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Margaret Jessie Chung
(October 2, 1889 - January 5, 1959) USA

Margaret Chung

Surgeon, philanthropist

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Margaret Jessie Chung, born in Santa Barbara, California, was the first known American-born Chinese female physician. After graduating from the University of Southern California Medical School in 1916 and completing her internship and residency in Illinois, she established one of the first Western medical clinics in San Francisco's Chinatown in the early 1920s.

In 1906, Chung was noted in the Los Angeles Herald for a poem she wrote, entitled "Missionary Giving", and delivered at the eighteenth anniversary of the Los Angeles Congregational Chinese mission. She would write and deliver a paper entitled "Comparisons of Chinese and American Costumes" at the first anniversary of the Pasadena Congregational mission in 1907. By that fall, Chung had graduated from the eighth grade at the Seventh Street School[7] and enrolled in the preparatory school at USC, being hailed as a "bright particular star" of the women's gymnasium class. In 1910, Chung won second place in a speech contest.

Chung won a Los Angeles Times scholarship to study at USC by selling newspaper subscriptions, and worked her way through college as a waitress, a seller of surgical instruments, and by winning cash prizes in several speech contests. She enrolled in the medical school in 1911, according to a 1914 profile that noted her belief that she was "the first Chinese girl to enter a medical school in this state."

After graduating with a medical degree in 1916, she was initially denied a position as a medical missionary to China or an internship and settled for work as a surgical nurse in Los Angeles, at the Santa Fe Railroad Hospital. After several months, she left for Chicago, interning at the Mary Thompson Women's and Children's Hospital before serving her residency at the nearby Kankakee State Hospital. Chung would serve as the resident assistant in psychiatry for the first Juvenile Psychopathic Institute of the State of Illinois at the Cook County Hospital in 1917; she was later appointed state criminologist for Illinois. After two years in Illinois, Chung resigned from Cook County in November 1918 and she returned to Los Angeles following her father's death, accepting a position as a surgeon at Santa Fe Railroad Hospital.

Chung moved to San Francisco's Chinatown in 1922, where she treated the local Chinese American population. She also treated seven Navy reserve pilots during this time; part of her care was making them meals, and they soon began calling themselves "Mom Chung's Fair-Haired Bastard Sons" in response. Prior to the United States entry into World War II, Chung would give her "adopted son" pilots a jade Buddha to wear around their necks, which would become a token by which the pilots would recognize each other throughout the world. Non-aviation naval officers "adopted" by Chung were called "Golden Dolphins."

When Japan invaded China in 1937, Chung volunteered as a front-line surgeon, but she was secretly assigned instead to recruit pilots for the 1st American Volunteer Group, better known as the "Flying Tigers." During the war, Chung would serve up to 175 people at Thanksgiving and would wrap and address 4,000 gifts at Christmas. Her houseguests included high ranking officers and US senators and congressmen; leaning on these connections, she helped to establish the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service although she was not permitted to join them, as the government suspected that she was lesbian. Mom Chung adopted the entire squadron VF-2, nicknamed "The Rippers" for their logo, which showed a Chinese dragon ripping a flag. VF-2 was assigned to USS Enterprise and would set an American record by shooting down 67 Japanese planes in a single day during the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot in June 1944.

In 1947, 90% of Chung's medical patients were white. She retired from medical practice within ten years after the end of World War II, and her "adopted sons" purchased a house for her in Marin County. Chung died of cancer in January 1959 at Franklin Hospital in San Francisco. Among her pallbearers was Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, one of her "Golden Dolphins."

A pioneer in both professional and political realms, Chung led an unconventional personal life. As the only woman in her class, she adopted masculine dress and called herself "Mike," but after having established a professional practice she reverted to conventional dress and her female name.

Based on personal correspondence, she had close and apparently intense relationships with at least two other women, the writer Elsa Gidlow and entertainer Sophie Tucker, that some writers have speculated were romantic. Although she was briefly engaged, she never did marry.

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Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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