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

This chapter will examine several medical training programs for women from the late
1800s to the 1920s. Most important to this study are the very few midwife-training programs in
existence during this time, but sources on these institutes are lacking. I have supplemented
information on midwifery with any medical school that accepted women students because the
majority of women physicians treated parturient women and their babies. In addition, I include
several nursing programs because they nearly always had a significant obstetrics component
required for female students, and many practicums took place in hospitals for women and
children. Male nurses were still common until the 1920s in China, but I assume that they were
exempt from these curricula because obstetrics was a woman’s realm and gender segregation in
hospitals among patients and staff was the norm.
In the early 1900s, childbirth was still the domain of midwives in both TCM and in
modern medicine, and the great majority of Chinese women gave birth at home with lay
attendants. Parturient women with serious complications may have called on one or more
traditional Chinese or modern physicians, but most of those were house visits, and they were not
common in most parts of China. For example, a male physician, Dr. D. Bethune McCartee,
worked in Ningbo under the Presbyterians from 1844 to 1872 and saw only “four or five
obstetrical cases in all that time.” He had on occasion “sent preparations of ergot in cases of
flooding [hemorrhaging] and only prescribed women’s diseases at second hand.” 58 The few
modern female physicians and medical helpers in China at this time may have assisted in
problematic births, usually at home. In fact, the hazards of childbirth prompted many medical
missionaries and modern Chinese physicians to encourage instructing Chinese women in modern
medicine as nurses, midwives, and physicians.
58 Mary H. MD Stinson, Work of Women Physicians in Asia (Norristown, NJ: J.H. Brandt, 1884), 17.
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