Dr. Mary Stone
| I. | With Unbound Feet |
| II. | The Danforth Memorial Hospital |
| III. | Winning Friends in America |
| IV. | A Versatile Woman |
Dr. Mary Stone
I With Unbound Feet
On the “first day of the third moon” of the year 1873, a young Chinese father knelt by the side of his wife and, with her, reverently consecrated to the service of the Divine Father the little daughter who had that day been given them. They named her “Maiyü,”—“Beautiful Gem”—and together agreed that this perfect gift should never be marred by the binding of the little feet. It was unheard of! Even the servant women of Kiukiang would have been ashamed to venture outside the door with unbound feet, and the very beggar women hobbled about on stumps of three and four inches in length. No little girl who was not a slave had ever been known to grow up with natural feet before, in all Central or West China. That the descendant of one of the proudest and most aristocratic families of China, whose genealogical records run back without a break for a period of two thousand years, little Shih Maiyü, should be the first to thus violate the century-old customs of her ancestors, was almost unbelievable.
Even the missionaries could not credit it, not even Miss Howe, whose interest in the family was peculiarly keen, since Maiyü’s mother was the first fruits of her work for Chinese women, and had ever since been working with her. To be sure Mrs. Shih had said to her, “If the Lord gives me a little daughter I shall not bind her feet.” But Miss Howe had made so many efforts to induce the women and girls with whom she had worked to take off the crippling bandages, without having been successful in a single instance, that she did not build her hopes on this. One day, when calling in the home and seeing little Maiyü, then five years old, playing about the room, she remarked, “My dear Mrs. Shih, you will not make a good job of it unless you begin at once to bind little Maiyü’s feet.” But Mrs. Shih never faltered in the purpose which she and her husband had formed at the little girl’s birth, and promptly answered, “Did I not tell you I should not bind her feet?”
The first years of Maiyü’s life were unusually happy ones. Her father was a pastor in the Methodist church, and had charge of the “Converting to Holiness” chapel in Kiukiang; her mother was successfully conducting a day school for girls. From her mother Maiyü received much of her earliest instruction and before she was eight years old she had studied several of the Chinese classics and memorized the Gospel of Matthew and the catechism in Chinese so thoroughly that she has never forgotten them.
But as she approached the age when custom required that her feet should be bound, the little girl discovered that the way of the pioneer is not an easy one. The unbound feet were a constant source of comment and ridicule, not only by older people, but by other children as well. She was stopped on her way to school one day by an older girl, who taunted her with her “big feet” and refused to let her pass unless she would kneel down and render obeisance to her own bandaged stumps. The small descendant of the proud house of Shih absolutely refused to submit to such humiliation; but it was only after her mother’s assistance had been invoked that she was allowed to proceed on her way.
Relatives and friends protested vigorously against such apparent indifference to their daughter’s future on the part of her parents. “You will never be able to get a mother-in-law for her,” they declared. Mr. and Mrs. Shih felt, no doubt, that this was true; for who could have then prophesied that the time would so soon come in conservative old China when young men would not only be willing to marry girls with natural feet, but would decidedly prefer them! Maiyü’s father and mother never reconsidered their decision that their daughter should grow to womanhood with natural feet; but they did try to devise some plan by which her life might be a useful and happy one, even though she might never enjoy the blessing of a mother-in-law. They were very much impressed with the service which Dr. Kate Bushnell was rendering the suffering women and children of Kiukiang, and when Maiyü was eight years old her father took her to Dr. Bushnell and announced, “Here is my little girl. I want you to make a doctor of her.”
This was almost as startling as the unbound feet! A Chinese woman physician was unknown and undreamed of. But this young father’s faith in the possibilities of Chinese womanhood was not to be discouraged. The necessity of general education, preliminary to medical training, was explained, and Maiyü was put in charge of Miss Howe, then at the head of the Girls’ Boarding School of the Methodist Mission. In this school she spent most of the next ten years of her life, studying in both Chinese and English, and fitting herself under Miss Howe’s direction for her medical course.
In 1892, Maiyü and her friend, Ida Kahn, accompanied Miss Howe to America, there to receive the medical education for which they had long been preparing. If America held much that was new and interesting to them, it was no less true that they were something new and very interesting to America. “What makes these girls look so different from the other Chinese women who come here?” the Government official who examined their passports asked Miss Howe. “All the difference between a heathen and a Christian,” was her prompt response.
That there were Chinese girls who could successfully pass the entrance examinations to the medical department of the University of Michigan, in arithmetic, algebra, rhetoric, general and United States history, physics, and Latin, was a revelation to the people of America, and their college career was watched with the greatest interest.
While in Ann Arbor, Maiyü took pity on the professors who found it so difficult to pronounce her Chinese name, and decided to use the English translation of it, Mary Stone, during her stay in America. Accordingly one morning when the professor started to call on her, she announced, “I have decided to change my name, professor.” The burst of laughter with which the class greeted this simple statement was most bewildering to her; but after she had seen the joke she often declared that she was “one of the products of Christianity, an old maid,” for, as she pointed out, an unmarried woman is practically unknown among non-Christians.
During her medical course Mary became more strongly impressed than ever before with the evils of foot-binding. Her mother’s feet had, of course, been bound in childhood, and although Mrs. Stone had never bound the feet of any of her daughters, she had not unbandaged her own. For she said that if she also had unbound feet people would say: “Oh, yes, she must be from some out-of-the-way place where the women do not bind their feet, and so she does not know how to bind the feet of her daughters. That accounts for such gross neglect.” On the other hand, she reasoned that if she herself had the aristocratic “golden lily” feet, it would be evident that her failure to bind her daughters’ feet was due to principle. But while Mary was pursuing her medical studies she became convinced that the time had come when her mother ought to register a further protest against the harmful custom, by unbandaging her own feet, and wrote urging her to do so. Mrs. Stone readily agreed to this. Moreover, at the annual meeting of the Central China Mission in 1894, when a large mass-meeting was held for the discussion of foot-binding, she ascended the platform and in a clear voice, which made every word distinctly heard to the remotest corner of the large chapel hall, told why she had never before unbound her feet, and why she was now about to do so. Her husband was so in sympathy with her decision that later in the meeting he added a few words of approval of the course she had taken. The last shoes worn before the unbinding, and the first after it, were sent to Ann Arbor to the daughter who had so long been a living exponent of the doctrine of natural feet.
After four years at the University of Michigan, during which she and her friend, Dr. Ida Kahn, had won the respect and friendship of both faculty and students by their thorough work, Dr. Stone went to Chicago for the summer, in order to attend the clinical work in the hospitals there. It was at this time that she met Dr. I. N. Danforth of that city, who was ever afterward her staunch friend. He was about to leave for Europe, but found time before his departure to introduce Dr. Stone to many of the Chicago physicians and hospitals. He says: “She won the hearts of all with her charming ways, and got everything she wanted. When I took her to clinics she would often not be able to see at first, being such a little woman; but the first thing I knew she would be right down by the operating table. The doctors would always notice her, and seeing that she couldn’t see would open up and let her down to the front.” After what Dr. Danforth considered a thorough clinical training, including visits to practically all the good hospitals in Chicago, Dr. Stone sailed for China with Dr. Kahn, reaching there in the autumn of 1896.