Sigourney Trask (June 14, 1849 - March 20, 1936) was an American physician and missionary. She is remembered as being the first woman physician at Fuzhou, China sent by the Methodist Episcopal Church missionaries.
Sigourney Trask (June 14, 1849 - March 20, 1936) was an American physician and missionary. She is remembered as being the first woman physician at Fuzhou, China sent by the Methodist Episcopal Church missionaries.
Trask was born June 14, 1849, in Spring Creek, Pennsylvania. Her mother died while Trask was young, and thereafter, she was raised by her paternal grandparents, who resided in Youngsville, Pennsylvania. At the age of 14, she joined the Methodist Episcopal Church. She graduated from the Pennsylvania Female College (now Chatham University) in Pittsburgh, and then at the Elizabeth Blackwell Woman's Medical College of New York City. [1] [2]
In 1874, Trask received her appointment to Fuzhou. In January 1875, the mission asked for US$5,000 to build a hospital and residence for Trask, which was appropriated by the General Executive Committee the following May. The hospital officially opened in 1877. At the close of the second year, Trask reported the number of patients registered as 1,208. After six years, she made a visit to the US in 1880 for a few months, and then returned to China. Her student during this time was a local Fuzhounese girl named Hü King Eng, who Trask saw much promise in. She wrote to her colleagues at the Woman's Mission in Philadelphia, who made arrangements for Hü to receive her medical education in the US. Trask's intention was for Hü to run the hospital after completing her education. [3] January 6, 1885, Trask married John Phelps Cowles, Jr., in Fuzhou. [4] His parents, Rev. John and Eunice Cowles, were presidents of Ipswich Female Seminary. while his sister, Mary, was an educator and philanthropist.
Trask died March 20, 1936, in Barcroft, Virginia.
Leonora Howard King was a Canadian physician and medical missionary who spent 47 years practising medicine in China. She was the first Canadian doctor to work in China, where she died in 1925.
Clara A. Swain was an American physician and Christian missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church. She has been called the "pioneer woman physician in India," and as well as the "first fully accredited woman physician ever sent out by any missionary society into any part of the Non-Christian world". Her call to service in India fell from a need to have a female physician provide quality medical care to high-caste women, that were religiously secluded to zenana. Supported by the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Swain left the United States in 1869, for Bareilly, India, where she spent the next twenty-seven years of her life treating women and children from illnesses, while simultaneously working to evangelize natives.
Nancie Monelle Mansell was an American physician. She was the second physician sent out by the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the first woman doctor who went out alone as a missionary into an Indian Princely State. Mansell fought against Indian baby marriages, pleading that the marriageable age of girls be raised to 14 years.
The Heathen Woman's Friend was a Christian women's monthly newspaper. Established in May 1869, it was published by the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Boston, Massachusetts. The monthly magazine describe conditions in the mission fields of the church, document the work of the society, and provide assistance to missionaries. The Heathen Woman's Friend was launched with volume 1, number 1 in May 1869. Its final issue, volume 27, number 6, was issued December 1895. The publication was relaunched as the Woman's Missionary Friend with volume 27, number 7 in January 1896, and ended with volume 73, number 7 in August 1940.
Hü King Eng was a physician, and the second ethnic Chinese woman to attend university in the United States, after King You Mé.. Her medical career is well-documented, as she was treated as a celebrity by American media, due to the lack of even American women studying medicine at the time.
The Woolston Memorial Hospital was a Christian hospital in China and the first of its kind in Fuzhou.
Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church was one of three Methodist organizations in the United States focused on women's foreign missionary services, the others being the WFMS of the Free Methodist Church of North America and the WFMS of the Methodist Protestant Church.
Esther E. Baldwin was an American missionary, teacher, translator, writer, and editor of the long nineteenth century. Known as "Chinese Champion", she understood the religious and political problems of China, and the Chinese people, as perhaps no other woman in this country did at that time. She labored constantly to bring about a better understanding between the two nations. Baldwin served as president of the New York Woman's Missionary Society for two decades.
Mary Sparkes Wheeler was a British-born American author, poet, and lecturer. She wrote the lyrics to several hymns, including two well-known soldiers' decoration hymns. Her poems were set to music by Professor Sweeney, P. P. Bliss, Kirkpatrick and others. She was the author of Poems for the Fireside (1883), Modern Cosmogony and the Bible (1880), First decade of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church : with sketches of its missionaries (1883), As it is in Heaven (1906), and Consecration and purity, or, The will of God concerning me (1913).
Anna Fisher Beiler was a British-born American Christian missionary and newspaper editor, who engaged in temperance, missionary, and philanthropic work. Associated with the Methodist Episcopal Church, she served as Secretary of the Bureau for District of Alaska. She thoroughly identified herself with this work, and visited the region in 1897, that she might do better at directing it. She made an extended tour in the service of that region in the interests of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and supervised the erection of the building in Unalaska. Beiler was a prominent officer of the Woman's Home Missionary Society for many years and influential in the shaping of its policy and work. She lectured on Alaska in many states, increasing the public interest.
Beulah Woolston was a pioneering American missionary teacher in China. With her sister, she founded schools, translated textbooks, and edited a Chinese-language newspaper.
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Lucinda L. Combs-Stritmatter was an American physician who was the first female medical missionary to provide medical care in China and is credited with establishing the first women's hospital in what was then Peking. Combs was a pioneer in women's medical care while serving the Women's Foreign Ministry Society's North China Mission for seven years.
Lucilla Green Cheney, M.D. was a 19th-century American physician and Christian missionary. Beginning in 1876, she served in British India under the auspices of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Stricken with cholera, she died in India after only two years of service.
Mary Porter Gamewell was an American missionary, teacher, speaker, and writer who founded a school for girls in Beijing, China. She was the first missionary sent out by the Western Branch of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society, and the first missionary that the organization sent to China. At that time, the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church had but five missionaries in the world, and she was one of them. She traveled from Davenport, Iowa to Beijing, China in 1871 and started a school for girls, the institution opening with only one girl. It grew very slowly, more so because it was the first school in China to unbind the feet of the girl, an act that engendered great prejudice. By the time of the Boxer Rebellion, the school for girls, which Porter referred to as the "Davenport school", had 150 pupils enrolled.
Janette Hill Knox was an American temperance reformer, suffragist, teacher, author and editor.
Phebe Stone was a physician and medical missionary who worked in Kiukiang (Jiujiang), China. She was the younger sister of the notable missionary Mary Stone, also known as Shi Meiyu. Her family was from the Hubei province in China and were one of a handful of Christians in the area. Stone went on to Goucher College in the United States for her undergraduate degree and later was awarded a fellowship to attend Johns Hopkins, where she received medical degree in 1918. Stone was the first Chinese woman to graduate from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Afterward, Stone briefly worked as a medical intern at a women's hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, then returned to her hometown of Jiujiang to take over the Danforth Hospital established by her sister Mary. She later founded the Bethel Mission and its encompassing hospital in 1920 along with Mary and the American missionary Jennie Hughes. She contracted tuberculosis and died in 1930.
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Methodism in Sichuan refers to the history and implantation of Methodism in the Chinese province of Sichuan. Methodism, along with Anglicanism, were the two largest Protestant denominations in that province.
Bertha Fowler was an American educator, as well as a Methodist Episcopal Church preacher and deaconess. In 1901, she established the Woman's Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which united with the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1908.
This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain :Baker, Frances J. (1898). The story of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1869-1895. Curts & Jennings. p. 155. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain :Wheeler, Mary Sparkes (1881). First Decade of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church: With Sketches of Its Missionaries (Public domain ed.). Phillips & Hunt. p. 168.