The Chinese Medical Ministries of Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu, 1872-1937
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This is the first full-length study of the medical ministries of Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu, who graduated from the medical school at the University of Michigan in 1896 and then ran dispensaries, hospitals, and nursing schools in China from the 1890s to the 1930s. Known in English-speaking countries as Drs. Ida Kahn and Mary Stone, they were well-known both in China and in the United States in the early twentieth century, but today have largely been forgotten. This book gives readers today the chance to know these fascinating women, whose stories shed light on many aspects of U.S.-China relations. At its broadest level, this study contributes to the development of a transnational women's history, deepening our understanding of how ideas about women have traveled across national boundaries.
Dr. Mary Walker
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A suffragist who wore pants. This is just the simplest of ways Dr. Mary Walker is recognized in the fields of literature, feminist and gender studies, history, psychology, and sociology. Perhaps more telling about her life are the words of an 1866 London Anglo-American Times reporter, "Her strange adventures, thrilling experiences, important services and marvelous achievements exceed anything that modern romance or fiction has produced. . . . She has been one of the greatest benefactors of her sex and of the human race." In this biography Sharon M. Harris steers away from a simplistic view and showcases Walker as a Medal of Honor recipient, examining her work as an activist, author, and Civil War surgeon, along with the many nineteenth-century issues she championed:political, social, medical, and legal reforms, abolition, temperance, gender equality, U.S. imperialism, and the New Woman. Rich in research and keyed to a new generation, Dr. Mary Walker captures its subject's articulate political voice, public self, and the realities of an individual whose ardent beliefs in justice helped shape the radical politics of her time.
Mary Seacole
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She was a black woman, and she flouted convention. In an age that put ladies in the parlor and preferred them to be seen and not heard, she was nursing the British wounded, not in hospital wards with Florence Nightingale but on the Crimean battlefields--and off them, she was running a restaurant and hotel. She purveyed homemade pickles in England; she mined for gold in Panama. For unabashed individuality, Mary Jane Grant Seacole knew no peer. Yet Punch, the Times, the Illustrated LondonNews all ardently touted her, and Queen Victoria herself entertained her. Mary Seacole--childless widow of Horatio Nelson's godson and "good ole Mother Seacole" to the soldiers at Sebastopol--was Britain's first black heroine, and this robust, engaging biography by social historian Jane Robinson shows why. In a narrative driven by colorful adventure, Robinson charts Seacole's amazing odyssey from her native Kingston, Jamaica, to her adopted London, via Panama, where she lent her doctoring and nursing skills to catastrophic outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever, and the Crimea, where she founded the famous British Hotel. Seacole makes numerous other eventful stops along the way, and everywhere, even in the face of disappointment, disaster, and loss, her indomitable spirit prevails.
Remarkable Minds
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Winner: 2015 Foreword Reviews INDIEFAB Book of the Year, Juvenile Nonfiction (Children's) Full of the inspirational stories girls need for exploring a future in science For centuries, women have risen above their traditional roles to pursue a new understanding of the natural world. This book, which grows out of an exhibit at the Grolier Club in New York, introduces the lives, sayings, and dreams of 16 women over four centuries and chronicles their contributions to mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, and medicine. Some of the notable women portrayed in the book include French mathematician Marie-Sophie Germain, known for her work in Elasticity theory, differential geometry, and number theory; Scottish chemist Elizabeth Fulhame, best known for her 1794 work An Essay on Combustion; and Rita Levi-Montalcini, who, with colleague Stanley Cohen, received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of nerve growth factor. A companion volume to Magnificent Minds by the same author, this book offers inspiration to all girls and young women considering a life in the sciences.
