Women's healing spaces: A case study of the female patients and their foreign doctor in the Canton Hospital, 1835–55

The relationship between China's first medical missionary Peter Parker and his female patients is best described as flexible and often negotiated curing boundaries that involved multiple agencies, which this paper refers to as healing spaces. These women actively left their private domain and stepped into a public sphere of healing constructed by an unknown foreign physician that was strange to most Chinese in the early nineteenth period – – hence establishing the healing spaces. This paper examines female patients' medical treatment in a foreign hospital from 1835 to 1855 by focusing on how these women approached Parker and initiated the treatment, as well as the different motives that drove them to do so. It also discusses the possible challenges that female patients encountered, including domestic, social and cultural aspects, in order to undergo treatment with Parker, and how their resolution motivated them to overcome these challenges. Finally, it looks into how female patients challenged Parker's perception of Chinese women with their views on the treatments, their networks of family and friends, and their contributions to the treatments. Copyright © 2012 City University of Hong Kong.