Imperialism, Race, and Rescue

In September 1918, the medical personnel from Soochow Medical College for Women, a Southern Methodist missionary medical school in Suzhou, China, set out for Vladivostok, Siberia, in response to a call from the newly established American Red Cross unit to aid with the refugee emergency in that city. While the Red Cross had originally been set up to help with the medical needs of the Czechoslovakian and anti-Bolshevik Russian military forces then controlling Siberia and of the American Expeditionary Forces, the refugees who had fled from the Bolshevik controlled regions of Russia to Siberia constituted a humanitarian crisis that came to form a major part of the work of the Red Cross. Because of their relative proximity to Siberia, most of the original medical personnel were “recruited from among American expat missionary and medical communities and their native employees” in East Asia, the Philippines, and Hawaii.1 The Red Cross asked the women missionary physicians at the Soochow Medical College for Women to come to Vladivostok to take care of the women and children refugees. After some consideration, two American women physicians, an American nurse, two Chinese women physicians, and one Chinese woman pharmacist who had been trained at the school, along with the five women medical students and five nursing students, left for Vladivostok in September, remaining for six months until April of 1919.

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