On the Pacific Ocean, Japan
The First Japanese Female Medical Doctor
In the last period of the samurai era of Japan, specifically in 1851, Ginko Ogino was born in Kumagaya, 60 km north of Tokyo.
In 1868 she married a rich farmer but got divorced two years later for infection of a sexual disease her husband transmitted to her. As she was hospitalized in a Tokyo hospital, she found that there were only male medical doctors even for gynecologic care. So, she was very much embarrassed. Accordingly she thought there must be definitely female medical doctors, though there were none in Japan at the time.
Ogino, however, tarted to study in the Tokyo Female Teachers' School as the school was the only high-education facility for women at the time. Then she went on learning in a private medical school in Tokyo. After graduation, she submitted a petition for medical practice to the Tokyo Prefecture office. But it was rejected as she was a woman. Almost every year her petition was rejected, but in 1885, women were allowed to take the test for license of medical practice; so she took it to pass it as the only woman to obtain a medical license.
She became Christian next year, and four years later she married again a Christian man. Then two years later, the couple moved to Hokkaido, a northern developing region of Japan. They wanted to cultivate frontier villages in Hokkaido. But her husband died 13 years later. After having spent two more years in Hokkaido, she eventually returned to Tokyo.
Then in 1913 she died of arterial stiffening.
Today there are about 45,000 female medical doctors in Japan, accounting for about 17% of all.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogino_Ginko)
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Mar 7:15 There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.