Honour Due: The Story of Dr. Leonora Howard King.
Wright, David C.
Honour Due: The Story of Dr. Leonora Howard King, by Margaret
Negodaeff-Tomsik. Ottawa, Canadian Medical Association, 1999. 236 pp.
$24.95 Cdn (paper).
Margaret Negodaeff-Tomsik has written an interesting book on the
life of Dr. Leonora Howard King, a Canadian medical missionary who was
born in Farmersville (now Athens), Ontario in 1851 and laboured in China
for most of the years from 1877 to the early 1920s. Negodaeff-Tomsik
lovingly takes us through Leonora's early years and education.
Leonora wanted to study at Queen's University's School of
Medicine in Kingston, Ontario, which was only a one-day ride from her
home. But women were not allowed to study medicine at Queen's or at
any Canadian medical school during the 1870s, so she headed due south to
study at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she earned her
MD in 1876. She then joined the American Methodist Episcopal Missionary
Society and its Women's Foreign Missionary Society and went to
China in 1877, at the age of twenty-six.
In China she was a smashing success, and by 1884 she had a practise
devoted to women and children. Her big break seems to have come in 1879,
when she attended to the gynecological problems of Lady Li, the wife of
Li Hongzhang, a high government official and one of the leading figures
in the "Self-strengthening" movement, or China's
modernization effort. With Lady Li's generous donations she built a
clinic in Tianjin in northern China. American assistants and American
money helped her build a hospital named the Isabella Fisher Hospital for
Women and Children.
In 1884 she married Rev. Alexander King, a Scott and a member of
the London Missionary Society. As a result, the Women's Foreign
Missionary Society told her that she would need to leave the Society and
work with her husband. This she did, with some disappointment. When Lady
Li learned of this she helped Leonora build another hospital, this time
called the Government Hospital for Women and Children. In 1895 Leonora
became the first Western woman ever to be made a mandarin and was given
the honour of the Order of the Double Dragon.
She remained in China during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, a
tumultuous time of anti-foreign uprising during which over two hundred
foreigners were killed. Her husband wanted to flee China during this
time, but she refused and remained in Tianjin. Remarkably, she and her
husband were not harmed. (Her hospitals were looted but not destroyed.)
In 1908 in Tianjin she opened the government-sponsored Government
Medical School for Women. In 1924 she was no longer allowed to practise
medicine in Tianjin due to burgeoning nationalist sentiment. She
returned to Canada and died in 1925, but her husband took her remains
for burial back in China. Hers was a remarkable career that spanned
several decades and saw some of the great upheavals and developments in
modern Chinese history.
Unfortunately, we do not hear Leonora herself speak often enough.
The book tells us quite a bit about Leonora's accomplishments and
the China in which she served, but it does not seem to allow us to get
to know enough about Leonora as a person. I feel like I know more about
Peter Parker (an American Protestant medical missionary who served in
China during the nineteenth century) after reading Jonathan
Spence's twenty-three page essay on him -- Jonathan Spence,
"Peter Parker: Bodies or Souls," in To Change China: Western
Advisors in China, 1620-1960 (Penguin, 1980), 34-56 -- than I do about
Leonora after having read this entire book about her. In fairness to
Negodaeff-Tomsik, I must point out that this is because Parker's
personal writings have been preserved, whereas most of Leonora's
have not. Her letters home were lost during the 1960s, and if she kept a
diary, it has not yet been discovered (p. 220).
A few errors and shortcomings mar the book. Negodaeff-Tomsik
probably does not read Chinese, but the translation of the plaque on
page 126 as "A doctor is interested in curing people, not in
profit" is unfortunate. The four characters yao shan hao shi might
more literally and concisely be translated as "She delights in
doing good and is fond of dispensing [medicine for free]."
Negodaeff-Tomsik also fails to note that the characters on the left of
the plaque seem to indicate that it was given to a "great American
[Meiguo] woman." On page 119 she has Confucius "adapting works
by the earlier Mencius," but Confucius's dates are 551-479
B.C., while Mencius's are circa 371 - circa 289 B.C. The characters
for the Government Hospital for Women and Children on page 120 are
upside down. "Book name" on page 140 is not "shu
ning" but shu ming. The map on page 30 has several errors of
spelling and location, and the depiction of the Yellow River's
course is quite inaccurate. Important books are missing from the
"Selected reading" listed on pages 223-24. Negodaeff-Tomsik
does not always give sources for the material she quotes or excerpts.
(See, for examples, pages 57, 65, and especially 187, where she quotes,
without attribution or citation, a young man from Brantford, Ontario who
had joined the American Marines.) All in all, it seems that the book
manuscript might have been vetted by Chinese acquaintances, but not
refereed by professional China scholars.
In spite of these shortcomings, however, the book is still
important because it draws attention to the life and contributions of a
dedicated and hard-working medical missionary in China. Leonora Howard
King's life story should be of interest to historians and general
readers who want to know more about the history of Christian missions,
women, Canada, China, and medicine. Hopefully, this will not be the last
biography on Leonora Howard King; perhaps some industrious graduate
student or researcher who reads Chinese will some day encounter
materials relating to her and fill out the picture that Negodaeff-Tomsik
has outlined for us.
David C. Wright
University of Calgary
