Nursing Shifts in Sichuan: Canadian Missions and Wartime China, 1937-1951

Nursing Shifts in Sichuan illuminates one of the most consequential additions to early-twentieth-century health care in China. In 1943, the Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) was forced to evacuate to the Canadian West China Mission in Chengdu, Sichuan. As part of an extraordinary mass migration to Free China during the Japanese occupation, the refugee PUMC was hosted by the Canadian West China Mission for the next three years.

During that period, the PUMC transformed nursing at the Canadian mission, initiating the second university nursing program in the country. Both programs were closed by the new Communist government in 1951. When China reopened degree programs thirty-five years later, it was PUMC alumnae who helped restart them.

In the contemporary era of exponential increases in East–West educational exchanges, Nursing Shifts in Sichuan offers both a cautionary tale about the fragility of transnational relations and a testament to the resilience of educated women.