Notable Women of Modern ChinaBurton, Margaret E. (Margaret Ernestine)
History
Notable Women of Modern China
Burton, Margaret E. (Margaret Ernestine)
China -- Biography; Women -- Biography
"In the golden future when schools abound we shall have to think of
state examinations; but at that time we shall expect to be ready to
greet the blaze of day in this wonderful country of ours, when she
has wakened from the long sleep we often hear about, and taken her
place among the nations of the world, and God and man shall see
'that it is good.'"
At the close of 1907 Dr. Kahn had been back in China for twelve years,
years of arduous, almost unremitting labour; and her fellow missionaries
felt that before the work on the new hospital building began she ought to
have a vacation. Certainly she had earned it. Not only had she worked
faithfully for seven years in Kiukiang, but she had, within the five
succeeding years, established medical work in a large city, where she was
the first and only physician trained in Western sciences. Assisted only by
two nurses whom she herself had trained, she had kept her dispensary
running the year around, all day and every day. Moreover, she had kept the
work practically self-supporting, in spite of the fact that she had refused
to economize by using inferior medicines, or bottles of rough glass which
could not be thoroughly cleansed. She had insisted that her drugs be of the
purest, and dispensed in clean, carefully labelled bottles, and had often
furnished besides the food needed to build up strength. In addition to all
this, she so commended herself and her work to the people of the city that
in 1906 she was enabled to hand over to the Woman's Foreign Missionary
Society, a dispensary building and two fine building lots, to be used for a
hospital and physician's home.
She was finally persuaded to go to America for a period of change and rest.
"Rest" for Dr. Kahn evidently means a change of work; for she went at once
to Northwestern University to take the literary course which she felt would
fit her for broader usefulness among her countrywomen. Eager to get back to
China she did three years' work in two, studying in the summer quarter at
the University of Chicago, when Northwestern closed its doors for the
vacation. In addition to her University studies, she undertook, for the
sake of her loved country, a work which is peculiarly hard for her, and
almost every Sunday found her at some church, telling of the present
unprecedented opportunities in China.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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