Shi Mei Yi

( 18 7 3-1954 )

   Chinese medical and educational missionary

   Shi Mei Yi (also known as Mary Stone) was born in 1873 to a Methodist minister father, who encouraged her to become a medical missionary. In 1896, she and another Chinese student, Kang Cheng, became the first Chinese women to complete medical training in the United States. The pair returned to China with the backing of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. They opened a one-room hospital in Jiujing, where they treated thousands of outpatients.

   Around 1900, they opened the Danforth Memorial Hospital with money from I. N. Danforth of Chicago. She became superintendent and took the lead in training nurses for a growing work that was treating almost 5,000 people a month. She also supervised a home for the disabled.

   As a Holiness Methodist, Shi was growing uncomfortable with the liberal theological trends among the Methodists, and in 1920 she ended her relationship with the Woman's Board. She left Danforth and set up the independent Shanghai Bethel Mission. over the next decade, she founded a hospital, a primary and secondary school, an orphanage, and an evangelistic training center, and she ran evangelistic campaigns around the country. Her training for nurses now included religious as well as medical education.

   The work of the Bethel Mission suffered with the Japanese invasion in 1937. She returned to Shanghai briefly after World War II, but then moved to Pasadena, California, where she died in 1954. In 1958, the Bethel churches were integrated into the Church of Christ of China, though a Bethel Hospital survives in Hong Kong and the Bethel Mission of China continues in Pasadena.

   Further reading:

   ■ Charles Luther Boynton and Charles Dozier Boynton, eds., 1936 Handbook of the Christian