100 Years Ago, This American Doctor Built a Life in China
In the late 1930s at the start of World War II, Ruth Hemenway was sitting down to dinner in the Chinese city of Chongqing when she heard Japanese bombers overhead. Suddenly, massive explosions shook the house one after another, accompanied by the rat-a-tat of antiaircraft guns. Her ears were ringing as she went to the compound’s wall to see two-dozen black holes in the riverbank below.
Her trials were just beginning, however, as the wounded started pouring into the local hospital, with fractured skulls, hemorrhages, and lost limbs. The 1921 graduate of Tufts University School of Medicine prepared herself to operate late into the night. “My whole life in China had been geared to patching up bodies, and now an evil power high in the sky was recklessly and uncaringly hurling death at us,” she later wrote. “It did not seem real.”
Hemenway’s courageous efforts to tend to the wartime wounded capped a remarkable 18-year stint as a missionary doctor in prerevolutionary China, traveling halfway around the world to practice medicine in aid of a people she loved. “She was a very brave woman,” says Thomas Hemenway, a distant relative who is now working on a feature film about her. “This was an extremely violent period in Chinese history. Missionaries were being attacked and killed. It’s amazing anyone would do that, much less a woman.”
He visited China this past year, invited by Ivy Huang, the granddaughter of Ruth’s adopted daughter, to tour the rural hospital facility Hemenway directed in southeastern China. There, a memorial attests to her efforts to not only establish modern medical facilities in a rural locale, but also to vaccinate and educate the local population. Huang, who works as a translator, is currently developing a new Chinese translation of her book, Ruth V. Hemenway, MD, A Memoir of Revolutionary China, 1924-1941, drawn from the copious journals she kept on her travels, to be published this year.
She is also helping create a new exhibit to honor her courageous forbear in a local museum to be opened this summer. “She was a kind person with great love in her heart,” says Huang. “She never condescendingly believed that her own religion and civilization were the most advanced or superior. Instead, she embraced the essence of traditional Chinese culture and combined it with modern knowledge to heal the bodies and souls of the people.”
Finding “Real Life”
Hemenway decided to be a doctor early in life, inspired by a Tufts University School of Medicine bulletin she discovered in an old desk at age 11 and read cover-to-cover. “When I finished I knew that medicine was to be my life’s work,” she said.
Born in 1894 in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, in the Berkshire foothills, she graduated high school in 1910 and taught for several years in a one-room schoolhouse to save money for medical school. At Tufts, she waited tables to earn money for tuition as she threw herself into her studies.
During an evening walk in Boston’s South End her junior year, she chanced on a lecture by a female Chinese doctor at a local church, expressing the need for advanced medical care. Before she was even done talking, Hemenway decided “I would give my strength and knowledge to medical work in China.” Graduating in 1921, she interned for two years in Pennsylvania before receiving an appointment from the Methodist Women’s Board of Foreign Missions to practice in China.
When told she had to be a Methodist to qualify, “I became a Methodist.” Unlike some missionaries, converting souls was never a priority for her. “I silently vowed that I would try to understand those whom I went to teach a healthier way of life, but never, never would I push them into believing what I was supposed to believe,” she wrote on the eve of departure.
Arriving in the coastal province of Fujian, she journeyed 75 miles inland to the town of Minqing, where she took charge of a 100-bed hospital serving a populace of 200,000 people. It was a heady post for the young female doctor at a time when few women were able to practice medicine at all.
“One reason women like her were attracted to go to China was because they had more agency there than they would have if they had stayed in the United States,” says Martha Smalley, former Special Collections Librarian at Yale Divinity School Library, who accompanied Thomas Hemenway and Huang in China last summer.
The posting wasn’t without difficulties, however—it had no electricity or running water, and Hemenway struggled with isolation and language as the only non-Chinese person at the hospital. The weather was often damp and raw—“some days, it was so cold that my hands were purple,” she wrote—and then there was the constant threat of attacks from tigers, bandits, and anti-foreign nationalists. Hemenway didn’t shy away from danger, often traveling more than a dozen miles by foot and Mongolian pony to see patients in the surrounding territory, taking with her “two grains of morphine hidden in my clothes in case worse came to worst.”
Despite the challenges, she loved the work, filled with a sense of purpose. “This was real life,” she said. “In the United States, we rode in cars, lived in comfort, sought pleasures, and followed our own desires… Here were people really at grips with down-to-earth life, yet they seemed to be getting real joy out of it.”
She immediately began improving the facility, overseeing construction of a new building, along with new wards, dormitories, a laboratory, and operating room. She trained two dozen nurses in the latest medical practices, and regularly toured the surrounding area, sometimes conducting surgeries on sawhorses when no facilities were available.
Her work became easier after the hospital acquired a car in 1931, and she was able to create several branch facilities in the province, regularly travelling between them. Hemenway instituted a province-wide vaccination campaign, and educated the populace on hygiene and health practices, particularly focusing on women, instructing them on modern practices for birthing and child rearing.
“She was passionate about spreading healthy infant care practices, and saved countless women and children,” says Huang. Hemenway adopted two girls herself, Hua Hui (“sunlight of China”) and Hua Sing (“starlight of China”), who would become Huang’s grandmother.
War and Remembrance
After visiting the U.S. between 1934 and 1936, Hemenway returned to China, where she hoped to gain further experience in the city of Nanchang. She was there when Japan attacked in 1937, starting the Second Sino-Japanese War (or as it’s known in China, the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression). Unable to return to Minqing, she volunteered with the Chinese Red Cross, following the millions of refugees from the coast to the inland city of Chongqing, and taking charge over obstetrics at a 200-bed hospital.
War caught up with her when the Japanese began bombing Chongqing, sending her to work round the clock to perform surgery on the wounded. The experience tested her faith; when other missionaries told her God spared them from bombing, she asked them pointedly why He had let so many innocent Chinese die instead. She found herself embracing “agnosticism, and perhaps very close to the sunless land of atheism.”
But that crisis of faith hardly dampened her desire to help, as she relocated with the hospital to the countryside, and later traveled to another hospital in the small town of Zizhou, where she spearheaded a vaccination campaign against cholera. By 1941, her own health was deteriorating from constant work under harsh conditions, and she returned to the United States for good. She was not able to take her adopted daughters with her due to documentation issues; eventually Hua Hui moved to the U.S. to join her, but Hua Sing stayed behind.
Upon her return, Hemenway never stopped working, practicing obstetrics in New Jersey and Pennsylvania before coming home to establish a practice back in Williamsburg.
She began taking painting lessons from a nationally known watercolor artist and eventually created over 100 works focused on her time in China—both bucolic images of farmers in the field, and disturbing images of war and hardship. She showed her paintings in libraries, as well as giving talks about her time in China, advocating for international bridge-building.
Her niece later remembered her as a “dynamo” who could whip up biscuits “while I was still looking up the recipe” as well as a “woman of great faith who rejected hypocrisy and foolishness.” With the help of University of Massachusetts professor Fred Drake, she organized her diaries into a memoir, published three years after her death in 1974 at age 80.
Now more than 50 years later, Hemenway’s descendants have developed a passion to remember her. Ivy Huang invited Thomas Hemenway to visit China with the help of Kuliang Friends, descendants of foreigners who populated an international community in the province. Walking in her footsteps, Thomas was struck by how locals had kept her memory alive. “This is four generations later—and in spite of the Communist takeover and the Cultural Revolution, they still remember her and what she did,” he says. “It’s amazing.”
Her legacy in China continued through Hua Sing, who became a physiologist herself, along with several children and grandchildren who became doctors. It wasn’t until a few years before she passed away in 2025 that she finally told Huang about Hemenway.
“Only then did I learn that she and her American mother had been separated by the ocean for decades,” Huang says, “their hearts filled with unspeakable sorrow and longing.” She began researching Hemenway’s life, connecting with Thomas in the U.S.
Last year, Huang succeeded in having Ruth’s name inscribed on a war memorial wall in the local cemetery where her grandmother is buried. “Though separated for decades, mother and daughter have finally been reunited in this manner, offering some solace to the family,” she says.
With her new translation of Hemenway’s memoir and museum exhibit—as well as Thomas’s proposed film—she’s hoping more people can be exposed to the life of her extraordinary ancestor. “A century later, my great-grandma, whom I never met, has become the greatest pride of my life,” she says. “I am joining with many others who have never forgotten her contributions to commemorate her and those shining moments she left behind in China.”