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

nationalist reforms. A group of Nanchang pastors petitioned the local government in 1912 for a
permanent grant for Kang because she was a native helping natives. For several years afterward,
she received a yearly $250 grant from the local government, and in 1913-14 that was raised to
$1,000. “City authorities” in Taihu and Huangmei asked Kang and Shi to give lectures, and
“magistrates had promised financial aid as well as moral support.” 142 By the 1920s, Kang had
considerable influence in Nanchang. She had befriended the governor of Jiangxi province, and
she influenced government programs that were not related to medicine or public health, like
establishing public parks and repairing and building roads. 143 Around 1920, a wife of a
Provincial Assembly member came to Kang’s hospital in Nanchang to give birth. The woman
had lost five previous children to incompetent midwives. Her sixth was delivered at Kang’s
hospital, and she returned to successfully deliver her seventh. 144
Throughout China, modern medicine garnered more and more support from government
and gentry alike. The Hunan provincial government pledged at least $50,000 per year to the
Xiangya Medical College and Hospital, plus large sums for land and buildings. Officials and
gentry in Anking contributed $3,000 per year for several years towards the American (Protestant-
Episcopal) Hospital there. The Shandong provincial government’s Civil Governor passed a bill
in 1920 for annual appropriation of $5,000 of the provincial budget towards the University
Hospital at Jinan. With government backing, hospitals were erected in several cities, many with
Western and TCM departments, such as the Central and Isolation Hospitals at Peking led by
Cambridge graduate Dr. S.P. Chen. The former was a very modern institution built at a cost of
$300,000. 145
142
Shemo, "'An Army of Women,’” 266-67.
143
Ibid., 403.
144
Ibid., 400.
145
Balme, China and Modern Medicine, 102, 87-89.
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