This dissertation presents a comparative examination of a cohort of international students who attended the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP) from the years 1883 to 1911. The physicians who receive particular attention are, in order of appearance, Anandibai Joshee (India), Susan La Flesche Picotte (Omaha), Sophia Johnson and Gurubai Karmarkar (India), Hu King Eng, Li Bi Cu, and Tsao Liyuin (China), and Honoria Acosta-Sison and Olivia Salamanca (the Philippines). The dissertation consider how the women came to study medicine in the United States, their experiences in the U.S., and how they later practiced medicine in their home countries.

The dissertation argues that the global dissemination of modern medicine, and the maintenance of U.S. imperial power, has been in part enabled by the willing cooperation of transnational intermediaries such as these women. By focusing on the physicians’ own choices, the dissertation reveals that people subjected to U.S. imperial power have responded in diverse ways and at times supported U.S. imperial power.

However, the students’ lives and choices were in large part shaped by changes within American medicine during this period, in which medical education was changing rapidly. Although students who attended the college in the 1880s and early 1890s were able to forge a space within the college that permitted forms of medicine other than Western allopathic medicine, later generations of students tended to be more beholden to the idea, then in its early development, that “scientific medicine” represented the only valid form of medicine. These later students tended to be more interested in transferring a distinctly American form of healthcare to their home societies.