Zhou Meiyu

Zhou Meiyu (1910 to 2001) was a Chinese nurse known as the mother of military nursing in China. Born in Beijing, she trained at Yanjing University and Peking Union Medical College, earned her nursing licence in 1930 and later took public health degrees at MIT and an education degree at Columbia with Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. She ran the health clinic of the Mass Education Movement in Dingxian from 1931 to 1938, then served on the Chinese front of the Second Sino-Japanese War with the Red Cross Medical Relief Corps and the Emergency Medical Service Training School in Guiyang. With her colleague Guan Baozhen she proposed an army nursing school, approved in 1943, and she became its dean; the school later moved near Shanghai into the National Defense Medical Center and then to Taiwan with the Nationalist government. She was the first woman in the Republic of China to reach the rank of major general and was posthumously given the Medical Dedication Award in 2001.