Christianity has always been concerned about body and spirit, mind and matter, the spiritual and the physical. This was why wherever Christianity spread, believers established hospitals and schools alongside churches. In China, for example, Western medicine was an essential ingredient of the growth of Christianity. Many important Chinese Christians were first introduced to Christianity and Western learning via medicine.
Shi Meiyu was born in Jiujiang, China. Her father was a Methodist pastor, and her mother was the principal of a school for girls in the city. They taught her the Chinese classics, as well as Christian literature. They also broke with Chinese tradition and refused to bind her feet.
Meiyu’s parents were especially impressed with the work of American missionary Dr. Katharine Bushnell. Although best remembered for her groundbreaking book “God’s Word to Women,” Bushnell got her start as a medical missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
Inspired by Dr. Bushnell’s medical work, Meiyu’s father decided that she should become a doctor. To prepare her for medical school, 7-year-old Meiyu was sent to Rulison-Fish School, the premier girls school in China founded by iconoclastic Methodist missionary Gertrude Howe. Howe was a single woman who had scandalized the male missionaries in China by adopting four Chinese girls and raising them as their mother.
Howe lived a very frugal life, saving money so that in 1892 she could take her five best students to her alma mater, the University of Michigan. These included Shi Meiyu and her adopted daughter Kang Cheng. Having tutored them in mathematics, chemistry, physics and Latin, they passed the entrance exam with flying colors. Four years later, they graduated together as the first Chinese women to receive a medical degree from an American university.