BUILDING THE NATION THROUGH WOMEN'S HEALTH: MODERN ...

CHAPTER ONE. LAYING THE FOUNDATION: MISSIONARY AND GENTRY
ATTEMPTS AT MEDICAL EDUCATION AND REGULATION
The seeds of formal medical education for Chinese women were planted around the fall of the
Qing dynasty in 1911. Medical training in China during this time, as in the United States and
Europe, was unsystematic and sparse. In the absence of a strong central government in China,
medical missionaries from the United States and Great Britain played the primary role of
providing and training modern medical personnel. They took to their task of saving lives with
the same conviction that they used to save souls. By the 1910s and the 1920s, new ideas from
the United States and Europe about public health and its role in nation building prompted
everyone from missionaries, modern Chinese physicians and nurses, government officials and
local gentry, to businessmen aimed at making a profit, to contribute to these training programs in
various ways. Nearly all of the funding for medical training came from such private sources, and
even some high-level government officials like Viceroys Li Hongzhang and Yuan Shikai
supported these endeavors. Because American and British missionaries were the primary
purveyors of modern medicine in China, medical training there was greatly affected by medical
developments in the West. Aside from the growing awareness of public health, an increasing
emphasis in the United States and Europe on medical specialization and the development of
modern hospitals contributed to the growth of formal medical training.
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