Edward Hicks Hume

Background and Coming to China

Edward Hicks Hume was born in 1876 in Ahmednagar, India, into an American missionary family, and grew up with his parents in South Asia. He graduated from Yale University (1897) and from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (1901), among the earliest graduates of that school. In 1905 he was sent by the newly founded Yali association (Yale Foreign Missionary Society, later renamed Yale-in-China) to Changsha, Hunan, arriving with co-workers including Brownell Gage (盖保耐), and opened the Yali clinic.

Medical Work at Hsiang-Ya

He was familiar with the literature of Chinese medicine and tried to enter Hunan society with an attitude that accommodated both Chinese and Western medicine. In 1907 he treated the mother of Tan Yankai (谭延闿), a prominent military and political figure in the province, which won the Yali hospital its first measure of trust in Hunan. In the 1910s he held repeated talks with Dr. Yan Fuqing (颜福庆) and with Hunan gentry and merchants such as Tan Yankai about jointly running a medical college, and in 1914 the "Contract for the Sino-American Joint Hsiang-Ya Medical College" was finally signed, establishing the Hsiang-Ya Medical College and Hsiang-Ya Hospital. Hume served as president of the college and superintendent of the hospital, and Yan Fuqing as the Chinese representative. Hsiang-Ya was one of the earliest medical colleges in China run jointly by Chinese and foreigners, and was spoken of as "Hsiang-Ya in the south, Peking Union in the north."

Training Doctors for China

He stressed "training Chinese doctors for China," and for many years argued for teaching in Chinese, for Chinese faculty taking the lead, and for local public health research. During the First World War and the Northern Expedition he repeatedly worked to find refuge for Yali teachers and students. In 1927, amid the turmoil of the Northern Expedition, he left China and returned to the United States, later becoming director of the New York Post-Graduate Medical School and Hospital; from 1934 to 1937, at the invitation of the National Health Administration of the Nationalist Government, he surveyed medical facilities in China; from 1938 to 1946 he was secretary of the Christian Medical Council for Overseas Work; and for many years he served as a trustee of Yale-in-China, continuing to work on behalf of Hsiang-Ya. He died of illness in Wallingford, Connecticut, in 1957. He wrote the autobiography Doctors East, Doctors West (1946) and Doctors Courageous (1950), an account of medical pioneers across Asia and Africa, important documents in the history of medical exchange between China and the West.