History of Medicine Lunchtime Lecture Series with Hsiu-Yun Wang
The Program in the History of Medicine and the Wangensteen Historical Library present this talk as part of their Lunchtime Lecture Series.
Hsiu-Yun Wang, Department of Medical Humanities and Social Medicine, School of Medicine at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan
Title: Women’s Transnational Network and Hospital Medicine: Chia-Yi Christian Hospital in Cold War Taiwan
Abstract: The establishment of the Chia-Yi Christian Hospital (CYCH) in southern Taiwan began with the efforts of a missionary couple—Marcy Ditmanson, a Minnesotan Lutheran medical missionary, and Joyce Stranks Ditmanson, a missionary of Australian origin with a background in nursing.
Forced to relocate from China after 1950, the Ditmansons founded the Chia-Yi Lutheran Clinic in 1961, which later became CYCH. Its origins relied heavily on their Minnesota connections: church women in Minnesota not only raised critical funds for the hospital and a nursing scholarship program but also supplied vital material donations. As Joyce recalled, “Marcy says that women built the Chia-Yi Christian Hospital.”
This talk will focus on the history of Chia-Yi Christian Hospital and the American missionary nurses who were essential to the development of this kind of missionary hospital in postwar Taiwan, particularly in the area of surgical medicine.
Being eager to make the hospital comparable to an American hospital, medical missionaries worked to build a hospital that would meet those standards, including equipment, tools, drugs, and trained workers. Facing a lack of local nurses and existing nurses trained sufficiently to meet the demands of the new hospital’s work, missionary nurses’ training (especially nursing training in the operating room), language skills (communication with American surgeons), and familiarity with resources, including medical supplies donated from the United States during the Cold War, were central to Chia-Yi Christian Hospital’s success.
Wang will discuss the challenges these medical missionaries encountered, their interactions with Taiwanese medical staff and patients, and accounts from those who went to Chia-Yi after graduating from Lutheran Deaconess Hospital’s School of Nursing. She will argue that CYCH was a complex achievement made possible by an overlooked transnational network of American missionary nurses and grassroots female church donors.
