Disease, Professionalisation, and Cosmopolitan Encounters: Anne Walter Fearn as a Woman Doctor in China

Abstract

ABSTRACT Reading Anne Water Fearn’s memoir My Days of Strength (1939) as an empowering narrative regarding female professionalisation, this article explores the intersection of gender, race, and transcultural encounters in representing epidemic disease. Fearn (1867–1939), a Southern American physician in early twentieth-century China, strategically uses disease, particularly epidemics, as a significant agentic actor in conceiving a medical career which transgresses not just gender norms but also the imperialist ideology prevalent in western discourses regarding China. This article first teases out the historical backdrop in which Western medicine conveniently coupled with imperialism in American discourses on China, mapping epidemic disease onto popular imaginations of China and its people. It moves on to trace the ways in which Fearn turns to depictions of China’s epidemic disease and her daughter’s death to displace possible criticism of her professional choices. Furthermore, I demonstrate how gendered approaches to epidemics allow for curiosity in and respect for some local medical practices. As such, the memoir reveals a cross-cultural, cosmopolitan sensitivity regarding local medical traditions as much as a cultivated distance from western medicine’s perceived superiority and dominance that sustain imperialism.