Ida Kahn

Ida Kahn was born on December 6, 1873, in Jiujiang, Jiangxi, China, the sixth girl in the family. After her parents failed to betroth her, they became convinced by an "unfavorable horoscope" that she was bad luck. Consequently, Kahn's father gave her up for adoption, and his employer, Gertrude Howe, adopted her and renamed her Ida Kahn.[1]

Howe was a member of the Women's Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS), the women's board of the Methodist Episcopal Church; an organization that Kahn would keep close ties with as she pursued her missionary work. From a young age, Kahn learned English, and worked as a translator for foreign doctors.[2] Due to her adoptive mother's faith, Kahn grew up Christian, an element that became a defining characteristic of her missionary work. Kahn remained active within the WFMS, and drew upon the organization for financial support of her hospital and dispensaries.

At the age of nineteen, Kahn, along with Mary Stone, was brought to the U.S. to obtain a degree in medicine, which was sponsored by the Methodist Episcopal Church.[3] They started at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Medical School in 1892, and graduated with honors four years later. While there, she also did Christian work with her church.[4]

Kahn took a short break from her work in Nanchang, and went back to the United States between 1909 and 1911 to receive a Bachelor's degree in English literature from Northwestern University.[5] She also pursued postgraduate work in London.[2]

Aside from her and Mary Stone, Gertrude Howe also adopted three boys. Kahn never married, though some of her adoptive family did.[6]

Kahn had been actively working out of Nanchang, when she finally relented to the missionaries asking her to visit a sanatorium in Shanghai in late 1931.[15] Kahn, at this point, was battling stomach cancer, and died shortly after arriving, on December 9, 1931.

After Kahn's death, Huang Yanyu (Alice Huang), a doctor who graduated from the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania and had previously worked with Kahn, took over the hospital.[16] The hospital remained a hospital for women until the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War caused both the WFMS and the General Hospital to evacuate to an area in Jiangxi safe from Japanese control, where Huang worked in a refugee camp.[16]

Kahn's hospital merged with another hospital named the General Hospital in 1949, when they both relocated to Nanchang. After the Chinese Communist Revolution, foreign missionaries left China over the next few years. Kang's Hospital ended up becoming a predecessor of the Jiangxi Gynecological Hospital.[16]

Prior to Ida Kahn and Mary Stone, Chinese women in the medical field were unheard of, those practicing Western medicine in particular. As one of the first in her field, Kahn's vision for the future of Chinese women in medicine in China was especially novel and important.

Ida Kahn was a huge proponent of "self-supporting" medical work,[17] where she believed that China could provide for itself. To this end, Kahn, along with her colleague, Mary Stone, trained a "Chinese corps" of nurses, which would help in building a strong "new China."[18] Her ideals reflect a blending of Western and Eastern cultures: she mixed classic Chinese gender roles with separate "healing spheres" with Western self-reliance to create self-support. Her 1921 report, where she stressed "By Chinese Women for Chinese Women," affirms this ideology. Kahn's goal was for a corps of Chinese women professionals extended beyond its rhetorical value.[19] She fought to keep raising the standards of her nursing school, and graduated about three to four nurses each year, following the guidelines of the Nurses Association of China; in 1930, she graduated a class of ten.[19] Kahn also made sure to give the nurses and the physicians that helped in her hospital and nursing school a chance to study in the United States; she often wrote to her American physician friends to help her secure them postgraduate training opportunities.[15]

Kahn's annual reports confronted important social, religious, and political issues. Her writing challenged then common views of Chinese women as victims in need of rescue.[16] She sought for China to be a place where its women could serve the nation in a good way, while simultaneously presenting a view of where they were saviors rather than victims in the eyes of Kahn's American audience.

Kahn was known for exemplifying a different path that Chinese women could take. At the time, women didn't have much to do outside of the family, but Kahn showed that missionary work, both religious and medical, was a viable path.[20]