine to China in the 1910s. While soliciting funds from the CMB they offered an alternative to the Rockefeller emphasis on elaborately equipped hospitals with their focus on training “nurse-evangelists” to set up dispensaries in rural areas. The final section shows the growing difficulties of Kang's and Shi's position on a cultural interface in the 1920s as the Chinese anti-Christian movement challenged their nationalist credentials, the fundamentalist-modernist controversy threatened support for missions in the United States, and increasing political turmoil weakened their base of support among Chinese reformers.