Mary Hannah Fulton

Medical Training and Calling

Mary Hannah Fulton was born on 31 May 1854 into a Christian family in Ashland, Ohio, USA. She received a good education from childhood, studying arts and sciences at Hillsdale College and then medicine at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania. In nineteenth-century America it was still hard for a woman to practise medicine, but, moved by her faith, she resolved to serve other nations with her medical skill. In the spring of 1884 she graduated from medical college, and in May of the same year she was sent by the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Northern Presbyterian) and set out for distant South China.

Called to China

When she first arrived in China, Fulton practised medicine and preached in the Guangzhou area, and for a time helped with treatment at the Canton Hospital (博济医院). She soon realised that Chinese women of the time, constrained by the rules of propriety, were very unwilling to be treated by male doctors, so that the illnesses of women and children went unattended. She therefore made it her aim not only to treat Chinese women but also to train China's own women doctors.

Founding a Women's Medical School

In 1899 Fulton founded the “Guangdong Women's Medical School” (广东女医学堂) in Xiguan, Guangzhou, the earliest medical school for women in South China and indeed in all of China. The school had a clinic and wards attached. In 1902 Hackett (夏葛), a man from Indiana, USA, donated 20,000 US dollars towards building the school, and it was renamed the Hackett Medical College for Women (广东夏葛女医学校). She also raised funds to build the affiliated David Gregg Hospital (柔济医院) for teaching and treatment. In 1905, with a further gift from Mrs. Turner (端拿夫人), she founded the Turner Training School for Nurses (端拿护士学校), which took in abandoned baby girls and orphan girls and taught them nursing. From then on the medical college, hospital and nursing school formed a single whole of considerable scale.

Training Women Doctors

Fulton headed the school for many years, teaching classes herself and translating Western medical books into Chinese, patiently training those who came after her. By the time she moved to Shanghai in 1915, more than sixty women students had completed their studies and gone into practice. They became China's first generation of systematically trained women doctors of Western medicine, spreading out to many places to heal and save lives; over the years the school's graduates numbered more than two hundred in total. Her elder brother, Albert Andrew Fulton (富利淳), was also a missionary to China, and brother and sister served China with one heart.

Return to America and Death

In 1918 Fulton returned to the United States because of overwork and asthma. On 7 January 1927 she died in Pasadena, California, at the age of seventy-two. She devoted her life to pioneering medical education for women in China, leaving behind not only a renowned school and a hospital but also opening the door for countless Chinese women to practise medicine and help others. Her dedication is still remembered today.